Contributors
This video is called '3 tips to make Google Data Studio Faster', but the same tips apply for dealing with a slow dashboard in Looker Studio.
Watch the video, or read here to learn about:
- 3 ways to make Google Data Studio / Looker Studio faster
- Why Funnel makes the Looker Studio experience much better
- Why Looker Studio is slow in the first place
If you're like me, then you use Looker Studio to create reports and dashboards for your clients (or for yourself!). But sometimes, it can be a little slow, especially if you have a lot of data in your account. In this post, I will show you 3 ways to make Looker Studio run faster and smoother.
1. Reduce the scope of the dashboard
It’s great to have one central Looker Studio dashboard for everything, but consider how often you use every widget, or if you’re creating a lot of noise. Those widgets should be in another dashboard if you use them on an ad-hoc basis.
One option is to consider breaking the dashboard into daily, weekly, and monthly KPIs - so one dashboard doesn’t become too much of a beast!
Another option is to have separate dashboards for each channel or tool you use. For instance: one Data Studio report contains data from Google Analytics, another one from your paid advertising channels like Google Ads and a third one from Google Search Console and other SEO related tools.
2. Use Looker Studio’s extract connector
Looker Studio has a special connector that works slightly differently. Instead of requesting all of your data each time, Google’s extract data source requests only some of your data.
It saves and stores data in an in-between step, making the request quicker as the amount of data is set. However, there are some limitations with this data processing and data freshness.
- You are limited to 100MB of data, which might not be enough for granular, informative reports.
- Data is not refreshed in real-time - but daily, weekly, or monthly. So, you cannot maintain real-time automated reports in the same way.
3. Create views in Funnel
Data Studio Views is Funnel’s clever way of sending data to Data Studio. You can, of course, send all of your metrics and dimensions over to Data Studio. But we recommend using views where you can choose a selection of metrics and dimensions to send over to Data Studio to make your data easier to work with and, of course, faster!
Funnel’s Data Studio Views offer you the ability to get the freshest data possible, without any limits on how much data can be in each call. You can get it sent in whenever you’d like, and have it refreshed multiple times a day for the freshest data possible.
Note: besides sending data to Data Studio, you can also use Funnel to send data to Google Sheets, Tableau or even PowerBi. Basically, Funnel enables you to send the data wherever you need it.
Why is Looker Studio slow?
Deep in Google’s help section, you’ll find an article explaining the following reasons for slow performance:
- The performance of the underlying data set
- The amount of data being queried by the visualizations in the report
- The complexity of those queries
- Network latency
Essentially, Google is suggesting a large amount of complex data flowing into a report could be responsible for slow performance.
Summary
Looker Studio, previously called Google Data Studio, is a powerful tool that helps marketers visualize data. However, when working with large datasets, the dashboard can take longer to load and become less responsive.
In this post, we discussed three ways to make Data Studio faster. We hope these will help you, so you can say 'goodbye' to slow load times in Data Studio.
