Internal Report on Dashboard Analytics for Agencies

Hi Sarah,

I use GA4 to track all my public reports and recommend it as part of the setup for all Looker Studio reports. I use it as a high-level tool to identify my most popular reports.

As you mentioned, more advanced tracking isn't possible without Tag Manager. Unfortunately, I don't see Tag Manager being integrated with Looker Studio, as it could pose risks like data exfiltration.

I came across an article that explores additional use cases, such as tracking the number of editors vs. viewers and using custom bookmark links to monitor filter usage.

If you discover other interesting use cases, please share them here. I'm always looking for ways to improve reporting!

Thanks

Ralph

​@sarahm I’m not sure if you’re using Google BigQuery for your looker studio reports, but if you are, there’s a simple way to track how reports are loading with the Google Cloud Jobs Explorer:
 

In the filters, type in ‘looker_studio’, and then set your time window to whenever you need it (1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, etc.). From there, it will pull a report for all bigquery tables that were used within looker studio, and you can see how many bytes were processed, along with how long it took and the results of that query. 

I had some data piping to a Connected Sheet that was consuming 49GB every time the data was called, and it drove our costs through the roof when someone was refreshing the page to load the info across different timeframes… Jobs Explorer allowed me to identify the exact resource and optimize it, that way we weren’t blowing budget on queries. Additionally, I go in there every week to see what tables are taking the longest to run, and if something’s not loading fast enough, I’ll work to optimize the query or replace the table in looker studio with something that runs a little faster.

I know this doesn’t help a ton if you’re using the API product, but these are the types of data points that helped me move over to BigQuery… when the API query takes 5 minutes to load, that time lost is super impactful. With BigQuery, that query now takes seconds, and if it’s any longer, I can know exactly why it’s taking so long and how to fix it.