The advantages of Looker Studio - Google Data Studio Tutorial

- [Instructor] Data visualization in marketing and in general is important, because it helps people understand and make sense of data. It also draws more interest. I'm going to guess that there are people out there who would agree with me when I say that I look forward to learning more from dashboards and visual reports, compared to large spreadsheets with hundreds or thousands of rows to make sense of. But any type of reporting involves questions, which is how to approach Looker Studio before even logging in. Knowing the why's are as important as knowing the how's. There are hundreds of data visualization and paid tools available, and that number is growing. So how does Looker Studio compare, and why is it valuable to be familiar with the platform? If you're an analyst, marketer, or data advocate at your organization, you may be faced with questions about what the benefits are, and how it compares to other business intelligence solutions out there. In short, it's not just about your audience, but it's also for you to understand things quicker, and keep up with marketing data from exploration. It's the perfect tool for personal use, because it's free. It could also help with your personal goals and career. Providing data is providing value, along with providing answers to questions about marketing data and site or app engagement. You can help the whole marketing team or marketing agency make decisions quicker to have that edge. It's important to know that you don't need to be overly technical to build Looker Studio dashboards, even when you add complex interactivity and data visualization design. For Looker Studio, all you need is an internet connection, access to your data, and some practice with the essentials. And again, the best part about Looker Studio over other tools is that the base version is free. This means that absolutely anyone can learn and use the reports for personal or business use cases. All the features of Standard Looker Studio come at no cost, so it doesn't need a budget or financial consideration other than time. Next, it's time to choose how you want to communicate, discover, and experiment with visualizations, creative methods, and dynamic chart building. Are you imagining yourself using a large screen, or virtual meeting screen to present and voiceover? Are you planning to create automated deliveries of PDFs, or are you planning on doing the most common and best practice of sharing the dashboards, and having people view right in Looker Studio? There are exceptions to that which should be flagged during the planning phase. A potential cost is if third party data connections are used. These don't come from Google, so the cost would depend on the service. For example, companies create data connections to popular platforms like Facebook, Salesforce, and LinkedIn ads. Since Looker Studio is a Google product, all Google marketing platform connections are free as well. And that's along with connections to common data sources, like sequel databases, spreadsheets, Redshift, file uploads, and some more. The first step when starting a dashboard here is to list out which data you'd like to see, and where it's from. Another benefit is ease of use. Some enterprise tools take quite a lot of ramp up time and prep work to set up, but Looker Studio is an approachable and intuitive tool. Since it's owned by Google, it's also used internationally by a huge audience. That means that there are forums to search through, documentation to reference, and groups to join, and some links are in the exercise file to check out. Having a lower level of lift creates a team ownership experience instead of a single person or a few team members who have the ability to use and update the reports. With more ownership and involvement, ideas and additions will make your dashboards even better. Speaking of teams, it's a very collaborative tool. Users can work on the same dashboard at the same time in a cloud-based environment. You can invite people, share a link, schedule those automated reports, or embed reports in another tool. A website or an intranet site is an example. If you're an analytics, marketing, IT, school, or even data science, Looker Studio can act as a single source of truth or additional asset for your work. There's also many sources of free data and samples to experiment and explore. As a user of Looker Studio, you can now communicate with your team, or have an informed start to your own work, knowing the possibilities for strengthening and using new skills, and the team collaboration that's needed as a successful marketer.