Looker Studio Dashboards Connected to GA4, Google Ads and BigQuery

Looker Studio is Google's dashboarding tool; until 2022 it was called Google Data Studio. It is free, shared like any Google document, and has built-in connectors for GA4, Google Ads, Search Console, Google Sheets and BigQuery. That is why it is usually a marketing team's first dashboard.

It is also why it tends to grow without a plan. One report connects straight to GA4, another to Google Ads, another to a spreadsheet someone updates by hand. Over time the familiar symptoms appear: charts that take ages to load, GA4 API quota errors when several people open the report at once, calculated fields copied between reports with small differences, and a conversion number that never matches the CRM.

As your Looker Studio consultant, our job is to turn that dashboard back into something the team opens every Monday and trusts.

Looker Studio works well for marketing dashboards built on Google sources with a reasonable number of users. It falls short when:

• You need a data model with relationships across many tables and governed, company-wide metrics. Looker Studio can blend data sources, but it has no semantic layer like Looker's or a Power BI model.
• Each sales rep must see only their own accounts, maintained for a lot of people. BigQuery permissions cover part of it, but Power BI and Looker are built for it.
• Your company runs on Microsoft 365 and other departments already use Power BI.
• Reports have become the place where complex calculations happen, rather than the place where people look at data.

In those cases we recommend Looker (Google's enterprise BI platform, with LookML to define the data model) or Power BI. If your data is already well prepared in BigQuery, switching tools is far easier, because the heavy lifting isn't in the dashboard.