Step-by-Step Guide to Connecting Looker Studio with BigQuery

This article serves as your step-by-step guide to effortlessly integrate Looker Studio into BigQuery and build a BI dashboard using Google Looker Studio. By bridging these two powerful database platforms, you can unlock a world of real-time data insights, making your organization and decision-making process more informed and strategic.

Whether you’re a seasoned data analyst or just starting out, this guide ensures you grasp every technical nuance while keeping the process straightforward. So let’s get started.

Understanding Google BigQuery for Better Data Management

Google BigQuery is like a massive, super-fast library for your data. It’s a tool from Google Cloud Platform that lets you store a lot of data without needing your own servers. Think of it as a big storage room where you can quickly find and read any book (or data) you want

When you ask a BigQuery table a question using SQL (a language to get data), it gives you an answer quickly. This is because it uses the power of Google’s computers. This is great for businesses because they can look at their data immediately and make decisions. BigQuery tables are used for querying and saving datasets, which can then be connected to build reports and visualizations in Looker Studio.

Several factors have made BigQuery popular among businesses and data professionals:

1. Scalability: It can handle vast amounts of data without any slowdown, growing with your needs.
2. Cost-efficiency: You only pay for the data you process, making it budget-friendly.
3. Integration: It works well with other Google Cloud services and various data visualization tools.
4. Security: Google ensures top-notch security with data encryption and regular updates. Businesses can recover deleted data as well.
5. Real-time Analysis: It allows for real-time data analytics, which is crucial for timely decision-making.
6. Ease of Use: Even with its advanced capabilities, it’s user-friendly and doesn’t require extensive setup. You can easily get data into BigQuery and also export the same. Public datasets within Google BigQuery can be accessed and integrated to create new tables and query data and build a business intelligence dashboard.

In simple terms, BigQuery helps businesses understand their data fast, efficiently, and securely, making it a top choice for many.

Features of Looker Studio

Looker Studio is a modern tool that turns complex data into clear pictures and stories. With Looker Studio, you can make your own data visualizations, dashboards, kind of like a personalized data storybook, and reports that show exactly what you want to see. It also aids in business intelligence by visualizing data, helping companies make better business decisions.

Now, why do so many people, especially data experts and businesses, love Looker Studio? Here are some reasons:

1. User-Friendly: It’s designed to be easy. You don’t need to be a tech genius to use it.
2. Flexible: You can customize it to show data the way you want.
3. Collaborative: It lets teams work together on data projects and share insights easily.
4. Secure: Your data is safe with Looker. They take security seriously.
5. Integrated: It works well with many data sources, so you can pull in information from different places.
6. Support: If you get stuck, there’s a helpful community and support team ready to assist. You can also create a bar chart in Looker Studio as part of a BI dashboard to visualize categories and departments effectively.

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Why Choose BigQuery as a Data Source for Looker Studio

Connecting BigQuery to Looker Studio offers several advantages:

1. Speed: Data queries are processed quickly, allowing for faster insights.
2. Real-time Analytics: Users can analyze data as it comes in, ensuring decisions are based on the most recent information.
3. Simplified Data Management: Organizing and accessing data becomes more straightforward.
4. Reduced Latency: There’s minimal delay between requesting and receiving data.
5. Seamless Visualization: It presents data in clear, understandable formats, making it easier to interpret.
6. Consistency: Both tools are designed to work together, ensuring data consistency and reliability.
7. Efficiency: The integration eliminates the need for multiple tools, streamlining the data analysis process. You can also connect other data sources in Bigquery for better data visualization, such as Google Ads and other sources.
8. Accurate Decisions: With precise data at hand, businesses can make more informed choices.

Looker offers additional features for data integration, including creating custom data applications and experiences, working with various databases and data stores, sharing, and providing a unified surface to access all of an organization's data.

In essence, using BigQuery with Looker Studio enhances data analysis, making it more efficient and effective for users. Looker can connect many columns to a single table, query, or view for data analysis, ensuring streamlined and focused data queries.

Preparing for the Connection Process

Before connecting Google BigQuery with Looker Studio, ensure you have a valid GCP access and the Looker Studio account. To learn more about BigQuery and how to get started - you can check out this guide:

Article: https://www.owox.com/blog/articles/bigquery-everything-you-need-to-know/

Google Cloud Platform Access

To effectively utilize the features and capabilities of BigQuery, it's essential to have access to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This is the platform where all your BigQuery projects and datasets are created, stored and managed.

By gaining access to GCP, you can seamlessly navigate, explore, modify, and analyze your datasets, ensuring that you can make the most of the data you've accumulated to date. It's the gateway to unlocking the full potential of your BigQuery projects.

Connecting Google BigQuery to Looker Studio Step-by-Step

The integration between the two allows you to visualize and analyze large datasets with ease, enabling more informed decision-making and deeper insights. We will walk you through the process of connecting BigQuery to Looker in three comprehensive phases. Follow these steps to seamlessly link your data and start creating impactful visualizations.

Here’s how you can connect everything in 6 phases, step by step:

Phase 1: Setting Up BigQuery

First, you need to set up your BigQuery environment. This involves creating a new project in the Google Cloud Console and enabling the BigQuery API. Once your project is set up, you can start importing your data into BigQuery.

To facilitate exploration and analysis, create and save a new LookML model file in Looker. This model file will help you define the structure of your data and make it easier to connect your Looker model to BigQuery.

Phase 2: Connecting Looker to BigQuery

Next, you need to connect Looker to your BigQuery project. In Looker, navigate to the Admin panel and select 'Connections'. Here, you can add a new connection by providing your BigQuery project ID and authentication details. Once connected, Looker will be able to access your BigQuery datasets.

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Phase 3: Building Your Dashboard in Looker Studio

With Looker connected to BigQuery, you can start building your business intelligence dashboard. In Looker Studio, for example, you can create custom visualizations, tables, and reports based on your BigQuery data.

To gain deeper insights, you can write and execute SQL queries within Looker Studio. These SQL queries will allow you to query, explore, and visualize specific e-commerce datasets, providing valuable business insights.

Finally, you can share your dashboard report with your team by generating a shareable link or embedding it in a page on your website. This makes it easy for everyone to access and benefit from the insights provided by your data.

Phase 4: Add BigQuery as a Data Source in Looker Studio

1. Connect to BigQuery.
2. Sign in to Looker Studio.
3. In the top left, click ‘+Create’ then select ‘Data Source’.
4. In the Google Connectors section, hover over BigQuery and then click ‘Select’.
5. For Authorization, click ‘Authorize’. This allows Looker Studio access to your Google Cloud project.
6. In the Request for Permission dialog, click ‘Allow’.

Phase 5: Select the group of projects

1. For the Project, click the name of your project.
2. For the Dataset, select the data set you need.

1. For the Table, click the table you are looking for.
2. In the upper right corner of the window, click Connect.
3. Click ‘CONNECT’. The Fields panel appears.
4. Rename your data source.
5. Optional: Share the data source.

Phase 6: Add data from BigQuery to the existing report

1. Open the Report.
2. Click on ‘Data’ on the right, and in Add a data source window, click ‘Create new data source’.
3. Then follow the guide from above.
4. Collect all of your raw marketing data into Google BigQuery with OWOX BI no-code integration.

Collect Your Marketing Data to Google BigQuery with OWOX Reports Extension for Google Sheets

OWOX Reports Extension for Google Sheets provides a no-code integration solution that allows businesses to effortlessly funnel all their marketing data into BigQuery.

This integration ensures that all the details of your marketing performance metrics are in one place, making data analysis more streamlined and efficient. Additionally, businesses can leverage public datasets from the Google Cloud Public Dataset Program to enhance their data analytics capabilities.

OWOX Reports presents a user-friendly solution tailored for businesses aiming to optimize their data management. This tool is designed for simplicity, enabling companies to transfer all their marketing data directly to Google BigQuery without any technical hurdles. For seamless integration and connection to BigQuery, it is essential to have a Looker instance running.

By centralizing all marketing information in one accessible location, businesses can benefit from a more organized approach to data analysis. This consolidation ensures that data-driven insights are easier to obtain, leading to more informed decision-making.

Furthermore, having a unified data repository reduces the chances of discrepancies and errors, ensuring that marketing teams are always working with accurate and up-to-date information. In today’s competitive market, tools like OWOX Reports are essential for businesses to stay ahead, offering them an edge in data analytics and strategy formulation.

Simplify BigQuery Reporting in Sheets

Easily analyze corporate data directly into Google Sheets. Query, run, and automatically update reports aligned with your business needs

Start Reporting Now