Looker Studio

Google Looker Studio dashboards, data visualization, and reporting (150 posts)

GA4 Dataform integration: how Springer Nature modernised analytics with Measurelab

The Springer Nature Group is an academic publishing company, with brands dating back to 1842, that advances scientific discovery by publishing robust and insightful research, supporting the development of new areas of knowledge, making ideas and information accessible around the world, and leading the way on open access. The challenge Springer Nature needed to migrate their Universal Analytics dashboards to GA4 data. Their reporting relied on multiple stacked scheduled queries in BigQuery tha

Steven Elliott•28 Aug 2025

How to start forecasting in BigQuery with zero training

If you’d told me five years ago that I’d be forecasting product demand using a model trained on 100 billion time points… without writing a single line of ML code… I probably would’ve asked how many coffees you’d had that day ☕️ But its a brand new world. And it’s possible. Let me explain What is TimesFM? TimesFM is a new foundation model from Google, built specifically for time-series forecasting. Think of it like GPT for time, instead of predicting the next word in a sentence, it predicts t

Katie Kaczmarek•14 Jul 2025

Easy ways to prepare your BigQuery warehouse for AI

You’ve probably heard that AI is coming to make our lives easier, especially in tools like BigQuery. But here’s the thing: AI isn't magic. If you want it to be accurate and useful, you need to set it up for success. One of the best ways to do that? Improve the metadata in your BigQuery warehouse. Metadata is like the index or contents page in a book, it quickly tells you exactly what’s inside and where to find it. Creating clear metadata means AI can more easily understand your data warehouse

Katie Kaczmarek•23 Apr 2025

Data pipeline optimisation with Google Cloud and Dataform

In our recent engagement with a client, we went on a journey to transform their data pipelines, tackling inefficiencies in performance and cost within their Google Cloud BigQuery environment. Our efforts culminated in a comprehensive optimisation strategy that used Dataform, improved SQL practices, and implemented tailored solutions for significant performance gains and cost savings. Here’s a deep dive into the highlights of our project. Identifying inefficiencies in BigQuery workflows We beg

Prasanna Venkatesan•22 Apr 2025

Behind the Cloud – Releases and scheduling in Dataform

In this episode of Behind the Cloud, Matthew dives into the details of releases and scheduling in Dataform. He breaks down how to manage different versions of your codebase in GitHub. From taking snapshots, to scheduling executions at various intervals daily, hourly, or monthly. By the end of the episode, you’ll have the know-how to confidently release and schedule your code, making it easier to build robust tables and models with Dataform. Watch below 👇 on Youtube, or catch more from the ser

Matthew Hooson•7 Mar 2025

2024: Measurelab's year in review

Same same but different At the beginning of the year, I wasn't quite sure what Measurelab would look like by the end of 2024. Altman's assistants had just been unleashed. The robots were on the march. Would the analytics arena be conquered by AI? Would we all be replaced by intelligent agents? As it turns out, no. Things are pretty much the same - on the surface at least. And that's no bad thing. After the tumultuous ups and downs of a rollercoaster 2023, I'll take steady, deliberate progress

Steven Elliott•27 Dec 2024

Integrating siloed data: Springer Nature marketing and sales case study

The Springer Nature Group is an academic publishing company, with brands dating back to 1842, that advances scientific discovery by publishing robust and insightful research, supporting the development of new areas of knowledge, making ideas and information accessible around the world, and leading the way on open access. The challenge The sales and marketing teams depended on incomplete data, which didn’t capture the entire customer journey due to different systems in use. Transactions and re

Mark Rochefort•7 Aug 2024

Grand Designs: "The Warehouse to CDP conversion"

Opening scene: A large meeting room at BigCorp. A systems architecture diagram with lots of boxes and arrows flowing from left to right fills a large whiteboard. Kelvin joins Jan (marketing director) and Joe (head of data) at the table, earnest expression, hands clasped in front of him. Kelvin: So, Jan, Joe, tell me a bit about the history of the warehouse. Joe: Well, going way back, it was originally an on-prem system, which was replaced back in 2019 with an Oracle data warehouse as part of a

Steven Elliott•14 Mar 2024

Behind the Cloud: The essentials of Google BigQuery

In this episode of Behind the Cloud, Matt discusses the essentials of Google Cloud’s BigQuery. Everything from project structure, data handling, to understanding the costs involved. Watch below 👇 or head over to our YouTube channel Transcript [00:00:00] Matt: Hello and welcome to Behind the Cloud. Today we’re going to be diving into the nuts and bolts of Google Cloud’s BigQuery and how it can help to revolutionise your marketing analytics. Whether you’re really familiar with the cloud or th

Matthew Hooson•7 Feb 2024

GA4 content performance reporting: Howard Kennedy success story

Howard Kennedy LLP is a London based, full-service law firm with nearly 200 lawyers in one location. They specialise in providing straightforward advice to entrepreneurial businesses and individuals on domestic and international matters. The challenge Howard Kennedy creates various ‘Hot Topic’ campaign pages featuring videos, podcasts, and articles. Despite tracking these pages with Google Analytics 4, the performance data was not directly available to campaign managers or lawyers. The object

Mark Rochefort•7 Feb 2024

Behind the Cloud: What GCP tools should you be familiar with?

In this episode of Behind the Cloud, Matthew aims to answer the question, what are the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) tools of the marketing analytics trade? And more specifically, what are the tools that you should care about in Google Cloud Platform. For a more in-depth write up on GCP tools, check out Matt’s blog post. Watch below 👇 or head over to our YouTube channel Transcript [00:00:00] Matt: Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Behind the Cloud. We’re going to try and answer the ques

Matthew Hooson•13 Jan 2024

Getting started with Plotly Dash

This blog post is a brief introduction to Plotly Dash and a short tutorial to learn how to build a custom visualisation. For this tutorial, you will need some basic knowledge of Python, HTML and JavaScript. This article will focus on locally building and visualising your graph. What is Plotly Dash? Let’s start with the basics: what is Plotly Dash? Dash is a Python framework created by Plotly to render interactive dashboards which can also be hosted online, by using just Python. Dash has both

Natalia Rizzi•22 Aug 2023

The Measure Pod: 2 years of podcasting

If you also work in an industry like analytics, there's generally very few people who you can really talk to about work stuff. I bet most of us have had something like "do you have Chandler Bing's job?" said to us at some point. Or is that just me? Anyway, to the point. Almost to the day two years ago I wrote about how we set up and launched The Measure Pod - wow, doesn't time really fly! If you've never come across the podcast The Measure Pod, you'd be forgiven. Like a lot of things, it was b

Daniel Perry-Reed•3 Aug 2023

How to set up GA4’s custom insights and email alerts

What are custom insights? Sometimes the data available in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) can seem a bit overwhelming especially if you have a complex site with lots of users coming and going every day. It can often seem difficult to quickly identify the most important trends or anomalies. Thankfully GA4’s Analytics Intelligence is here to help bring some much needed clarity. This is a group of features that uses modelling to help you understand your data. Insights is one such feature and it comes in

Timothy Gorringe•17 Apr 2023

The sun is setting on Universal Analytics

It’s finally happening. Google has announced the sunsetting of Universal Analytics, or more specifically, the date when UA will stop processing new hits. The 1st of July, 2023. For those without a calendar to hand, that’s fifteen and a half months from now. So plenty of time still to think about migrating to Google Analytics 4, right? Wrong. Well, wrong if on 1st July 2023 you want to be able to compare your latest GA4 data with comparable data from the previous year. And what analyst wouldn’

Dara Fitzgerald•16 Mar 2022

Data warehouse: Repair broken tables in BigQuery

At Measurelab, we love a bit of data warehousing using BigQuery; in fact, we are obsessed with finding the best approach to managing data warehouses in the most optimal way possible.  So in this series, we want to share with you our knowledge and expertise to show what a fantastic and dynamic tool BigQuery is. As you may know, BigQuery has some super powerful features, which allow us to build, manipulate and even run machine learning algorithms within the interface. However, we’re all human, an

Lace Rogers•8 Mar 2021

Data warehousing: What is BigQuery and how do I get started?

At Measurelab we live and breathe the Google Cloud Platform, so our specialists are experts in Bigquery.  We have decided in this series to share our knowledge and take you through some great techniques to maintain your BigQuery data warehouse.   So firstly-what is BigQuery? BigQuery is a fully-managed, serverless data warehouse that enables scalable analysis over petabytes of data. ...and that means? Simply put, BigQuery is a fantastic cloud-based data warehouse in which you can store huge

Lace Rogers•21 Dec 2020

Google Analytics 4

The new future version of Google Analytics has been announced - now branded as Google Analytics 4. Building on the "App + Web" property that was released last year, this sets the direction for Google Analytics going forwards. It is now the default experiences for all new properties and is where all product developments will be focussed. Google Analytics 3, commonly known as Universal Analytics, was released in October 2012. This next product iteration for Google Analytics is a major step on fro

Mark Rochefort•14 Oct 2020

Emergency Analytics Support

It can be tricky judging how to pitch a new offer in times of crisis. There’s a fine line between being genuinely helpful and appearing exploitative. Sometimes you have to just jump in and try things, knowing they may be misinterpreted by the minority. In business, indecision can be crippling. While people’s lives are undoubtedly the most precious thing, livelihoods are worth saving too. A number of our clients - particularly those in the retail sector - have been hit hard by recent events.

Steven Elliott•2 Apr 2020

How to Conduct an Exceptional Training Session

So… you’ve been asked to conduct a training session and you don’t know where to start. Or, you’re looking for a way to take your current training process to the next level. Whatever your level of experience, the following tips will help you make your next training session exceptional. 1. Know the subject The first step in giving an exceptional training session is being deeply familiar with the subject matter. In the words of Albert Einstein: You may think you know a subject through and throu

Dave Beatty•6 Dec 2019

A day in the shoes of a Senior Analyst: Will Deschene at EDF

Our first launch into a ‘day in the shoes’ series is spent with Will Deschene, Senior Digital Analyst at EDF. In this interview, he tells us about managing stakeholders and a team, brands that have inspired him lately, and shares some valuable advice for new analysts. Aimée: Please describe your job: what do you do? Will: The majority of my work is stakeholder management, less of the 'doing' in the analytics world, as I now have two analysts in the team. It's more about stakeholder engagement

Aimée Hart•6 Nov 2019

Goodbye DoubleClick, hello Google Marketing Platform!

Last week, Google announced they were unifying their analytics and advertising platforms under a single new name: Google Marketing Platform. The Google Analytics 360 Suite and DoubleClick brands are being replaced with this single name. What does this mean for DoubleClick? If anything this is a change that has needed to happen for years. DoubleClick always sat rather clumsily alongside other tools from Google and this shift heralds the beginning of a more unified approach. Search Ads 360 wil

Mark Rochefort•17 Jul 2018

Firebase Analytics demystified

<span style="font-weight: 400;">After a steep learning curve into the world of Firebase Analytics or Google Analytics for Firebase, it seems that a blog post about it would be much valued and appreciated. I’ve compiled a list of the most frequently asked questions.</span> 1. How does Firebase Analytics define a session? Firebase Analytics defines a session as a user engaging with your app for a minimum amount of time (10 seconds by default) followed by your user not engaging with your app

Alex Cirstea•5 Feb 2018

Data Studio new countries availability

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The time has come for more of you to enjoy the benefits of Data Studio reports! Today, Google has announced long-awaited expansion of its product availability to more than 180 countries. </span> More and more people will now be able to enjoy the benefits of this powerful tool - you can now create, share and edit reports, and impress your boss and clients with your skilful dashboard creation skills. But that's not all! With that great news come other useful f

Magdalena Pajak•7 Mar 2017

Google Data Studio: just getting better & better

We have some great news for all those of you who live and breathe Data Studio! Google has just announced two big changes to the tool: 1. The 5 report limit for the free version has been removed 2. What is even more exciting, Data Studio is now free for both basic and 360 (enterprise) version users! Up till now, the only real downside of the free version of the tool, was its limitation in the number of reports you could create per account. So if you are a free version user, you won’t be reall

Magdalena Pajak•2 Feb 2017

Google Data Studio tips: tricks and best practices

Getting started with Google Data Studio Since its release back in May 2016, Data Studio (a free version of Data Studio 360) has made quite a lot of progress on improving its functionality. Of course, it is still in beta, so you might come across some system bugs and limitations, but the Google team is working hard to add new features and fix any issues the user may face, with at least two new releases per month (so far). I won't go into details as what you can do with the tool, as you can chec

Magdalena Pajak•7 Dec 2016

When GA just isn't enough - my #measurefest talk

<span style="font-weight: 400;">I spoke at <a href="http://www.measurefest.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">#Measurefest</a> in the Barbican last Friday. Here are the slides from my talk but I wanted to write a quick summary to give a bit more context as the slides on their own don’t tell the story. </span> When GA just isn't enough from darafitzgerald The title of the talk was "When GA just isn't enough". For some that know me this might sound like an unexpected title. I sp

Dara Fitzgerald•24 Nov 2016

Data Visualisation with Power BI

Since the recent(ish) announcement of <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/analytics/360-suite/data-studio/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Google Data Studio 360</a>&nbsp;(Google's answer to&nbsp;Tableau), we wanted&nbsp;to&nbsp;see where Data Studio 360 will fit into the mix by trying to compare what little we currently know about it with&nbsp;other data visualisation tools that are already on the market. Fast forward a few weeks, and to cut a long story short, Microsoft Power BI

Daniel Perry-Reed•6 May 2016

Google Analytics 360 Suite: what it is & why it matters

So it's finally happened, Google has brought their enterprise-level analytics offerings together in one neat package: the Google Analytics 360 Suite! What they have done is re-branded Google Analytics Premium as Google Analytics 360 and Adometry as Google Attribution 360, and released 4 all new tools. What’s included in the suite: Google Audience Center 360 (beta) A data management platform (DMP) that helps understand and identify customers across channels, devices, campaigns, etc. Google

Daniel Perry-Reed•15 Mar 2016

GTM’s new interface: public‑beta update, API & feature changes

Things move fast in the digital world. Even more so when the might of Google is behind a product. Even so, a complete overhaul of the Google Tag Manager interface is quite a leap - considering how accustomed we have become to seeing incremental changes in product development. This morning I was using Google Tag Manager as usual, this afternoon I noticed that an import/export feature had become available. That was great news in itself, as it opens up all sorts of possibilities - for example, link

Steven Elliott•15 Oct 2014

How to use the Google Analytics Embed API: guide & examples

When I started at Measurelab, way back in July, one of the items on my List Of Things To Do was to look into new and exciting ways of visualising data for clients. A few weeks ago I spent some time experimenting with dc.js but then, Mark and Dara went to MeasureCamp in London (I was going to go but I had other commitments) and came back bearing glad tidings of great joy for all analytics consultants, because unto Google, in the town of Mountain View, was born an API, and the angel Justin C

Adam Englebright•1 Oct 2014

Adam's Analytics Adventure: Week 3

<h1 style="color: #141412;">New Laptop!</h1> New laptop finally arrived! It’s so shiny! aaaaaaaaaahhhhhh ahem. Bit shorter than usual this week, as the time I’d usually use for blogging has been spent installing/configuring the laptop which just arrived. On top of that, it's been a busy week, but not one in which the majority of my activities lend themselves to interesting anecdotes – I spent Monday just looking at spreadsheets. Fun for me, but not very interesting for you to read about

Adam Englebright•18 Jul 2014