Looker Studio
Looker Studio is an online dashboarding tool from Google.
Looker Studio is the primary tool used within GDS for data visualisations and reporting.
Report creation
If you are a member of GDS staff, please use one of the standard data connections listed in Trello when creating a new report. If your data source is not listed there, it may not have a standard data connection. If that is the case, please follow the instructions on data connections below, or ask the Data Engineering channel for support.
Make sure to add the Looker Studio GA4 property ID to your report to track usage.
Data sources and connections
Creating new data connections
When creating a new data connection to be shared, you should:
- Turn off Community Visualisations
- Set the ‘Data credentials’ used to the viewer’s
- Add the Google Group ‘data-connection-editors@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk’ as editor
- Share with the GDS domain as viewer so that others can use your connection
Community visualisations must be turned off because a DPIA has not been carried out on them to assess the potential risk of data loss.
If you are connecting to a BigQuery dataset, it is better to connect using a custom SQL query with date range parameters than to connect to the table directly. This is because some of our data is stored in sharded tables, and Looker Studio queries all shards when direct connections are established. This can be quite costly given the size of our datasets.
For some data, however, we have now created partitioned tables which are more efficient to use than sharded tables. For example, we have a partitioned flattened table for GOV.UK GA4 data. These can also be used in custom SQL queries to connect Looker Studio to BigQuery.
For SQL examples showing how to connect to both partitioned and sharded data sources with date parameters, please refer to our guidance onLooker Studio best practice
When setting up the connection, ensure you select the appropriate billing project. For most shared reports that will be the GDS BQ reporting project.
Sharing reports
Do not make your reports ‘unlisted’ or ‘public’ to share them. You can either share your reports with anyone on the GDS email domain, or with specified individuals or Google groups.