We're relatively latecomers to the Google Looker Studio way of doing things, but absolute converts - we use the reports that we've set up for ourselves regularly, and are constantly thinking of things we can add to them to make them even more effective.
Out of the box, Google Analytics presents a huge amount of information to you - but it does suffer somewhat from a signal-to-noise problem. It offers a myriad of reports from day one, but it's not always particularly obvious where you can find the information that you're looking for. And when you do, the information isn't always displayed in the way in which you would like it to be.
Yes, you can create custom reports in Analytics and save them to your library. But it's quite a convoluted process to do so.
On top of that, it seems to have a mind of its own when it comes to date ranges - you'll be looking at one report, showing (for example) last month's performance compared to the same time last year. Change to another report, and more often than not the dates change as well.
The other problem is that, naturally, Google Analytics only presents you information from Google Analytics. If you want to see your performance in Search Console, you have to go to Search Console. If you want to see how your ads are performing, you have to go to Google Ads. You have to go to YouTube to see YouTube analytics. And so on.
That's where Looker Studio comes in. It allows you to pull in data from a wide range of sources, then create reports into that data, formatted how you wish, displaying what you wish, across one or more pages. One single date field means that the reporting period is consistent across the report. Styling options allow you to customise its look to your brand. Sharing, exporting and embedding allows you to distribute the report to a wide audience easily. In short, it brings everything into one place, lets you show what you want to, and share it with who you want to.
There is, undoubtedly, a small investment of time involved in setting it up - but once it's done, it's done. Having everything you want visible how you want it saves you time in the long run, be that from switching platforms, switching reports or switching dates.
What data sources can you use?
As well as the various sources mentioned above, you can connect Looker Studio to a myriad of other sources, be they Google products (BigQuery, Google Sheets, etc.) or more generic sources such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, and there are various other third party connectors, so the chances are high that you can pull in data from wherever you want. The only question is whether that can be done automatically, or whether (as with, say, an Excel spreadsheet or Google Drive) it would need to be uploaded manually to bring data up to date.
How can you visualise the data?
However you want, really!
First choose what format you want to see your data in - a simple number, bar graph, pie chart, etc.. Then select the data source you want to pull in that data from (you only have to connect to each data source once).
Depending on whether your display format allows, you then may need to say whether you're showing a single value (a metric) or multiple values (a dimension) - so, for example, a list of where your visitors came from would be a dimension, whereas the number of visitors you received in total would be a metric.
If you've chosen a dimension (let's say the sources your visitors came from) then you can specify one or more metrics to show for each of those sources - so you can see how many people each source sent you, how much those people spent in total, and so on.
Finally, you can filter the data - we do it, for most of our metrics - where we have one set of charts showing data about all visitors to the website, and one set showing the same data but only for visitors from the UK. There are a myriad of pre-made filters, or you can quite easily build your own filter (which you can then apply to multiple charts).
If you've got lots of information that you want to display, or you want to categorise the information, you can set up and manage separate pages and move the charts around between them. The date range will appear as a dropdown option on each page, but setting it once applies across all data on all pages - an absolute boon compared to Google Analytic's behaviour.
In conclusion
We are honestly slightly annoyed that it took us too late to get on this bandwagon. Once set up - a process which took maybe a couple of hours at most - we now very rarely look at the underlying platforms, as all the information that we want from Google Analytics, Search Console, or wherever, is pulled into one single report in Looker Studio. We cannot recommend it highly enough.
If this has piqued your interest and you'd like a look at what's possible, and how you can streamline your reporting into one place, then feel free to get in touch for a chat with absolutely no obligation.
If you're new to Google Analytics itself, we covered the fundamentals in Master Google Analytics: Essential Insights for SMBs, and looked at what the data actually means for your business in What Google Analytics Really Tells You About Your Business.
For a guide on setting up measurement before any marketing activity, see Measure First, Market Second.