Looker Studio

What Stevin gets out of Looker Studio

Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) is free and flexible, but that comes at a price: slow dashboards, limited transformation options, and hard to scale beyond a handful of data sources. For SMBs with basic reporting needs (GA4, Google Ads, GSC combined) it is fine. For multi-platform attribution or cross-tool dashboards you quickly hit limits and have to move toward Tableau, Looker (the paid version) or Metabase. We use it ourselves for client reporting; internally we work in BigQuery plus a custom UI.

What you pair it with

For your stack: always connect through an intermediate layer (BigQuery views or an ETL tool like Fivetran), not directly on live APIs. Connecting straight to GA4 looks easy, but dashboards become slow and fragile to API changes. Build one template dashboard and duplicate it per client instead of 30 unique dashboards nobody maintains.

Common mistakes

• →Not noticing sampled data in the GA4 connector, so figures in the dashboard do not match the GA4 UI
• →Using custom fields as calculations that should have lived in BigQuery, performance drops
• →Setting sharing permissions loosely (Anyone with link), so a competitor can view the dashboard
• →Building dashboards around a metric that later gets renamed in the source, refactoring is manual work