How to Create a Report in Looker Studio
Looker Studio turns your raw data into clear, interactive reports, and getting started is a lot easier than you might think. We'll walk through the process of connecting a data source, designing a simple dashboard, and customizing it to answer your key business questions. You'll go from a blank canvas to a shareable, informative report in no time.
What is Looker Studio (and Why Bother?)
You might remember it as Google Data Studio. In 2022, it was rebranded as Looker Studio, but its core purpose remains the same: it's a completely free tool designed to help you build beautiful, interactive dashboards and reports. For businesses, especially those already using Google products like Google Analytics or Google Sheets, it's a fantastic starting point for data visualization.
Here’s why it’s so popular:
It’s Free: This is a big one. Competing tools like Tableau or Power BI can have significant licensing costs, but Looker Studio is free to use.
Connects to Everything: It natively connects to dozens of platforms, especially Google's entire ecosystem (Sheets, Ads, Analytics, Search Console, BigQuery). It also has hundreds of partner connectors for non-Google platforms like HubSpot, Shopify, and Facebook Ads.
Highly Customizable: From styling charts with your brand colors to creating custom calculated fields, you have a ton of control over the final look and feel of your reports.
Easy to Share and Collaborate: Sharing reports works just like a Google Doc. You can invite people to view or edit, generate a public link, or even schedule a PDF export to be emailed to stakeholders every Monday morning.
Before You Start: Getting Your Data Ready
The golden rule of data analysis is "garbage in, garbage out." The quality of your report depends entirely on the quality of your underlying data. Before you even open Looker Studio, it helps to have a clear idea of what you want to measure and where that data lives.
For this tutorial, a great place to start is with your Google Analytics account. It’s a rich data source that everyone with a website has, and it connects to Looker Studio seamlessly. If you don't use GA, a clean Google Sheet works just as well. Just make sure your data is organized properly:
Use a clean, table-like format.
Have a single header row at the top with clear, descriptive column names (e.g., "Date," "Product Category," "Sales," "Country").
Ensure your data types are consistent — numbers are formatted as numbers, and dates are formatted as dates.
Having clean data ready to go makes the reporting process incredibly smooth. For our guide, we will focus on using Google Analytics.
Step-by-Step: Creating Your First Looker Studio Report
Let’s build a simple website performance dashboard. Our goal is to see a quick overview of user traffic, engagement, and where our audience is coming from.
Step 1: Starting a New Report
First, head over to lookerstudio.google.com. If you have a Google account, you’re already set. In the top-left corner, click the + Create button and select Report.
This will immediately take you to a screen asking you to add data to your report.
Step 2: Connecting Your Data Source
Looker Studio needs data to visualize. The next window shows a list of Google Connectors and Partner Connectors.
Find and select the Google Analytics connector.
You’ll be asked to authorize Looker Studio to access your Google Analytics data. Agree to this.
Next, choose your GA account and property (your website) from the lists that appear.
Click the Add button in the bottom right. A final confirmation pop-up will ask if you're sure you want to add this data to the report. Click Add to Report.
With that, you've connected your data! You’ll now be dropped into the main report editor with your official GA data source added.
Step 3: A Quick Tour of the Looker Studio Interface
Things might look a little intimidating at first, but the interface is quite logical once you know what you're looking at. For new data sources, Looker Studio will often add a starter table to the canvas for you.
Here’s a quick breakdown:
The Canvas: This main, grid-lined area is where you build your report. You can drag, drop, and resize charts here.
The Toolbar: At the top, you'll find buttons to add pages, data, charts, controls, images, text, and shapes. This is your primary creation menu.
The Properties Panel (Right): This is your control center. It’s context-sensitive, meaning what you see here depends on what you have selected on your canvas. If you select a chart, you'll see two main tabs: Setup and Style.
Setup Tab: This is where you connect data to your chart — choosing your dimensions (categories) and metrics (numbers).
Style Tab: This is for aesthetics — changing colors, fonts, backgrounds, legends, and axis labels.
The Data Panel (Also on the Right): This lists all the available "Fields" from your data source. Fields are organized into Dimensions (blue) and Metrics (green). Think of Dimensions as the "what" or "who" (e.g., Country, Page title, Device Category) and Metrics as the "how much" or "how many" (e.g., Sessions, Users, Conversions).
Step 4: Building Your Dashboard
Let's clear the sample table that Looker Studio added by selecting it and hitting delete. Now we have a fresh canvas. Let's add some components to create a useful summary.
Add Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) with Scorecards
Scorecards are great for showing top-line numbers at a glance.
From the toolbar, go to Add a chart and select Scorecard.
Click anywhere on your canvas to place it.
With the scorecard selected, look at the Setup tab in the Properties Panel. Under 'Metric', drag the Total Users field from your data panel into the box. Just like that, you have a live count of your site's users.
Let's add two more. Repeat the process to create scorecards for Sessions and Engagement rate. You can copy and paste the first scorecard to speed things up, then just change the metric for each new one. Arrange them neatly at the top of your report.
Visualize Trends with a Time Series Chart
Now, let's see how our user traffic has trended over time.
Go to Add a chart and select Time series chart.
Draw a box on the canvas where you want it to appear. Looker does a pretty good job guessing what you want to see.
Check the Setup panel. By default, it should have a date field in the 'Dimension' box and something like Total Users as the 'Metric'. If not, you can drag and drop the correct fields from your data panel.
You now have a line graph showing user counts for each day in your selected timeframe.
Break Down Data with a Table and Geo Chart
Let’s find out where our users are coming from.
Navigate to Add a chart and select Geo chart. Place it on the canvas.
In the Setup panel, ensure the 'Geo Dimension' is set to Country and the 'Metric' is set to Total Users. You'll instantly see a world map where countries are color-coded based on user volume.
Maybe we also want a simple table view of traffic sources.
Go to Add a chart > Table. Place it next to your map.
In the Setup panel, for 'Dimension', add Session source / medium.
For 'Metric', add Sessions and Engaged sessions. This will give you a clear breakdown of which channels are driving traffic.
Step 5: Styling Your Report
A good report isn't just accurate, it's also easy to read.
Add a Title: Use the Text tool in the toolbar to add a title like "Website Performance Summary" at the top. You can change the font size and color in the Text Properties panel that appears on the right.
Use Your Brand Colors: Click on any chart, go to the Style tab in the Properties Panel, and explore the options. You can change bar colors, line colors, fonts, and backgrounds to match your company's branding.
Make it Interactive: The real power of Looker Studio is interactivity. Go to Add a control > Date range control and place it near your title. This single control allows anyone viewing the report to change the date range, and all the charts will update instantly.
Step 6: Sharing and Viewing Your Report
In the top-right corner, you’ll see an “Edit” button and a “View” button. Clicking View shows you what the final report looks like to your audience. The controls you added, like the date picker, will be fully functional.
To share it, click the Share button. You have several options:
Invite people: Grant specific email addresses view or edit access, just like a Google Doc.
Get report link: Generate a shareable link that anyone can use to view the report.
Schedule email delivery: Set up a recurring email that sends a PDF version of your report to a list of stakeholders daily, weekly, or monthly. This is perfect for automated team updates.
Final Thoughts
You’ve just learned the core workflow of Looker Studio: connecting data, adding and configuring charts, applying styles for clarity, and sharing your work. This process provides a powerful, automated alternative to endlessly exporting CSVs and fighting with spreadsheet pivots to see what’s going on in your business.
To make reporting even faster, we've designed Graphed to remove the manual setup steps entirely. Instead of dragging and dropping fields, you simply describe the report you want in plain English, like "Show me a dashboard of user trends, top traffic sources, and performance by country from Google Analytics." Graphed instantly builds a live, interactive dashboard for you, connected directly to your data sources. It lets you skip straight to the insights and focus on analysis rather than configuration.