Looker Studio reporting

The problem with marketing reports

Most business owners receive too much data and too little information. Google Ads sends one email, Meta another, the SEO agency a 30-page PDF, and GA4 sits unopened because nobody remembers which report to check. Each source tells a partial story with its own definitions. Adding them up gives more customers than you actually had.

Looker Studio reporting solves this by putting everything on one page with consistent definitions. Looker Studio is Google's free dashboard tool. It connects to GA4, Google Ads, Search Console and many other sources, refreshes automatically and can be shared like a Google Doc.

Designing a report people actually read

The technical part is easy. The hard part is deciding what to leave out. I start with questions rather than charts:

• Are we getting more enquiries than last month and last year?
• Which channel brings them, and at what cost?
• Is any channel getting more expensive?
• Which pages and campaigns convert, and which only spend?

Every chart on the first page answers one of these. Detailed tables for campaign managers go on a second page. If something doesn't help a decision, it doesn't go on the report. For a guide to which numbers matter and which to ignore, see marketing reports: what to look at.

Clean data first

A beautiful dashboard built on broken tracking is worse than no dashboard, because it looks trustworthy. Before building, I check that conversions are counted once, calls are included and sources are labelled correctly. If your tracking has gaps, an analytics audit or a clean GA4 setup comes first. UTM tags on email and social links also matter, otherwise those visits end up as "direct" or "unassigned"; my UTM tracking guide explains how to tag links.

Combining sources

Google products connect to Looker Studio natively. Meta ads data usually needs a third-party connector, some of which charge a monthly fee, or a regular data export. CRM data can be pulled from a spreadsheet export or, for systems that allow it, a direct connection. On custom CRMs I build, the data can feed the dashboard directly.

Once sources are combined, I add calculated fields: cost per lead across channels, conversion rate by landing page, revenue per channel where sales data exists. These are the numbers that turn a report into a decision.

Reading the dashboard monthly

A dashboard is only useful if someone looks at it. I suggest a fixed monthly habit: open the report on the same day, compare this month to the last, note one thing to change. For businesses where I manage the marketing, I do that review and send a short written summary with it. Ads are reviewed every two weeks; SEO monthly. Over time, this rhythm matters more than any single number.

Common reporting mistakes

Three mistakes show up in many dashboards I'm asked to look at. The first is vanity metrics on the front page: impressions, followers and sessions without any link to enquiries. The second is mixing definitions, for example adding Google Ads conversions to Meta conversions to GA4 key events and calling the total "leads". The third is no comparison: a number for this month alone says nothing until you see last month and the same month last year, especially for seasonal businesses in Canada where winter and summer look completely different.

Targets make reports useful

A number without a target is just a number. Thirty leads a month means little until you know you need forty to hit your revenue goal, or that a lead costing more than $80 loses money. If you haven't set those targets yet, start with marketing budget and KPIs. With targets in place, the dashboard shows at a glance whether you're on track.

Ownership

The dashboard is created in your Google account and belongs to you, like everything else I set up. You decide who sees it. If you change suppliers, the report keeps working with your accounts.