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How to Create a Daily Report in Looker with AI

Cody Schneider••7 min read

Creating a daily report shouldn't be a tedious copy-paste ritual that eats up the first hour of your morning. Automating this process frees you up to act on insights instead of just gathering them. This guide will walk you through setting up, building, and automating a high-value daily report in Looker (now part of Google Cloud), complete with steps for integrating its AI features for smarter, proactive monitoring.

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Rethinking the Daily Report: From Chore to Strategic Asset

Daily reporting is key for maintaining a sharp pulse on your business. It helps you catch issues before they escalate, capitalize on sudden trends, and keep your entire team aligned on the metrics that matter most. When everyone starts their day looking at the same trusted numbers, decisions become faster and more data-driven.

The problem is the manual labor. Exporting CSVs, updating spreadsheets, and emailing static PDFs is not only time-consuming but also prone to human error. Automation turns this daily chore into a strategic asset that delivers insights reliably and on time, every time.

Step 1: Get Your Data House in Order

Before you build any report in Looker, you need a solid foundation. An automated report is only as good as the data model it’s built on. A little preparation here will save you massive headaches down the road. In Looker, this foundation is your LookML project.

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Define Your Key Metrics (Measures & Dimensions)

Think about the top 3-5 questions your team needs answered every single day. The answers to these questions will become the core tiles of your report. For a marketing team, this might be:

  • What was our total ad spend yesterday?
  • Which campaigns are driving the most conversions?
  • How many new leads did we generate?
  • What was the traffic and conversion rate on our key landing pages?

To answer these, work with your data team or Looker administrator to ensure the necessary measures (the quantifiable metrics, like total_spend or lead_count) and dimensions (attributes to group by, like campaign_name or traffic_source) are defined and accessible in your LookML model and Explores.

Step 2: Build Your Daily Report Dashboard in Looker

With your data prepped, it’s time to build the visual interface for your report. Creating a new dashboard in Looker is your canvas for displaying daily insights.

  1. Navigate to the folder where you want to save your report and click the New button, then select Dashboard.
  2. Give it a clear, descriptive name like "Daily Marketing Performance" or "Daily Sales Snapshot."

Now, let's add the visualizations (or "Tiles" in Looker terminology) that answer those daily questions.

Add Tiles for a Quick Overview

Start with the most important numbers. These should be glanceable KPI scorecards that give an immediate sense of performance.

Example: Creating a "Yesterday's Revenue" Tile

  1. From your new dashboard, click Add Tile. You'll be prompted to choose an Explore. Navigate to your primary sales or orders Explore.
  2. In the Explore view, select the relevant measure (e.g., Total Revenue).
  3. Apply a date filter. Go to the date dimension in your Explore (e.g., Order Date), click on it, and set the filter to "is in the past 1 day" or simply "yesterday." Click Run.
  4. Under the Visualization panel, choose the Single Value chart type. This creates a large, easy-to-read number.
  5. Customize the title to be crystal clear, like "Yesterday's Revenue."
  6. Click Save to add this tile to your dashboard.

Repeat this process for your other top-line KPIs: New Users, Ad Spend, Registrations, or whatever else is critical for you.

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Visualize Trends and Breakdowns

Once you have your summary KPIs, add charts that provide more context. A line chart is great for showing intra-day trends, while a table is useful for drilling into specific campaigns or channels.

Example: Creating a "Top Campaigns" Table

  1. Click Add Tile and choose your marketing or ads Explore.
  2. Select your key dimensions and measures: Campaign Name, Spend, Impressions, Clicks, Conversions.
  3. Apply the same date filter for "yesterday" or "past 1 day."
  4. Run the query and select the Table visualization type from the menu.
  5. Use the visualization settings to reorder, hide columns, or add conditional formatting to highlight top performers.
  6. Save it to your dashboard with a title like "Top Campaigns (Yesterday)."

After adding a few more relevant tiles – like a line chart for traffic over time or a pie chart for traffic sources – you'll have a comprehensive daily report ready for automation.

Step 3: Automate Your Report with Looker's Scheduler

This is where the magic happens. A great dashboard is only useful if people see it. Instead of reminding everyone to check the link, you can push the report directly to them every morning.

Setting Up a Daily Scheduled Delivery

  1. On your completed dashboard, click the gear icon in the top right corner and select Schedule delivery.
  2. Give Your Schedule a Name: Call it "Daily Marketing Email Report" or something similar.
  3. Choose the Destination: This is powerful. You can send it via email, to a Slack channel via a webhook, or to other services. Email is the most common starting point.
  4. Set the Format:
  5. Specify the Recurrence: Under Delivery, set the timing.
  6. Add Recipients and a Message: Enter the email addresses, a subject line ("Your Daily Marketing Performance Report for [Date]"), and a brief message if you'd like.
  7. Apply Filters: Double-check that your dashboard filters are correctly set to reflect "yesterday's" data. The schedule will use whatever filters are saved on the dashboard.
  8. Click Save and you're all set! Your report will now run and be delivered automatically every day.

Step 4: Supercharge Your Reporting with Looker's AI Features

An automated daily PDF is a huge step up, but modern BI tools can do much more. Looker has been integrating more proactive, AI-driven features that turn a static report into an intelligent monitoring system.

Get Proactive with Alerts

Instead of you spotting a problem in the report, what if the report could spot the problem for you? That's what Alerts do. You can set them up on any tile with numeric data.

For example, on your "Daily Cost" KPI tile, you can create an alert to notify you if spending spikes unexpectedly.

  1. Navigate to the dashboard tile you want to monitor (e.g., your tile for "Leads Generated").
  2. Click the bell icon on the tile.
  3. Set a condition, such as "is less than 50," for a given day.
  4. Choose who gets notified and how often (e.g., "only the first time the condition is met").
  5. Looker will now monitor this metric continuously and send a notification the moment the condition is met, allowing you to react immediately instead of waiting for the next day's report.

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Enable Conversations with Gemini in Looker

Looker's generative BI features are changing how users interact with dashboards. Instead of just viewing a report, your stakeholders can now ask questions. If your organization has it enabled, Gemini in Looker allows you to use natural language to query your data right from a dashboard view.

Once you send the link to your live dashboard (instead of a static PDF), team members can ask follow-up questions in a chat interface like:

  • "What were our top 5 landing pages by new users yesterday?"
  • "Show me the trend of mobile traffic vs. desktop traffic this week."
  • "Summarize the key trends from yesterday's performance."

This allows your teammates to self-serve when they have new questions, digging deeper into the data without needing to learn the complexities of the Looker Explore interface themselves. It empowers everyone to become more data-literate and can dramatically reduce the number of ad-hoc follow-up questions your data team has to field.

Final Thoughts

Setting up an automated daily report in Looker transforms a repetitive daily chore into a powerful system for driving data-informed decisions. By starting with a clean data model, building an intuitive dashboard, and leveraging the scheduler and AI features, you can deliver timely and crucial insights to your team with zero manual effort.

While Looker is a fantastic tool for deep analysis, we know its complexity can be a hurdle, especially for teams without a dedicated data expert. Oftentimes, creating new dashboards and reports requires navigating steep learning curves like mastering LookML. We built Graphed to remove that friction completely. You can connect your marketing and sales data sources in seconds and use simple, plain English to build real-time dashboards, freeing your entire team to get answers right away.

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