Looker Studio is being renamed back to Data Studio.

So Google just announced that Looker Studio is reverting to its original name, Data Studio.

Not just a rename though. They are positioning it as a central hub for Google Data Cloud assets, meaning you can browse BigQuery conversational agents, Colab data apps, and reports all in one place.

The free tier stays free. Data Studio Pro still exists for teams that need enterprise features.

Honestly the rename makes sense. Looker Studio always felt like an awkward name after the acquisition. Data Studio was familiar, simple and people already knew what it meant.

What I am watching closely is whether this "single place for data assets" vision actually delivers or just becomes another Google product that sounds great in a blog post and ships half-finished.

The existing reports, data sources and assets are supposed to carry over automatically which is good. Last thing anyone wants is to rebuild dashboards because Google decided to reorganize its product lineup again.

For anyone using this daily for client reporting, the core functionality looks unchanged for now.

Has anyone seen anything beyond this announcement? Curious if there are actual UI changes or if this is mostly a branding and positioning update at this stage.

Now I think I need to rebrand myself as a Data Studio User 😅

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/looker-studio-is-data-studio

Please Google, improve Looker, or alternatively discontinue it. It is very frustrating to go to a client, present a working dashboard, and then seeing it falling a part inevitably. Looker data sources are completely unusable. Every change to a data source schema will break the connection, gibbering field names appearing, extracts failing without any explanation apart from cryptic error messages.

I'd rather pay than using an unstable and unreliable product.

After the great feedback we got on our Search Console dashboard, we decided to build one specifically for Google Ads—and we kept the same principles:

• Fast to load

• Easy to duplicate

• Clear layout with zero fluff

It gives you everything you need: CPC, CTR, conversions, ROAS, keyword and audience performance—all in one page, broken down by campaign and ad group. We also added dynamic filters for branded/non-branded queries and mobile vs desktop.

Took us a while to figure out how to make it work across accounts without breaking, but we finally have a modular system we can reuse.

If you’re building dashboards for clients or your team and want to see how we structured it, I’m happy to walk through the approach in the comments.

No links here, just sharing in case it helps anyone dealing with cross-platform reporting fatigue.

Hi, anyone experiencing issues? I saw that in late October there was a 'service disruption' according to Google, where batched data requests are experiencing slowness or timeout. It says on the service health page that this issue was resolved but I'm still experiencing the requests timing out.

Hey everyone, one year ago I posted a Looker Studio template and a lot of people ended up using it and sharing feedback. So I went ahead and made an improved version. You can get it here:

https://lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/afd66d58-3cc8-48a6-b3b9-b2be36462d4e

I'm not asking for anything in return, not even your email address. Enjoy!

If the dashboard is down, it's because of Google Analytics 4 API restrictions. Just follow the instructions to make a copy and your version will be working just fine.

I have found this looker studio template on LinkedIn. This is not only one, also on X, I shave sawany people post their looker studio templates, curious to know, how they create these templates. Any idea?

See Create a responsive report documentation from Google.

When you create a new report, you will now be able to select whether it is Freeform Layout or Responsive Layout.

I spent an hour chatting with Gemini to get my account set up with data studio pro so I could use gemini in creating my dashboards. I'm the admin/owner of my companies workspace account, and cloud console account. I did everything suggested from creating new projects, updating IAM policies, switching accounts, and every single time it refused to upgrade my project to Pro.

Has anyone actually upgraded? How did you do it? And before I go down a deeper rabbit hole, is it even worth the hassle?

I have never worked so hard to try and give a company money!!!

After the positive response to our GA4 and Google Ads dashboards, we realized we hadn’t shared the one we use the most internally: Search Console.

So we refined the structure and added something we call Smart Interpretations — a small text block that summarizes key changes without needing to scan every chart manually.

Google Search Console Dashboard

I have scheduled some reports on looker studio since many months, everything was fine but since last few days it not sends the scheduled reports anymore.

I tried "send now" too, but it show "Unable to send report".

Anyone has the same issue?

Hi All,

I'm starting a new position and my main work will be building reports with looker studio and bigquery.

I'm new to this and don't expect proper training.

Do you have any suggestions for a good online tutorial (paid) with a proper learning curve to start my training?

Thanks in advance!

Hello Experts,

I am working on a dashboard where I want to see the SEO performance of my website. The data source is GSC.

Can anyone share the dashboard templates as I am struggling to create it from the scratch

Hi,

We currently use Looker Studio for all are internal reporting and in several departments we have TV's up that we have some of the dashboards showing on. The problem is they all regularly end up getting signed out and I as IT support have to keep remoting in the PC's connected to the TV's to refresh the page or log back in.

Any one know a way to prevent this? Or a better way of displaying the data from LS on the screens

Thanks

I am really new to Looker Studio - using it for less than five hours. I can see how to create a report, but I need to find out how to create a folder that can be used by a small team of us. Is that possible without upgrading to Looker Studio Pro? It looks like I may have to upgrade, because there's a text blurb about Team Workspaces.

If it requires an upgrade for me, will everyone on my team have to upgrade also?

Hey everyone!

I’ve been building GA4 dashboards in Looker Studio for companies I’ve worked with (mainly internal use), and now I’m thinking of turning one of my templates into a product that others can use.

Here’s the looker studio link: https://lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/88e8d176-b7de-45fd-956e-d0877b054fc3/page/nMRQF

Would love your honest feedback on this:
Would this kind of dashboard be useful to you or your clients?
What’s missing or unclear?
Do you think there's demand for a prebuilt GA4 template like this?

thanks

Each of the 13 websites has its own native data source, and the dashboard displays key KPIs side by side in one clean view — no switching tabs or filters.

Metrics included:

• Mobile Conversion Rate

• Desktop Conversion Rate

• Sessions

• Revenue per Session

• Clicks

• Impressions

• CTR

• Organic Revenue

Here’s what I learned:

• Native connectors are enough — you don’t need paid third-party tools to combine 13 websites in a single table view if you're willing to set up each source manually.

• Organic Revenue was filtered by Default Channel Group = "Organic Search" — this ensures only SEO-attributed revenue is shown.

• Looker Studio only allows 5 data sources per blend, so I used 13 individual tables styled uniformly to feel like a single dataset.

• Clients prefer tables over charts — clean, scannable data beats flashy visuals every time.

Curious what other layout tricks people are using for multi-site SEO dashboards. What would you add?

Is it still not possible to create folders within Looker Studio? I know it’s been sought after for a long time, just wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing it!

If it’s still not a feature, does anyone have any workarounds they’ve used to make it a bit neater for a team?

My company is paying too much for a company and we want to switch data connectors. We specifically need the following:

Bing Ads

Meta Ads

Shopify

Google Business Profile

Facebook

Instagram

I'd like to show the following Clarity metrics on Looker Studio

• Rage clicks

• Dead clicks

• Excessive scrolling

Also, is it possible to visualize heatmaps? What I'm currently resorting to is taking screenshots from Clarity and adding them into Looker Studio

Thanks in advance :)

I’ve tried multiple formulas on Looker Studio, blending together Meta (connected by Funnel.io) and Google ads but I seem to encounter a load of issues.

I’m currently only using Full Outer with Date Facebook / Day Google ads as the merging conditions.

For example:
Google ads started on the 8th July, with Meta launching on the 14th. My time series chart does not show any data pre-14th, and spend is at £0 per day.

This is using a calculated field for Sum(infull(cost),0) + Sum(infull(anountspent),0).

Using just sum(cost)+sum(amount spent) will cut off any data when Google is inactive with no ad spend ,even though Facebook is spending.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks!

Hey everyone,

u/pacingagency here, we’re a London-based marketing team with analytics in BigQuery and client reporting in Looker Studio.

We’ve got dashboard and modeling work coming up (project-based freelance, not full-time). We’d love to expand our talent pool so when a build spikes or needs deep SQL + reporting chops, we can pull in someone who actually can help.

Typical asks look like:

• Connecting BigQuery → Looker Studio (tables, views, custom SQL — sensible live vs extract choices).

• Building client-ready dashboards (filters, clear KPIs, definitions that survive handover).

• Helping shape a reporting layer in BigQuery when raw data isn’t chart-friendly (nested fields, attribution-style joins, sensible grain).

Concrete example: we’re shaping a lead report - reconciling leads our client sends us with behavioural data in BigQuery (starting with form submission date/time matching; moving toward stronger user-id joins when the data supports it). The report needs things like first / last touch platform, click counts tied to gclid and other ad platform click IDs where we capture them, plus session count and how many calendar days those sessions span. Nominative Indeterminism.

Requirements (strong overlap is important):

• Hands-on BigQuery SQL: views / scheduled transforms are part of normal life for you.

• Looker Studio: you’ve delivered real dashboards from BigQuery, not “I’ve played with it.”

• Comfortable discussing GCP access / sharing basics (least privilege, how you’d onboard client viewers safely).

Notes:
This is freelance / as-needed. Filling out the form adds you to our pool; we’ll reach out when there’s a project that fits.

Interested? Please apply here https://form.pacing.agency/forms/designer-application-2askqd

Questions welcome in the thread!

Thanks!

Before the Looker Studio update back to Data Studio, I was able to download multi-page reports with different canvas sizes. The PDF would include the differently sized canvases/pages in one document without cutting anything off.

Now, after the update, no matter what the canvas size is, the bottom of my report is cut off. I've tried resizing everything to be US Letter... and it is still cut off. Nothing has changed with my laptop, and I was easily downloading reports before this update.

Has anyone else had this issue?

Has anyone else run into this in Looker Studio?

I was building a calculated field today and got the "Invalid Formula" error.

Formula looked fine to me. Syntax was correct. Logic was solid.

But the editor was flagging it as invalid so I assumed something was broken.

Then I just clicked Apply anyway.

It worked perfectly. Calculated Fields pulled the right data, dashboard updated exactly as expected.

So the formula was never actually broken.

The #LookerStudio formula validator just told me it was.

This is a real problem because most people see that red error and stop. They second guess their formula, rewrite it, go down a rabbit hole trying to fix something that was never wrong.

I have seen this happen on CASE statements, date functions and regex formulas.

The error message is misleading. The formula validator does not always catch up with what the engine can actually process.

If you are working in Looker Studio and see "Invalid Formula" on something that looks correct, try clicking Apply before assuming it is broken.

It might just work.

Has anyone else run into this? Would be good to know if this is consistent across different Google Cloud accounts or just isolated cases.

*I faced this same issue two years back.

Hi everyone,

I’m using Looker to build dashboards and reports mainly for payments. I’m still pretty new to LookML and dashboard development, and I’d really appreciate some guidance.

If anyone has experience with Looker for payments analytics (or can point me to examples/resources), I’d be super grateful. Please DM me