How to Create a Dashboard in Looker

Creating a Looker dashboard is the best way to get a clear, consolidated view of your business data, moving you from raw numbers to actionable insights. Instead of sifting through messy data tables, you can build a visual hub for monitoring key metrics across your company. This guide will walk you through the entire process, from understanding the core concepts to building your first interactive dashboard, step-by-step.

What Are the Building Blocks of a Looker Dashboard?

Before jumping into building, it’s helpful to understand the components you’ll be working with. Looker dashboards are made up of a few key elements that work together.

1. Explores

Think of an Explore as your starting point for asking questions. It's a curated view of your data, prepared by your data team, that lets you select a specific set of dimensions and measures without writing any SQL. For instance, you might have an "Orders" explore that contains fields like order date, customer region, and total revenue.

2. Looks

A Look is essentially a saved query that you create using an Explore. It’s a single data visualization, like a bar chart showing sales by region or a table listing your top ten customers. Each Look answers one specific business question. You can save these to use later or add them directly to a dashboard.

3. Tiles

A Tile is the individual box or widget that sits on your dashboard. It’s what holds your content. There are two main types of tiles:

• Query Tiles: These tiles are connected to a Look or a new query. They display your data visualizations (charts, maps, scorecards, tables).

• Text Tiles: These are for adding context. You can use text tiles to give your dashboard a title, add descriptive paragraphs explaining a section, or insert images and links.

4. Dashboards

Finally, the Dashboard is the canvas where all your tiles come together. It’s a collection of visualizations and text grouped into one place to monitor performance and tell a data-driven story. You can arrange, resize, and connect tiles on a dashboard to create a comprehensive and interactive reporting tool.

Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Your Looker Dashboard

With the basics down, let's walk through building a dashboard from the ground up.

Step 1: Plan Your Dashboard Before You Build

This is the most important step. A common mistake is to dive straight into building charts without a clear purpose. Before you touch Looker, ask yourself these questions:

• Who is the audience? Is this for the marketing team, the CEO, or a sales manager? The metrics for each will be different. A CEO might want high-level KPIs, while a marketing manager needs granular campaign performance data.

• What questions should this dashboard answer? Aim for clarity. Instead of a vague goal like "show sales data," define specific questions, like "Which marketing channels are driving the most revenue this quarter?" or "How is our sales team's pipeline trending MoM?"

• What are the most critical KPIs? List the 3-5 most important metrics you need to track. Don't try to cram everything onto one dashboard. A focused report is far more effective than a cluttered one.

Step 2: Create Your First Query with an Explore

Building your first visualization begins with creating a Query Tile. To do this, you’ll use an Explore.

1. Navigate to the Explore section in Looker from the main navigation menu.

2. Choose the relevant Explore for the data you want to analyze. For this example, let's imagine we're using an "Orders" Explore.

3. In the left-hand panel, you’ll see a list of available Dimensions (attributes, like Order Date or Customer City) and Measures (calculations, like Total Revenue or Order Count).

Let's create a simple query to see monthly revenue:

• Under Dimensions, click on Order Date. Looker will often present this in different timeframes, select Month.

• Under Measures, click on Total Revenue.

• Click the Run button in the top right.

Looker will execute the query and generate a data table showing total revenue for each month.

Step 3: Choose a Visualization

A table of numbers is useful, but a chart is often better for quick understanding. Looker’s visualization tab makes this easy.

1. Above your data table, click the Visualization tab.

2. Looker provides thumbnails of different chart types. A line chart is perfect for showing trends over time. Click the Line chart icon.

3. You should now see your monthly revenue data visualized as a line graph.

4. Click the Edit gear icon in the top right of the visualization pane to customize it. You can change axis labels, titles, colors, and more to make your chart clear and professional. Give it a meaningful title like "Monthly Gross Revenue Trend".

Step 4: Save Your Query to a New Dashboard

Once you’re happy with your visualization, it's time to add it to a dashboard.

1. Click the gear icon in the top right corner of the page (next to the Run button).

2. Select Save > As a new dashboard.

3. A pop-up will appear. In the Title field, type a name for your query tile, such as "Monthly Revenue Trend".

4. In the Dashboard field, give your new dashboard a name, like "Executive Sales Overview".

5. Click Save to Dashboard.

Congratulations, you’ve just created your first Looker dashboard with its first tile!

Step 5: Edit and Arrange Your Dashboard

Now, let's go to your new dashboard and start organizing it.

1. Navigate to the folder where you saved your dashboard and click on it.

2. You'll see your one tile on a blank canvas. To make changes, click the Edit dashboard button in the top right corner.

3. Once in edit mode, you can click and drag the tile to move it around. Drag its corners to resize it.

To add more content, you simply rinse and repeat the process of creating queries in Explores and saving them to this existing dashboard. You can also add Text Tiles by clicking Add at the top of the dashboard while in edit mode.

Making Your Dashboard Dynamic with Filters

A static dashboard is good, but an interactive one is great. Dashboard filters let users slice and dice the data themselves.

Let's add a date filter so you can view your sales overview for any time period.

1. Make sure you are in Edit dashboard mode.

2. Click Filters > Add Filter in the toolbar at the top.

3. Give your filter a name, like "Date Range".

4. For the Type, select a control that makes sense, such as "Date Range".

5. Set a default value if you want, like "Last 90 Days".

Now, you need to tell the filter which tiles to update:

• Go to the Tiles to Update tab within the same pop-up window.

• You'll see a list of all your query tiles on the dashboard. For each tile you want the filter to affect, select the specific field it should control. For our "Monthly Revenue Trend" tile, you would choose the Order Date field.

• This step is crucial: you are essentially connecting the dashboard filter with the underlying data field in each of your Looks.

• Click Add to finalize the filter.

Now, when you save your dashboard and exit edit mode, you'll see a "Date Range" filter at the top. Changing it will automatically update all the tiles you connected, letting you dynamically explore your data.

Pro Tips for Building Better Looker Dashboards

• Tell a Cohesive Story: Arrange your tiles logically. Put high-level KPIs at the top as scorecards, followed by related trend charts. Use text tiles to add section headings and explanations. Guide your viewer through the data.

• Choose the Right Visualization: Don't use a pie chart to show a trend over time.

  • Line charts are for continuous data (e.g., daily sales over a month).

  • Bar/Column charts are for comparing categories (e.g., sales per region).

  • Scorecards ("Single Value") are perfect for displaying single, big KPIs (e.g., total revenue).

  • Tables are best for showing precise details.

• Keep it Clean and Focused: Just because you can add 20 charts doesn't mean you should. Information overload is a real problem. Stick to the metrics that truly matter and use white space to make the design breathable and easier to read.

• Use Descriptive Titles: Don't leave your charts with titles like "Count by Date." Use something clear and declarative, like "Daily New Users This Month." Always be clear what the X and Y axes represent.

Final Thoughts

Creating a Looker dashboard is a powerful skill. By starting with a clear plan, building tile by tile from your Explores, and leveraging interactive filters, you can transform complex data into an accessible, actionable resource for your entire team. The process gets faster with practice, but following these steps provides a solid foundation for any report you need to build.

Mastering tools like Looker involves a steep learning curve and requires time to build, configure, and maintain each report. That's why we built Graphed . Our platform lets you skip the tedious parts by connecting directly to your marketing and sales data sources - like Google Analytics, Shopify, or HubSpot. Instead of manually building queries and configuring charts, you just describe the dashboard you want in simple, natural language, and our AI data analyst builds it for you in seconds.