How to Create a Weekly Report in Looker

Building a weekly report shouldn't feel like a chore you dread every Monday morning. When done right, it’s your compass for navigating business decisions, helping you and your team stay focused on the metrics that actually matter. This guide will walk you through setting up a meaningful, automated weekly report directly in Looker, so you can spend less time pulling data and more time acting on it.

Why Weekly Reporting Even Matters

In a fast-moving business, a month can feel like a year. Weekly reports bridge the gap between real-time chaos and ponderous quarterly reviews. They give you a frequent, reliable checkpoint to see what's working and what isn't, enabling you to be agile and responsive.

A good weekly report helps you:

• Stay Focused: It keeps the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) top-of-mind for you and your team.

• Course Correct Quickly: Did a marketing campaign tank? Did website traffic suddenly drop? A weekly report spots these trends early, giving you a chance to fix them before they become big problems.

• Celebrate Wins: It’s a great way to recognize progress and keep team morale high. Seeing positive numbers is a powerful motivator.

• Manage Stakeholders: Sending a regular, concise update to leadership or clients builds confidence and shows you’re on top of performance.

Getting Started: What Makes a Good Weekly Report?

Before you jump into Looker, take a moment to decide what your report needs to achieve. A report without a goal is just a collection of numbers. Start by asking, "What question am I trying to answer this week?"

The most impactful reports pull together data from multiple sources to tell a complete story. For example, a marketing team's weekly report might look at:

• Website Performance: How many sessions, new users, and conversions did we get from Google Analytics?

• Campaign Performance: How much did we spend on Google Ads or Facebook Ads, and what was the return (ROAS)?

• Lead Generation: How many new contacts were created in HubSpot or Salesforce?

• Sales Activity: How many deals were closed, and what’s the updated pipeline value from our CRM?

Your goal is to choose a handful of KPIs that give you a high-level "health check" of your area of the business. Don't try to cram everything in, focus on clarity over quantity.

Step-by-Step: Building Your Weekly Report in Looker

Once you know what you want to report on, it's time to build it. Looker (now part of Google Looker Studio) is incredibly powerful, but its terminology can be tricky if you're new. We'll break it down step-by-step.

Step 1: Start from an 'Explore'

In Looker, everything starts with an Explore. Think of an Explore as a curated dataset designed for a specific purpose, like "Website Traffic" or "Sales Orders." Your organization's Looker developer sets these up for you.

To begin, click on the "Explore" menu and find the Explore that contains the data you need for your first metric. For this example, let's say we want to visualize weekly sales, so we'll start with a "Sales" or "Orders" Explore.

Step 2: Add Dimensions and Measures

Once you are in the Explore view, you will see a list of fields on the left, divided into Dimensions and Measures.

• Dimensions are the "what" or "who" - descriptive fields you use to group your data. Examples include Date, Campaign Name, Product Category, or Country.

• Measures are the "how much" - quantifiable, numeric fields you can perform calculations on. Examples include Total Sales, Number of Sessions, or Count of New Leads.

To create a weekly sales chart, you'll need at least one date dimension and one sales measure.

1. Find a date dimension. Looker often has pre-built timeframes. Select one like Order Created Week.

2. Find a numeric measure, such as Total Sales Amount.

3. Click on both fields. As you select them, they will appear in the "Data" pane on the right.

Then, click the Run button in the top-right corner to see your initial unfiltered view of all-time weekly sales.

Step 3: Filter for the "Weekly" View

Your current data shows all weekly sales, which isn't very helpful. You need to filter it down to just the time periods you care about. This is where filters come in.

The "Filters" tab is at the top of an Explore page. Let's set a filter for the past week:

1. Click on your date dimension (Order Created Week) and select "Filter."

2. A filter box will appear in the Filters section.

3. Click inside the filter box. Looker has a fantastic set of relative date options. Choose "is in the last" and then type "1 complete week" into the box. Using "complete week" ensures you always see a Sunday-to-Saturday period and avoid partial data days.

Click "Run" again. Now you’ll see the data for last week only, which is perfect for a weekly report.

Step 4: Visualize Your Report Tile

A table of numbers is nice, but a visual is much easier to digest. Looker supports a variety of chart types.

• Find the Visualization tab next to the data tab. Click it.

• Looker may default to a table, but depending on your data, it might suggest the best option. For a weekly trend, a Line Chart or a Column Chart works great. Use a Single Value visualization if you just want to display one big KPI number, like "Total Sales Last Week."

• Use the Edit button (the gear icon) on the visualization bar to customize your titles, axes, labels, and colors so your audience understands your chart. A well-labeled chart tells the story even when you're not there to comment.

Once your visualization, or "Tile", looks good, it's time to find a home for it.

Step 5: Save to a Dashboard

A single visualization is useful, but a true weekly report is typically a Dashboard - an organized collection of all your KPIs side by side.

1. Click the gear icon in the top right of the screen.

2. Select "Save..." and then "To a new dashboard" (or choose a dashboard you created earlier).

3. In the following popover box, name the dashboard “Weekly Marketing Report - [Today].”

4. Name a tile descriptively, like "Weekly Total Amount of Sales," so it’s clear to others when they review it.

5. Select ‘Create and Save.’

Congratulations, your first Looker dashboard for your company is set up. Continue the loop of creating other tiles and adding them to the dashboard for each separate report. Consider returning to other Explores to fetch fresh data when needed. Repeat steps #2 through #5 until your “Weekly Check-Up” includes all your essential data.

A dashboard can be adjusted by rearranging or resizing its elements. Place similar KPIs next to each other for easier comparison, or group related stats using headers for clarity.

Automating Your Report for Easy Delivery

You've now built your dashboard - the last thing you want is to manually log in and send it weekly. Let’s automate the process! Looker allows you to send the report in several ways automatically.

1. From your dashboards, use the kebab menu (three dots) at the top of the page. Click it, then select “Open dashboard in...”

2. Choose Schedule delivery.

3. Under Recurrence, select "Weekly on..." and choose the day and time you want it sent. If the report is for Monday, set the timing to 8-9 a.m.

4. Specify the destination, such as an email address or a Slack channel, based on where your audience prefers to receive their weekly summaries.

5. Choose the format settings. PDF is great for emails due to its visual clarity. For Slack, a .png might be preferable.

6. Give the title more clarity, such as "Weekly Report - Data as of Monday, [Date]." Check options like time zone settings.

Click ‘Save...’ No more scrambling on Mondays. Your report will now be sent automatically on the scheduled day every week.

Final Thoughts

Creating automated weekly reports in Looker may seem complex, but once you understand the process - exploring data, filtering by week, visualizing, adding to a dashboard, and scheduling - it becomes straightforward. The right report gives your team the pulse they need to make smarter, faster decisions instead of navigating by guesswork.

We know that even with a guide, building reports in complex tools like Looker takes a significant investment in time and technical knowledge. At Graphed, we’re simplifying this entire process. We built our platform for marketing and sales teams who need instant answers from all their data sources - like Google Analytics, Shopify, Facebook Ads, and Salesforce - without the steep learning curve. Instead of manually configuring dashboards, you can just ask in plain English, "Create a weekly marketing dashboard," and receive a live, automated report in seconds, not hours.