You've built the perfect Looker Studio dashboard. It's beautiful, insightful, and … painfully slow. We've all been there. That wait for the data to load is frustrating enough when it’s for yourself, but can be excruciating when you’re presenting to stakeholders.

Don’t lose hope, here are two great ways to get your dashboards loading in a flash.  How much faster? 

Here’s a quick comparison video:

Option 1: The Built-in Looker Studio Extract Data Feature

Looker Studio's built-in "Extract data" option is a quick and easy way to speed things up. It creates a copy of your data source, storing it directly within Looker Studio. This means your dashboard queries a smaller, locally stored dataset instead of hitting the original source platforms every time - and that’s generally where the lag time comes from.

Pros:

• Simple Setup: Easy to use and requires minimal technical knowledge.
• Free: It's a built-in feature, so no extra cost.

Cons:

• Storage Limitations: You're limited by Extract Data connector’s storage capacity of 100MB.  So you might not be able to get your data at the detail you want for the length of time you want.
• Flexibility: You’ll need to plan ahead which fields you want to use and how much history you need.  If you change your mind you’ll need to update the extract not just the dashboard.

Want to try it?  Here’s a brief video walkthrough of the steps (or see Google’s own guide).

Option 2: Supermetrics Storage

For those who need a more robust solution, there's Supermetrics Storage. You’ll get the benefits of using a data warehouse without owning one yourself.  It can be seamlessly integrated with Looker Studio, ready to answer your dashboard's every query in a flash.

Pros:

• Scalability: Handle massive datasets without breaking a sweat.Done, re
• Flexibility: That also means you can store more fields for a longer time from the start, giving you more choice in the future.
• Standard schemas: We’ve pre-built the most popular combinations of fields per platform to get you up and running in no time with loads of data to choose from.

Cons:

• Licence: If it’s not already included on your licence, you’ll need to add it in.  Message me or email sales@supermetrics.com to try it out for free.
• Setup Time: Depending on your requirements there might be more clicks needed to set up Supermetrics Storage but you’ll only need to do those once most likely.

Here’s Tea walking you through Supermetrics Storage in more detail.

The Verdict?

Both options offer significant performance improvements over directly querying large datasets in Looker Studio - the main downside for either is the data freshness: daily updates rather than live data. Choose the "Extract Data" option for small datasets and a simple, free solution. To futureproof your dashboards, allowing near unlimited history and super-detailed data, Supermetrics Storage is your best bet.

But the best news of all? You don’t have to choose just one! Your dashboard can source its data from both direct and stored connections.  So you can get high performance for the heavy lifting use cases like year-on-year reporting and get near real time and complete agility for quick analysis, for example during peak season reporting.

Do you have any alternative suggestions for speeding up your dashboards?  We’d love to hear from you!