Well, well, well. Google Data Studio is now Looker Studio. But what does that mean for you? In this video, I’m going to dive into
why Google has changed the name of Data Studio to Looker Studio. I'll explore their announcement of Looker
Studio Pro and explain what you're likely to get with a paid subscription
and explain what Looker is like the regular Looker, the Looker that ultimately led Google down
this name change path. And just to clarify, we (collective we)
as in us marketers now have Looker Studio, Looker Studio
Pro and Looker. Why has Google changed Data Studio
to Looker Studio? Back in June, 2019, Google announced
it was acquiring a data analytics scale up called Looker for $2.6 billion. Yes, that's a lot of cash. The deal was then finalized in early 2020 meaning Google had added a new arm
to the growing Google Cloud platform. I'll talk a bit more about the looker
that Google purchased in the next section. But essentially by 2021
Looker gained about 2000 customers, meaning it was becoming a serious player
in the data and analytics market as Looker gained traction
as a go-to data and analytics platform for larger businesses, Google Data Studio
remained the reporting choice for millions of small and mid-market businesses
namely because unlike Looker, it is and always has been free. But that's just it. Google Data Studio had a huge user base Looker, on the other hand,
only had about 2000, but Looker users were paying users
and Data Studio’s weren’t. And because Google is still like
every other company and need to figure out how to make more money,
they saw a huge nonpaying user base
that they wanted to try and monetize. So they created a natural path
to monetization that starts for free in Google
Data Studio - or rather Looker Studio and ends with a paid subscription
to Looker with a potential stop
along the way and Looker Studio Pro. Not only do all roads
lead to a paid subscription to Looker, but Looker also runs on BigQuery
which also charges on data consumption, meaning that as all roads point
to a paid subscriptions in Looker, they also point to more revenue
from Big Query consumption. Smart. For the rest of the video,
I want you to think of the three platforms on a data analytics
maturity scale with Looker Studio
at one end and Looker on the other. So to make that path more obvious and allow for more integration
and collaboration opportunities, they renamed Google Data Studio
to Looker Studio. What is Looker? As I said, Looker was founded in 2012 and by 2020 had sold themselves to Google for a whopping $2.6 billion. Happy days for those founders. OK, to understand what Looker is
in relation to Looker Studio and Looker Studio Pro,
I wanted to go through how they position themselves in this huge data
and analytics market and then explain what kind of companies use it
and to help you understand its value. I'll let you know
about how we use Looker at Funnel. On their website. Looker helps with
and I quote business intelligence, big data analytics
or a 360 degree view of your customers. Sounds like a very copy-written
sentence to me. What I will say is that from my experience nailing your position in 12
words is pretty good going. But what does that actually mean? Well, it means that they help businesses
with their BI and analytics integrated insights, data-driven
workflows and custom apps. Let's break each one of those down. BI and analytics. Business intelligence
is thrown around a lot, but in this context it means helping
businesses create real-time dashboards that can be used to analyze
key business data by giving teams access to consistent data. By the way, I'm going to run
through each one of these, but don't worry if they don't hit home as I'm going
to bring them all together in a second. Integrated insights. What this is referring to
is bringing your various data sources together from a data warehouse
like Big Query. Although you can have multiple data sources in Looker Studio
that isn't really what it was built for so it struggles with this at scale. Data-driven workflows. Invigorate your workflows
with fresh, reliable data. Looker can give teams
unified access to answers they need to help drive successful
outcomes. Custom applications. Create custom apps that can deliver data
experiences as unique as your business. Looker's embedded analytics solution,
from retail to healthcare can give your customers the data
they need to get the job done. I sort of feel like a Looker account
manager at the moment or something. With that said, to understand Looker
and how it facilitates the above, we have to talk about LookML for a second.
LookML is a modeling language which means it functions as the glue
between the front-end and the back-end. It controls what you see in the explore
and how that translates into SQL code when you run a query, essentially the step
between an interface that functions without code and the code
that actually makes the thing happen. You can think of it like any app
you use. On the front-end you click something and on the back-end
that click is translated into code and makes something happen so you then see something else
on the front-end. In this case, LookML allows
data teams to define the calculations and relationships of a data warehouse
and expose that in a simpler format. That allows businesses and business users
to build their own dashboards without having to write the SQL code,
because I don't want to do that. Again, thinking about your favorite apps,
they are built on the back-end by someone not to allow you to do anything
you want on the front-end, but within the guardrails of what the back-end
has been created to allow you to do. Take Instagram for example. You can't build a website on Instagram
because, well, they didn't build it for that,
but you can post pictures to your story in the feed
because they built it as such. The same goes here. The data teams create guardrails
and business users operate within them to explore the data as they wish without
moving or altering those guardrails. You use LookML to define explores, which I just want to point out
is actually similar to Funnel’s Data Explorer. Explores
allow users to choose between available dimensions and metrics
and combine them to answer questions from the data
and visualize the result. The LookML translates that user-friendly
UI to SQL code that runs in the underlying
data warehouse. Here you can see a Looker explore
showing the number of BigQuery exports from Funnel per month
in the last 60 months. As you can see, the more customers we add,
the more Big Query exports are created. What you then see here is the SQL that gets run
in the underlying Big Query data warehouse. To answer that question,
which is translated by LookML into the graph or without me
the business user writing any code. LookML is a modeling language
and therefore it can be treated as code. This is another game changer in the data
analytics space because it allows data teams to adapt tools and processes
from their older siblings. The software engineers. Long ago, software engineers had to figure out
how to build stable and scalable products, with hundreds of engineers making changes
to the same underlying code base. You can think of it as a bunch of people
painting their small part of a huge picture of a tree
the size of a football pitch and trying to make sure the end product
looks like a tree and not as a big collection
of different pictures that actually don't
look anything like a tree. So why does this matter for understanding
Looker Studio, Looker Studio Pro and Looker. LookML like the JavaScript that powers a website
or an app is controlled through Git this allows
data teams to roll back changes that might have had unforeseen
consequences. Like why did all my dashboards break? It allows
several people to work on the same code without chaos. That's because they all work on different
branches. That eventually gets merged
into the production branch. Think of it like a tree. At some point you can trace everything
back to the trunk. I challenge you right now not to be thinking of a huge picture
of a tree covering like a football pitch or something. Amanda have some fun with that. Fundamentally this guarantees a single source of truth
for your data and business logic. It's an elegant solution to the age
old problem in business intelligence of everyone coming to a meeting
with a slightly different definition of what an active user is, well
because they're all working independently, building their own logic. Ultimately, Looker is a cloud based data
visualization tool that has some really powerful
and complex functionality. It also integrates really well
with other data and analytics tools, meaning if you use it correctly,
you can create a really powerful environment to consume valuable
and connected business data. So what kinds of companies use Looker? I've been hinting at the complexity
and power of Looker, which means it's typically used
in more complex data use cases, which also typically corresponds to scale
and thus size. This means that Looker at the moment
is more for companies on the larger end of the spectrum
with lots of complexity. Look at a company like Samsung. They have a bunch of tools in their stack
including Funnel by the way. But the thing with Samsung is that
they have data coming from so many places. They have various markets,
various business units, various methods of selling their various products
like infinite complexity. In fact, Samsung
is so infinitely complex that you could probably make use of Looker
in some way. I'm not entirely sure
if they do, but it wouldn't surprise me. How do we use Looker at Funnel? I think the best way to understand
Looker is for me to explain how we use Looker here at Funnel. For context, we’re a 320-person
fast-growth software company with offices in Stockholm, Boston,
Dublin and London. So, we aren’t a startup,
nor are we a huge publicly traded company, but we are a data company
and being data-driven is in our DNA. As you can see, Looker sits as an end
destination where we primarily do two things. One, combine data
from different parts of the organization and two, consume data
in tables, dashboards and looks. Let me walk you through our monthly
marketing dashboard that contains data from Funnel which includes marketing
data, budget data and HubSpot data. Marketing is an integral part
of our business and helped contribute to our incredible
70% year-on-year growth. Given that marketing is so important,
we have to have a solid reporting structure that can tell us what we've got in return
for our marketing investments. In this dashboard,
you can see data for the month of October, I've blurred out the Y axis, so you can’t actually see
all of our super sensitive business data. But what you can see is what each chart visualizes like spend versus budget,
or how many hand raisers we’ve got versus our target or the cost per acquisition
of a hand raiser, etc., etc. But what is cool with Looker
and what I mentioned earlier is that if I click on explore from here, I can essentially start
looking into the numbers behind this chart and decide to slice
and dice them in a different way. Think of it like when you have a Google
Sheets graph linked in a deck and you can open that sheets that’s connected
and check out the data. It's the same principle,
but way more powerful as this data is all connected, unlike a Google Sheet
where each sheet or data set is siloed. And I know, yes,
you can connect sheets with formulas, but that's not very scalable
and it gets messy very quickly. As I mentioned earlier,
although I'm free to explore here, I can only explore within the boundaries
that the team responsible for our Looker setup who created. Again, if it was a Google Sheet
besides locking sheets, I'm pretty free to break or change
whatever I want. Sticking with that Google Sheet analogy. Hypothetically,
there may be a calculation for budget that pulls from a couple of other sheets,
and I might decide that we should include
some other test budgets from last month, even though someone else doesn't think
that those test budgets should be included in the official dashboards.
Because there are no real guardrails, I could go ahead and just change that.
Here in Looker I'm free to explore and say
take a closer look at spend, but only within the boundaries
created by the team responsible for setting up Looker.
To keep things simple maybe I want to look at spend by traffic source to break down
what I've spent on each channel. So I click explore from here now I just need to hide
a couple of things so this visualization is a bit simpler So I hide seven day average from visualization and do the same with budget budgeted cost. Then I search for traffic source
on the left here the interesting part of Looker
that is different from, say, Google Sheets is that I have so many available
fields here because the team responsible for setting up Looker have piped in data
from all over the business. In this case, traffic source
comes mapped together from Funnel. So the data’s nice and clean.
So once I have traffic source, I just click on this little arrow
which pivots the data on this new field, which is another way of segmenting
or slicing the data. I then change the graph to a column view
and hit run. With Looker every time I hit run, it's processing
tons of data on the back-end. So you see here in this, it's
a great example of LookML in action. I have this smooth front-end interface
where I'm choosing what I want to see then LookML is translating that into a SQL code
and running it in the back-end in BigQuery to pull data from various tables
to produce a nice visualization. Once it's run, you can see
I have this nice stacked bar chart showing Facebook spend in blue, Google Ads spend
in green, LinkedIn spend in yellow, plus a few of the smaller channels
labeled as other displayed in grey. This was just a quick example of how
we use Looker in our daily work, but it is literally used all over the business
in every single team. It contains an abundance of valuable data,
and I always say like that's where the juicy stuff is
because I can combine data from various different parts of the business
and really like dig into it. Like a spade or something. What is Looker Studio Pro
and what are the benefits of upgrading? Now, you know what Looker
Studio and Looker are. Let's talk about the newest kid
on the block. Looker Studio Pro. As I mentioned,
Looker Studio Pro is intended to bridge the gap between Looker Studio and Looker. Google want companies
to eventually mature into Looker, but the gap between Looker Studio
and Looker is quite large. Looker involves much more data
infrastructure and maintenance, and as I explain, is way more powerful, making it a whole different beast
altogether than Looker Studio. So like a lot of companies out there,
Google want users to start with Looker Studio for free and then when they mature,
upgrade and buy Looker Studio Pro. But what will you actually get
for upgrading? Well, at the moment it's pretty unclear
because at the time of recording Looker Studio Pro is still in closed
alpha testing, meaning you have to manually submit
a request to give it a try. Then Google will decide
if you're a good candidate. What we do know
is what Google have released but this is Google
and things can move fast. I mean, just look at GA4. When it was first released, it was looked
entirely different than it does today. So according to what Google has said,
it looks like Looker Studio Pro is going to focus on collaboration,
which I assume is their bet on Looker Studio taking organizations
towards a more centralized reporting system rather than a siloed,
decentralized reporting system. But what does that mean? Google calls this the ability to manage
access to content at scale through two new features called “team workspaces”
and “Google Cloud project linking”. Let's unpack those a little. Team
workspaces is essentially permission functionality for a centralized team
or owner to control who can do what with reports and data sources
in Looker Studio. Google Cloud project linking enables a centralized place
for all of your reports to live. You can imagine that with Looker Studio,
storage works a little like Google Drive in that reports live in a bit of a messy
drive that does have permission settings, but no great way of managing permissions
at scale from a centralized place. But with Looker Studio Pro,
all of a sudden there's a centralized place for reports
to be organized and easily accessible, even when individual contributors leave
or fit with project level permissions. The last feature of Looker Studio Pro
that has already been teased is some level of support
to help businesses get the most out of Looker Studio Pro, a feature that can be looked
at as a sort of pre-sales qualification as Google account managers will build
relationships with the maturing businesses so they can successfully sell them
on the power of Looker when the time is right and prevent them
from leaving to other competitors. Collaboration is intended
to push organizations up the data analytics maturity framework with Looker
Studio reporting is more siloed and the platform isn't really built for
collaboration with centralized analytics. Then hopefully you've got from
my explanation with Looker Studio Pro, you start to take steps
toward centralization, likely with a team owning processes
and permissions. And finally with something like Looker you really need
to have some real ownership of the various data streams into Looker and permissions
processes, systems, strategy, ect. That's because when you do implement
Looker, you increase complexity, and with complexity comes more investment
and deeper analytics. You can start to see what I was explaining
earlier about Looker Studio Pro being created to bridge the gap
between a simple data and analytics tool like Looker Studio
and a more complex tool like Looker. Our verdict is that at the moment it's hard
to gauge the extra value of Looker Studio Pro
because it truly is in its infancy. But what will be interesting to see
is whether Google decides to move some advanced features of Looker
Studio up into Look Studio Pro and or move some of the paid features
of Looker down into Looker Studio Pro at a more reasonable price,
sort of creating a longer, wider bridge capable of transporting more users
from Looker Studio into Looker. What I will say is that the power of
LookML, I think Looker’s $2.6 billion price tag will eventually turn out
to be a really smart play. So there you have it. You now know why Google Data Studio
is now Looker Studio, what Looker Studio Pro is and what Looker is
and how companies use it. If you find this video useful, subscribe
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