How to Create Looker Studio Template

Creating the same reports over and over is a massive time sink. Building a Looker Studio template solves this by giving you a reusable dashboard structure that you can connect to different data sources in just a few clicks. This guide will walk you through how to plan, build, and share your own templates to streamline your entire reporting process.

What Exactly Is a Looker Studio Template?

Think of a Looker Studio template as a master copy of a report. It contains all the design elements, charts, tables, scorecards, and interactive filters you need, but it's built with a placeholder data source. When you or someone else wants to use it, you simply make a copy and swap the placeholder data with your own live data.

The benefits are immediate:

• Speed and Efficiency: Stop building reports from scratch. Once your template is ready, you can generate a new, branded report in minutes, not hours.
• Consistency: Ensure that every report you deliver - whether for different clients, campaigns, or departments - has the same look, feel, and set of core metrics. This makes your work look far more professional and makes the data easier to compare.
• Scalability: Templates are perfect for marketing agencies managing multiple clients, e-commerce businesses tracking different product lines, or any organization that needs to standardize reporting across teams.

Before You Build: Planning Your Template

A great template starts with a solid plan. Rushing into the builder without a clear goal will lead to a cluttered and ineffective report. Ask yourself these questions first.

1. Who is the Audience and What is the Purpose?

Before you drag and drop a single chart, define who the end-user is and what one key objective the report should achieve. The needs of a CEO are very different from those of a social media manager.

• For a CEO or executive: They need a high-level overview. A template focused on business KPIs like revenue, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and return on ad spend (ROAS) across all channels would be most effective.
• For a Marketing Manager: They need a more detailed performance view. Your template might focus on campaign-level metrics, channel performance breakdowns, and conversion rates.
• For a client: The report should answer the simple question, "Is our investment with you paying off?" Focus on the metrics tied directly to their business goals.

Once you know the audience, define the dashboard's purpose. Examples include: GA4 Traffic analysis, Facebook Ads campaign performance, E-commerce sales overview, or a combined sales and marketing funnel report.

2. What Are Your Core Metrics and KPIs?

With a clear purpose in mind, list the specific metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you need to display. Jot them down. For a GA4 traffic report, your list might include:

• Total Users
• New Users
• Sessions
• Engaged Sessions
• Engagement Rate
• Conversions
• Sessions by Channel
• Users by Country
• Views by Page Title

Finalizing this list beforehand keeps you focused and prevents you from adding charts that don't contribute to the report's main goal.

3. How Should You Structure the Layout?

A good report tells a story. Sketch a rough layout on paper or a whiteboard to organize your visuals logically. A classic, easy-to-read dashboard layout follows a simple principle: high-level summary at the top, trends in the middle, and granular details at the bottom.

• Top Section: Use scorecards to display your most important KPIs (e.g., total revenue, sessions, conversion rate) and a date range control. This gives users an instant snapshot of performance.
• Middle Section: This section is ideal for visualizations showing trends over time. Use line or area charts to track things like sessions over the last 30 days, or bar charts to compare channel performance.
• Bottom Section: Use tables to break down the data in detail. A table of your top-performing campaigns with metrics like spend, impressions, clicks, and conversions is a perfect example.

4. Which Placeholder Data Source Will You Use?

Every Looker Studio report needs a data source to function. For a template, you should connect a "placeholder" or "sample" data source that has the same structure as the data your end-users will connect. The best and easiest place to start is the Google Analytics GA4 Demo Account. It's publicly available, stable, and has a rich set of fields, making it a perfect placeholder for any web analytics template.

Simply choose "Google Analytics" as your data source, then navigate to Demo Accounts > GA4 - Google Merchandise Store.

Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Your Looker Studio Template

Once your plan is ready, it’s time to build. Let’s create a simple website traffic template using the GA4 Demo Account.

Step 1: Start with a Blank Report

In the Looker Studio home page, click the + Create button and select Report. This opens a new, untitled blank canvas. Looker Studio will immediately ask you to connect a data source.

Step 2: Connect Your Placeholder Data Source

In the data source panel, select Google Analytics. Choose the GA4 - Google Merchandise Store demo account. After connecting, Looker Studio will add a basic table to your canvas. You can delete this and start fresh.

Step 3: Build Out Your Dashboard

Following the layout you sketched, start adding your charts and controls from the toolbar at the top.

1. Add Scorecards for KPIs: Click Add a chart and select Scorecard. Place it at the top of your report. In the properties panel on the right, set the metric to Total users. Copy and paste this scorecard a few times, changing the metric for each to New users, Sessions, and Conversions.
2. Add a Time Series Chart: Go to Add a chart > Time series chart. Place it below the scorecards. Set the dimension to Date and the metric to Sessions to visualize traffic trends over time.
3. Add Geographic and Categorical Charts: Place two more charts side-by-side in the middle section. Use a Geo chart to show Users by Country and a Pie Chart to break down Sessions by Session default channel group.
4. Add a Detailed Table: At the bottom, navigate to Add a chart > Table. Set the dimension to Page title and add metrics like Views, Engaged sessions, and Conversions. This will provide detailed content performance data.

Step 4: Style Your Template for Clarity and Branding

An ugly, confusing report won’t get used. In the toolbar, click Theme and layout to apply consistent styling across your entire report.

• Colors and Fonts: Choose a pre-made theme or click "Customize" to create your own palette that matches your brand colors. Select clean, easy-to-read fonts like Montserrat or Lato.
• Header and Title: Use the Text tool to add a title like "Website Performance Overview." Use the Image tool to add a placeholder for a logo in the top left corner.
• Visual Groupings: Use the Rectangle shape tool to draw light gray backgrounds behind related groups of charts. This simple trick adds structure and separates the different sections of your report.

Step 5: Add Interactive Controls

Controls are what make a template truly user-friendly. Go to Add a control in the toolbar.

• Date Range Control: This is a must-have for every template. Add it to the top right of your header. This will allow anyone using the report to analyze performance for a custom period.
• Filter Control: Add a Drop-down list control. In the properties panel, set its Control field to Session default channel group. Now, users can filter the entire report to see data for just "Organic Search" or "Direct" traffic.

Sharing Your Report as a Template

The final step is to set the sharing permissions so that anyone can view and copy your creation.

1. Click the Share button in the top right corner.
2. In the 'Link sharing' section, change the access from "Restricted" to "Anyone with the link can view." This is the key. You do not want to grant "edit" access unless you want them to modify your original template. View access is all they need to make their own copy.
3. Copy the shareable link and send it to your users or team.

To use the template, a user opens the view-only link, clicks the three-dot menu icon in the top right, and selects Make a copy.

Looker Studio then opens a dialog box prompting them to map their new data source to the original placeholder source. They choose their own GA4 property, click Copy Report, and just like that, they have a new report filled with their own data.

Tips for Building Better Looker Studio Templates

• Add instructional text: Use small text boxes to leave notes for your users, like "Use the filters above to explore the data" or "This chart shows daily user trends." It helps first-time users navigate the report.
• Check source compatibility: A template built with a GA4 data source will only work seamlessly with another GA4 data source. If you create a template with a Google Ads source, it will require a Google Ads source in return. If the field names don't match, the charts will break.
• Test it yourself: Before you share your template widely, test the copying process yourself. Use the link to make a copy using a different but similarly structured data source to find and fix any broken charts or missing fields.
• Naming is everything: Give your pages logical names like "Traffic Overview" and "Audience Details" instead of "Page 1" and "Page 2." This makes multi-page reports much easier to navigate.
• Keep it decluttered: Resist the urge to add every chart imaginable. Focus only on the metrics that support the template's purpose. White space is your friend. A clean, focused dashboard is far more valuable than one crammed with data.

Final Thoughts

Building your own Looker Studio templates standardizes your reporting, enforces consistency across your team or clients, and ultimately saves you a tremendous amount of time. By following a structured approach - planning, building, styling, and sharing - you can create powerful, reusable assets that elevate your analytics workflow.

While Looker Studio templates are a fantastic way to streamline manual report building, the creative process itself is still hands-on. At Graphed, we're taking it a step further. We've built an AI data analyst that lets you skip the entire drag-and-drop process by creating real-time dashboards using simple, natural language. Instead of building charts manually, you can just ask, "Show me a dashboard comparing website traffic vs. conversions by channel for the last 90 days," and our system instantly generates it for you, connected directly to your live data sources.