How to Share Looker Studio Report Publicly

Making a Looker Studio report accessible to everyone is a fantastic way to showcase data on your website or share insights with a broad audience without needing them to log in. In this tutorial, we'll walk through exactly how to share your Looker Studio report publicly, explaining the different sharing options and critical settings you need to check to ensure everyone can actually see your data.

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Why Share a Looker Studio Report Publicly?

Before jumping into the steps, it helps to understand why you might want a public report. Sharing with specific people via email is secure, but it’s not practical for every situation. You might need to share a report publicly to:

• Embed a Dashboard on Your Website: Display key metrics, like website traffic or survey results, directly on a blog post or your company’s "About Us" page. This keeps visitors engaged and informed without sending them to another platform.
• Share with a Large Community: If you're presenting data to a large community or a public forum, sending a single public link is much easier than collecting and adding hundreds of individual email addresses.
• Provide a Portfolio Piece: Data analysts and marketers can use public reports to create a live portfolio showcasing their skills with real, anonymized data.
• Enhance Transparency: Non-profits and public organizations can use public dashboards to share performance metrics or financial data openly with stakeholders and the public.

Understanding Looker Studio’s Sharing Permissions

Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) has a flexible sharing system similar to Google Docs or Sheets. The most important area to understand is the "Link sharing" setting, which controls who can find and access your report. Here’s a quick breakdown of the main options:

• Off - Only specific people can access: This is the default and most private setting. The report is locked down, and only people you’ve added by email can access it.
• Unlisted: Anyone who has the link can view the report. This is the most common option for "public" sharing. The report is not indexed by search engines, so people can't stumble upon it through Google Search. It’s perfect for sharing with clients or team members who don’t have Google accounts.
• Public: Anyone on the internet can find and view the report. This is an entirely open setting, meaning search engines like Google can index your report, and it could show up in search results. This setting is best when you are embedding data on a public website and want it to be discoverable.

Each of these settings gives users viewing access. You can separately grant editing access to specific people by adding their email addresses, but the public link will always be view-only.

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How to Share Your Looker Studio Report: A Step-by-Step Guide

Ready to make your report public? Just follow these steps. It only takes a minute once you know where to look.

Step 1: Open Your Report and Click "Share"

First, open the Looker Studio report you want to share. Once it’s loaded, look for the blue "Share" button in the top right corner of the screen. Clicking this button opens the sharing dialog box, where you can manage all access permissions.

Step 2: Configure the Link Sharing Settings

In the sharing popup, you’ll see two main sections: "Add people and groups" and "Link settings." We're going to focus on "Link settings." Click the dropdown menu to see your options.

To make your report public, you’ll need to choose either "Unlisted" or "Public."

• Select "Unlisted" if you want anyone with the link to view the report but you don't want it discoverable on search engines. This is the safest default for most public use cases, like sharing with a specific group of non-Google users.
• Select "Public" if you want your report to be fully open and discoverable by anyone on the internet. Choose this if you're embedding it on a public-facing website and have no concerns about its content being found via search.

After selecting your preferred setting, you will see a confirmation appear like, "Anyone with the link can view."

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Step 3: Copy and Share the Link

Once you’ve set the link sharing preference to Unlisted or Public, simply click the "Copy link" button in the sharing popup modal. You now have a shareable link that you can send via email, paste in a messaging app, or link from another document. Anyone who clicks it will be able to see your report in view-only mode.

The Most Important Step: Check Your Data Credentials

This is the part where many people get stuck. You've shared your report publicly, sent the link to someone, and they reply, "I'm seeing an error message that says 'Data Set Configuration Error'."

This happens because while you've shared the report, you haven't given viewers permission to see the underlying data source (like your private Google Analytics account or the Google Sheet the report is built on). To fix this, you must change the data source's credentials.

How to Set Data Credentials for Public Viewing:

1. Go to Resource > Manage added data sources in the Looker menu.
2. Find your data source in the list and click "Edit."
3. In the data source configuration window, you'll see a field called "Data credentials" near the top.
4. Click on it and change the setting from "Viewer's Credentials" to "Owner's Credentials."
5. Click "Reconnect" in the top right corner to apply the changes, then finally click "Done."

By using "Owner's Credentials," you're telling Looker Studio: "Anyone viewing this report should use my connection permission to see the data." This allows public, anonymous users to view the visualizations without needing direct access to your private Google Sheet, BigQuery project, or GA4 property.

If you have multiple data sources in your report, you need to repeat this step for every single one.

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Bonus Pro Tip: How to Embed a Public Looker Studio Report

Once your report is public and your data credentials are set, embedding it on your website or in a tool like Notion is straightforward. Here's how:

1. In Looker, click on File > Embed report.
2. A popup will appear with an embed code. Check the "Enable embedding" box.
3. Copy the provided HTML code snippet (it will be an iframe).
4. Paste this code into the HTML of your website, blog post, or anywhere else that supports iframes. You can easily adjust the width and height properties in the code to fit your layout.

Final Thoughts

Sharing a Looker Studio report publicly is a simple process once you understand the key settings involved. By choosing the right link permission (usually "Unlisted") and, most importantly, setting your data sources to use "Owner's Credentials," you can make your valuable insights available to anyone, anywhere.

While mastering sharing permissions for your reports is important, the process of creating them shouldn't consume your entire day. Here at Graphed, we’ve created a much faster way to get from raw data to a shareable dashboard. You simply connect your marketing and sales accounts, describe the report you need in plain English, and our AI builds the interactive dashboard for you in seconds. It allows you and your team to focus on the insights instead of getting stuck on technical setups.