What is LookerStudio (and what happened to Data Studio)
LookerStudio is an advanced data exploration and visualization platform that takes over from Google Data Studio. We love it as it allows businesses to seamlessly connect, analyze, and gain deeper customer insights from their data across various sources and touchpoints. Behavioural analytics starts here for many SMEs who want to get a feel for the online customer journey.
Currently, a hot topic we’re being asked about at Good CX is the migration from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). So it’s a good time to also discuss updating your dashboard. While making sure your old data migrates ok, we suggest taking the opportunity to unlock even deeper insights with LookerStudio.
Do you need LookerStudio is you’ve already migrated from GA4?
While GA4 offers improved tracking capabilities, LookerStudio takes data analysis to a whole new level. If you’ve had Data Studio in the past, you’ll understand how much easier those monthly Board reports are with a great Dashboard like LookerStudio. It’s one way your team can share comprehensive and actionable customer insights from Web data and Paid Campaigns. Actually, it’s of best benefit to SMEs who aren’t running other types of paid behavioural analytics dashboards such as Mixpanel.
7 things we love about Google’s new LookerStudio (especially for SMEs)
Wondering why a customer LookerStudio dashboard provides richer and more profound insights compared to a basic GA4 dashboard? Good question. We like to think it ensures our clients can maximize the impact of their GA4 data migration. The key benefits you will find include:
1. Unified Data Integration
A beautifully simple dashboard, LookerStudio integrates data from multiple sources, allowing businesses to bring together customer data from various touchpoints into a single, unified view. This integration enables a holistic understanding of customer behaviour beyond website interactions. In contrast, a basic GA4 dashboard primarily focuses on tracking events within the GA4 ecosystem. We find this can limit the breadth and depth of insights.
2.Customized Metrics and Dimensions (tailored for your business)
So you’re actively working on your CX, but you’re not sure what’s working? Or maybe you’re looking for optimisation opportunities? LookerStudio is designed to help you define your own metrics and dimensions, tailoring the analysis to the specific needs of your business. This customization allows for a deeper understanding of key performance indicators (KPIs) and business objectives. With LookerStudio, businesses can create unique metrics that align precisely with their customer journey and uncover insights not readily available in a basic GA4 dashboard.
3. Advanced-Data Modeling and Analysis for insightful behavioural analytics
Depending on who sets it up, LookerStudio can provide some slick data modelling capabilities. You’ll find this allows your team to transform and analyze your data in more sophisticated ways. These advanced techniques offer deeper insights into customer behaviour, enabling businesses to identify patterns, trends, and opportunities that may be overlooked in a basic GA4 dashboard. Set us a brief to let us know what you need. This might include:
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- Cohort analysis
- Segmentation
- Funnel analysis
- Customer lifetime value calculations.
4. Dynamic and Interactive Data Visualizations on an intuitive dashboard
Offering a wide range of dynamic and interactive visualization options, LookerStudio can create visually compelling charts, graphs, and reports that bring your data to life. These customizable visualizations allow for intuitive exploration and communication of insights, enabling stakeholders to understand complex data at a glance. In contrast, a basic GA4 dashboard provides limited visualization options, restricting the depth of data exploration.
5. Collaborative Data Exploration for cross-functional teams
Having a good dashboard is a great way to foster collaboration among teams. By allowing your team to share dashboards, annotate visualizations, and add comments, everyone can get answer to their questions directly. As always, a collaborative environment encourages Contributor Safety. Knowledge sharing, discussion, and collective understanding of customer insights is not only good for your bottom line, but it’s good for team engagement. Teams can work together to uncover deeper meanings in the data and drive informed decision-making. In contrast, a basic GA4 dashboard lacks these collaborative features, limiting the ability to share and explore insights as a team.
6. Scalability and Future Growth
Change is always afoot, so LookerStudio is designed to handle large volumes of data and can scale with growing businesses. It seamlessly integrates with various data sources and can accommodate future data expansion. This scalability ensures businesses can continue gaining deeper insights as their customer data grows over time. Conversely, a basic GA4 dashboard may face limitations when it comes to analyzing data beyond the GA4 ecosystem and may require additional tools for scalability.
7. No subscription costs for Basic Version
Set it up yourself, and you’ve got an amazing free tool at your fingertips. Alternatively, get the set-up in place and let it run with no subscriptions (unless you want the Pro version)
While a basic GA4 dashboard offers improved tracking capabilities, a customer LookerStudio dashboard takes data analysis to the next level. With its unified data integration, customized metrics, advanced data modeling, dynamic visualizations, collaborative data exploration, and scalability, LookerStudio empowers businesses to uncover deeper and more actionable customer insights. By leveraging LookerStudio during the migration from Universal Analytics to GA4, your team can maximize the value of this great baseline behavioural data. Moreover, it will help everyone from Marketing to Finance make data-driven decisions, and drive sustainable growth in an increasingly competitive NZ landscape.
How can we help you set up LookerStudio Dashboard with your new GA4 data.
Unless you love a good Data Dashboard as much as I like Pivot Tables, you might like some help from our development team. While lots of companies muscled through the migration to GA4 alone, we were glad to help ease the pain for some of our clients (by doing it for them!). Drop me a line for a quote or to make a time to discuss what you might like to get set up.
