Reporting
Looker Studio for ecommerce stores
Looker Studio turns the store's data sources into pages a non-analyst will actually open, which is the only reason reporting changes anything. The dashboards we are asked to fix usually share one problem: they were built to show everything available rather than to answer a question somebody has on a Monday morning. We build a small number of pages tied to decisions, define each metric once, and make every headline number traceable back to an order.
Looker Studio
Reporting · by Google. A text wordmark, not a logo: we are not affiliated with the vendor and make no claim to its trademarks.
What we do with it
The work inside Looker Studio
One page per decision
A store rarely needs more than four views: how the business is trading, where the traffic came from, what paid media returned, and what the catalog is doing. Each page opens with the two or three figures that would change someone's mind, and detail sits below for the person who wants to check it.
Sources connected the right way round
Google connectors cover analytics, ads and search data directly. Anything heavy, blended or historic is better read from a warehouse table built for the purpose, because a chart querying millions of raw rows on every page load is slow enough that people stop opening it.
Metrics defined once
Return on ad spend, contribution, repeat rate and new customer share all have several plausible definitions. We write the definition into the report as a calculated field with a note, so the number means the same thing in January as it did in October, and nobody rebuilds it slightly differently on another page.
Marketing performance against store revenue
Channel pages carry platform-reported conversions and the store's own order data side by side, with the gap visible rather than hidden. That is the honest way to show paid media: what the platform claims, what the store recorded, and the trend in the difference.
Organic and catalog reporting
Search performance, landing page behaviour and product-level revenue go on their own page so SEO work can be judged on the pages it touched. Grouping by template, collection or brand tells a story that a list of five hundred URLs does not.
Delivery, access and upkeep
Reports are scheduled to the people who need them, access is granted by role rather than by whoever asked last, and each page carries the date it was last reviewed. A dashboard nobody maintains becomes misleading faster than it becomes useless.
When it fits
Looker Studio is the right tool when
Stores that need numbers in front of non-analysts
Owners, buyers and warehouse managers will not open an analytics interface. They will open a link with four charts on it, which is what makes reporting turn into action.
Merchants already inside the Google stack
Where analytics, ads and search data all live in Google properties, the connections are direct and the maintenance is low. That advantage shrinks as more of the important data sits elsewhere.
Brands reporting to an owner or board monthly
A fixed set of pages, reviewed on the same day each month, ends the ritual of rebuilding a deck from screenshots and gives every meeting the same baseline.
What to watch
Where accounts drift
Facts about defaults and costs, not criticism. These are the settings we check on every account.
Report speed depends on the source
Connectors have their own quotas and response times, and caching hides that until someone changes a date range. Reports that will be opened daily should read pre-aggregated tables rather than querying a large source live.
Blending has rules worth understanding
Joining two sources on a key they do not truly share produces a chart that renders happily and reports nonsense. Every blend needs a stated join key and a sanity check against a known total before it goes on a page anyone trusts.
Search data carries its own limits
Search Console history is finite and its clicks are counted differently from sessions, so an SEO page should compare periods within that source rather than treating it as interchangeable with analytics traffic.
Third-party connectors are a dependency
Data from platforms outside Google usually arrives through a paid connector maintained by someone else. Note who owns each one, what it costs and what happens to the report if it stops, before a monthly meeting comes to depend on it.
Is Looker Studio enough, or does a store need a paid analytics platform?
For most stores it is enough for a long time. The reasons to move are governance, heavy modelling or many users needing controlled access. A store with one storefront and a handful of channels is better served by four well-built pages than by a larger tool nobody has configured.
Why does the dashboard not match the numbers in our admin?
Usually because the sources count different things: analytics counts what was tracked and consented to, the store counts what was ordered, and platforms count what they attribute. We annotate each figure with its source and reconcile the revenue line to orders so the difference is expected rather than alarming.
Can it report on email, social and other non-Google platforms?
Yes, through connectors or by loading that data into a warehouse table first. For anything the store reviews weekly, the warehouse route is more reliable, because it keeps the report working when a connector changes or a platform revises its API.
How many dashboards should an online store have?
Few. One trading report reviewed weekly, one marketing report reviewed monthly, and any temporary page built for a specific project. Every extra dashboard is another set of definitions to keep consistent, and stores rarely retire the ones they stop reading.
Works alongside
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