Tools & Data
What Is Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio)?
Google's free reporting and dashboarding tool, renamed from Data Studio in 2022.
Definition
Looker Studio is a free business intelligence and reporting tool from Google that connects to data sources and produces shareable, interactive dashboards. It was called Google Data Studio until October 2022, when it was renamed as part of the Looker family.
What it connects to
It has native connectors for Google products including Search Console, Analytics, BigQuery and Sheets, plus community and partner connectors for other sources. For search work the common pattern is Search Console for query data and BigQuery for anything that needs history beyond the Search Console retention window.
Its practical limits
Performance depends heavily on the underlying source. Querying a large BigQuery table directly on every dashboard load is slow and expensive, so aggregating into a summary table first is usually necessary. Complex transformations are better done upstream in SQL than in calculated fields.
A naming note
Because the rename is recent enough, older documentation, tutorials and job descriptions still say Data Studio. They refer to the same product.
Looker Studio turns your data into informative, easy to read, easy to share, and fully customizable dashboards and reports.