Google announce the next evolution of their unified business intelligence platform
Google has rebranded Data Studio, its immensely popular analytics and data visualisation platform, as Looker Studio. This change represents an exciting new chapter for Data Studio, and reaffirms its commitment to its rapid development of Data Studio’s – sorry, Looker Studio’s – features.
Data Studio has always been an incredibly powerful tool, especially for marketers, not just thanks to the plethora of features it boasts, but also thanks to its accessibility: it’s easy to get started with, and completely free. Google is now framing it as a “complete enterprise business intelligence suite”, which should allow users to “go beyond dashboards” and infuse “workflows and applications with the intelligence needed to help make data-driven decisions”.
But Why the Change to Google Data Studio?
Google is unifying all of its business intelligence products under the Looker umbrella.
“Looker is the name you’ll hear us use when talking about our Google Cloud business intelligence products, as we bring together Looker, Data Studio, and core Google technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)”.
Why We Are Excited About This Change
Although this might be little more than a branding exercise, the possibility of the various technologies mentioned above being eventually merged into one product, or at least products that work together seamlessly, is an exciting one.
One of the single biggest challenges agencies face is ensuring their reporting and analytics solutions are providing the level of insights that clients increasingly demand and that a constantly evolving market requires, without taking up hours and hours of time.
Helping agencies address this challenge is one of our key services, and it’s why we almost always recommend Data Studio as a visualisation platform – accessibility and ease of use.
So the prospect of being able to more easily integrate AI and ML into Looker Studio reports while maintaining that same level of accessibility is hugely exciting.
Some Background on Google Data Studio
Data Studio launched in early 2016 as part of the Google Analytics 360 suite, with a free version that allowed users to turn their data into beautiful and informative reports with fully customizable dashboards. The easy to use drag and drop interface allows almost anyone to pick it up quickly, and its native connectors mean you can connect to and visualise data from dozens of data sources without having to spend any time wrangling data or messing around with authentication.
We’ve used Data Studio for all sorts of reports, including everything from standard weekly client reporting to advanced agency-wide, cross-channel health check dashboards. We even used it to display data for real-time n-gram analysis across 150+ clients, which allowed one agency we worked with to completely revamp their entire keyword strategy.
A Pro Version of Google Looker Studio
Google has also announced that there will be a new pro (i.e., paid) version of Looker Studio named Looker Studio Pro.
“Customers who upgrade to Looker Studio Pro will get new enterprise management features, team collaboration capabilities, and SLAs. This is only the first release, and we’ve developed a roadmap of capabilities, starting with Dataplex integration for data lineage and metadata visibility, that our enterprise customers have been asking for.”
This confirms their commitment to investing in the platform over the long term and promises more exciting features to come. If you’re interested in reading more about these changes, we’d recommend going directly to the Google blog.