Getting more from your marketing analytics with Looker building block for GA 360

One of the nice features of Looker is the wide range of out-of-the-box building blocks to easily make dashboards. Recently, new Looker blocks have been introduced for Google Marketing Platform that facilitate insights in web traffic and advertising data.

Since I really like this new feature I will show you some advantages of using these Looker blocks as well as the first steps for getting started. In this post I will focus primarily on Google Analytics 360. Blocks have also been developed for Campaign manager and Display & Video 360, Google Ads and Search Ads 360. I will write about these as well later.

When using analytics directly from the Google Console insights are not accessible for large groups in your organisation as access is typically limited to your data analysts and digital marketers only. Also Google Console may be limited in reporting functionality compared to the most outstanding tools in the market. Think of features like a friendly building interface, advanced and appealing visualisations, slicing and dicing, alerts and other advanced reporting functionality. 

Looker is more than just another BI tool having a data platform and extensive functionalities that go beyond dashboarding. It provides web based, interactive dashboard functionalities on premise or in the cloud. Also it is known especially for the ability to create data models by end users, with LookerML as its modelling language. This brings knowledge of the business and its data to data modelling in an easy way and as a result, reduces the dependency on technical professionals. 

Example of Looker building block for GA 360

On top of that users can install out-of-the-box building blocks for applications, data models and visualisations in an easy way. Those blocks represent not only the standard insights from GA 360 in the Google Console, but offer additional insights and functionalities such as:

• The custom goals dashboard that enables you to define your goals at every moment and to see how these goals trend historically over time.
• The campaign impact dashboard that identifies specific cohorts of customers you target with a campaign and shows how the customer base has trended over time to understand if the campaign had much impact.
• Advanced analytics to predict which customers are likely to make purchases in the future based on historical behavior. This leverages the out-of-the-box BQML capabilities of BigQuery.

Looker users can install GA360 building blocks themselves from the Looker Marketplace, after a Looker admin enables the marketplace and local project import labs features and sets the right permissions for the Looker user.

Looker Marketplace provides applications, data models and visualisation for many dashboards solutions like GA 360

Goals and segments created in Google Analytics Console are not exported to BigQuery so you likely want to build this in Looker as well, using logic in LookML. This enables more flexibility and more advanced analysis than the Google Console itself. Also user segments can easily be created in Looker while having more dimensions available and having more flexibility in forming them.

With Looker blocks for GA 360 you can bring your marketing analytics to the next level and put controls in the hands of the ones that work with the insights. 

If your organisation already uses Looker you can access Looker marketplace, install GA 360 blocks and find out what these can do for your marketing analytics. Not yet a Looker customer and seeking for advanced reporting functionality? Crystalloids can help you implement Looker on Google Cloud Platform.

ABOUT CRYSTALLOIDS

Crystalloids helps companies improve their customer experiences and build marketing technology. Founded in 2006 in the Netherlands, Crystalloids builds crystal-clear solutions that turn customer data into information and knowledge into wisdom. As a leading Google Cloud Partner, Crystalloids combines experience in software development, data science, and marketing making them one of a kind IT company. Using the Agile approach Crystalloids ensures that use cases show immediate value to their clients and make their job focus more on decision making and less on programming.

For more information, please visit www.crystalloids.com or like us on LinkedIn.