Business intelligence (BI) plays a critical role in data-driven marketing to understand customers' behavior. It empowers marketers to analyze customers' needs, optimize marketing campaigns, and drive better business decisions. This guide provides an in-depth comparative analysis of two prominent BI tools, Looker and Looker Studio.
While both serve the purpose of business intelligence, they cater to different user needs and offer unique functionalities. Let's do a detailed evaluation of both Looker and Looker Studio to enable you to choose the most suitable one.
Looker is a cloud-based business intelligence (BI) and data analytics platform owned by Google (since 2020). It helps you explore, share, and visualize data that drives better business decisions. Looker allows businesses to manage and organize their complex database and information in an easy and accessible way in one place.
Here is a step-by-step process of how Looker works:
Looker modeling language, or Look ML, is a language that describes different dimensions, calculations, aggregates, and data relationships in an SQL database. Looker formulates SQL queries based on a specific Look ML project about certain databases or information a business needs. In simple terms, Looker modeling language is a translator between your data and Looker.
For example, an E-Commerce store wants to see its total sales by state. Let's see how Look ML processes this request with 'orders' and 'users' tables.
Query Building: Look ML writes SQL queries to the 'order' and 'Users' table, filtering the user location table.
Data Analysis: It calculates the total sales amount for each state based on order values.
Stat Presentation: The Looker displays the result as a table or chart showing total sales figures grouped by state.
Look ML is a major difference between Looker vs Looker Studio as it makes data management easier and more accessible to business owners and non-technical users.
To understand the distinctions between Looker vs Looker Studio, we will first look at some prominent features of Looker.
A complete cloud-based platform, Looker allows you to work directly from your browser without downloading any desktop software or application. Both the Looker software and your data reside on Google Cloud infrastructure. This allows you to maintain strict security measures and limit access to your valuable data.
Looker has an intricate and advanced workflow that automatically schedules and manages the process of extracting data from various sources, transforming it into a usable format, and loading it into Looker for analysis called ETL (Extract, transform, load). This eliminates manual tasks and ensures data consistency. The data reports can be set up to be delivered only when certain conditions are met. For example, receiving an alert if sales drop below a certain figure allows proactive issue identification.
Another notable difference between Looker vs Looker Studio is the use of machine learning. Looker offers a set of pre-built or custom-made machine-learning models to analyze data. These models can automate tasks, identify trends, and generate predictions all within the looker interface.
There are different types of looker blocks, such as analytics, data, viz, and embedded.
Looker models help you uncover deeper insights within specific data, providing a more comprehensive understanding. For example:
Analytics block automates frequently used calculations or formatting logic for specific data analysis tasks such as calculating profit margin or conversion rate.
Looker has an excellent partner ecosystem that lets you extend your workflow beyond visualization tools and dashboards and connect with external data sources. These third-party integrations allow you to connect with different CRM systems, marketing platforms, or similar applications. This creates a unified view of your data, enabling you to analyze internal trends and external factors. Looker itself offers a library of supported connectors such as:
Looker offers several benefits. Let's discuss three of the most significant for a better comparison between Looker vs Looker Studio.
Looker empowers users of all technical and non-technical backgrounds to gain insights from data. Its user-friendly interface minimizes the need for coding. Look ML, handheld by specialists, further reduces the technical barriers and allows a wide range of people within an organization to leverage the power of data for informed decision-making.
Looker offers real-time alerting, which proactively notifies you like an early warning system. Let's say you are managing an online store with a limited stock of a popular gadget; the Looker can trigger an instant alert if the inventory dips below a certain threshold. This may include notifying staff to restock the item or temporarily pausing sales.
This feature allows you to analyze your data in a more detailed and organized way. For example, you notice a significant increase in sales for the West region this month. This new view might reveal which products are driving sales growth and help you evaluate the success of your marketing campaigns. These insights help you understand the 'why' behind high-level trends.
Google Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) is a free self-service business intelligence platform for data visualization. It helps you transform your business data into engaging reports and dashboards.
It can be connected to over 800 data sources, pulling in the required information. This data can be easily transformed into colorful and interactive charts and graphs for dashboards and reports such as KPIs, digital marketing reports, or insights.
The biggest difference between Looker vs Looker Studio is that Looker Studio doesn't require any sort of coding or modeling language, which makes handling data highly convenient for general users. You can share and collaborate on reports, informing everyone with real-time data insights.
While both explore data, Looker Studio's drag-and-drop simplicity and interactive features make it stand out in Looker vs Looker Studio comparison. Let's take a look at them.
Google Studio is a central translator, connecting your data across different sources (databases, spreadsheets, or analytics). With all your data in one place, Looker Studio empowers you to tell a rich story with this data. You can combine sales figures, customer demographics, and website traffic seamlessly into a single, visually compelling report that derives impactful insights.
Looker Studio's drag-and-drop lets anyone become a data visualization expert. Think of it as a toolbox filled with pre-built charts, graphs, and interactive elements. Just drag and drop these elements onto your report canvas to transform data into professional business insights in one click.
You can choose from bar charts, line charts, geo charts, tables, and shapes. Since there is no prior need for any technical knowledge, all of your team members can easily create dashboards that bring data to life.
Customization is a major distinction between Looker Studio vs Looker. Looker Studio lets your reports adapt and tell a more interactive story. For instance, you can add filters that viewers can use to explore data by time period (see sales trend by month or quarter), geography (regional performance), or customer segment (buying habits of different groups).
You can also pick from a variety of pre-built templates, saving your time while still allowing customization with interactive tools.
Looker Studio offers plenty of benefits for business owners, such as real-time collaboration, data sharing for a wide range of audiences, and cost-effective marketing data analysis.
Looker Studio offers built-in collaboration tools that allow multiple users to work on reports and dashboards simultaneously. Edits, comments, and revisions are automatically saved, ensuring everyone stays on the same page and can access the latest version. This streamlines team collaboration and communication, fostering a more efficient and transparent data analysis.
Looker Studio is a powerful data visualization tool completely free of cost. You can shift your focus from software expenses to data analysis and communication. It empowers startups and small businesses to leverage the power of data visualization without worrying about expensive software licenses.
Looker Studio has a report embedding feature, allowing you to integrate your insightful reports directly onto different web pages or networks. Embedding lets you share your data stories with a broader audience. Unlike static documents, embedded reports are dynamic; when the data refreshes in Looker Studio, the embedded version automatically reflects the updated version.
Let's create a comparison table to summarize the key difference between Google Data Studio vs Looker.
The above table provides detailed, comprehensive knowledge of the features and uses of Looker and Looker Studio. Here is a breakdown of the parameters of choosing between both of them.
This article provides a detailed outlook on Looker vs Google Data Studio. Looker is a paid BI platform with advanced data modeling and machine learning, ideal for businesses with complex data needs. Looker Studio, on the other hand, is a free visualization tool perfect for creating reports and dashboards.
After collecting and sorting all the data, you must prepare detailed performance reports such as sales, digital marketing, or KPIs. While this may be an overwhelming task, Catchr can make it easy for you. It can save you time by collecting marketing data from different platforms, enabling you to create insightful reports that combine data from multiple sources.
Catchr keeps your data safe and up-to-date. You can integrate your data insights from Looker Studio with Catchr to create compelling digital marketing reports in an easy and simplified manner.