Simplify Data Visualization with Looker Studio Integration

Becoming data-driven is a two-step process: First, you must break down data silos and bring your data together. Then, you must employ the necessary tools to make sense of your data. The second step in the process entails business intelligence (BI) tools, and Peaka spent the 2024 summer launching integrations with some of the most powerful of such tools.

Our latest integration in the BI series connects Peaka with Looker Studio, Google’s data visualization tool catering to users looking for a simple solution to set up and use.

What is Looker Studio?

Google’s naming convention for its products in the data analytics/BI space leaves a lot to be desired. The company has two products, Looker and Looker Studio, with different but complementary capabilities, but this inevitably creates some confusion among the uninitiated. However, they are clearly differentiated in their capabilities:

Looker is a data analytics platform that uses a modeling language (LookML) to define data relationships in a relational database. It was acquired by Google in 2020, and the tech giant positioned its new acquisition as an umbrella under which other BI products would be placed. Looker handles data modeling, harmonizes what different metrics refer to, and promotes a uniform understanding of data across an organization. By doing that, it ensures that different data users who look at a data point such as “monthly sales” understand the same thing.

Looker Studio, on the other hand, is how Google renamed Data Studio in 2022. It is Google’s answer to other popular data visualization tools, such as Tableau and Power BI, but with significant differences. It serves the BI needs of non-technical people and functions as the go-to data visualization solution within the Google ecosystem.

• Looker Studio features an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface. This makes it a popular choice among marketing and growth teams, who want to draw insights without much fuss.

• It seamlessly integrates with tools in the Google ecosystem. Just like Power BI boasts native connectivity with other Microsoft products, Looker Studio offers hassle-free integration with Google Analytics, Google Ads, and BigQuery.

• In addition to 21 connectors built in-house, the platform offers a collection of more than 1000 third-party integrations that are built and supported by its partners.

• Looker Studio comes with 40 pre-made visualizations for basic data visualization tasks. Users needing more advanced charts and graphs can tap into the collection of visualizations created by Looker Studio partners.

• Users can utilize LookML to define data relationships and create consistent data models that can be shared across the organization.

These features make Looker Studio a good option for business teams looking to generate reports and build dashboards without IT involvement. True, the platform lacks the endless customizability offered by some of its rivals. However, this lack of control over the minute details of a report's layout and appearance translates into ease of use and improved self-serve capability, which may be desirable in some use cases.

What is Peaka?

Peaka is a data platform specifically developed to cater to the data integration needs of startups and SMBs. Lacking a purpose-built option in the market, these organizations usually have to pay for the modern data stack, which is overkill for their needs, or get by relying on spreadsheets.

Peaka turns data integration into a smooth, one-click process where users can aggregate data from distributed sources and expose their consolidated data to other applications. It currently serves two use cases as a zero-ETL data integration platform and a serverless connector infrastructure:

Zero-ETL data platform

The extract-transform-load (ETL) process is the backbone of the modern data stack and is essentially what makes it inflexible, costly to run, and troublesome to maintain for startups and SMBs. Lacking the precious engineering hours needed to build and maintain ETL pipelines, these companies either end up paying for a solution they cannot utilize properly or resort to copying data from one spreadsheet and pasting it to another to unify their data.

Peaka’s zero-ETL approach approach relies on data virtualization to eliminate the transformation stage from the ETL process. It turns your data into virtual tables and removes the need to physically copy and move your data from one location to another. Thanks to this single virtual layer, you can query every data source, execute join queries on them, and form a single view of truth.

Serverless connector infrastructure

Peaka not only simplifies data integration for startups but also helps them ship connectors at scale, giving them a serverless connector infrastructure.

One of the most formidable challenges keeping startups from gaining traction is the sheer number of connector requests they receive from prospects before they can close deals. Building a connector takes weeks, if not months, and doing this at scale takes a big engineering team, which most startups cannot afford. Once built, every connector demands years of maintenance and updating, which requires a long-term commitment of resources.

Peaka’s serverless connector infrastructure offers an innovative way of launching “white-label” connectors and ensures that these connectors are always up-to-date and scalable. This allows startup founders to close deals faster and expand into new markets by shipping the popular connectors in that market while channeling engineering resources to other productive tasks.

What does Peaka’s Looker Studio integration do?

Peaka has become a Looker Studio partner by launching an integration with this popular BI tool. This integration provides Peaka users with another option to turn their data into visualizations. Non-technical users stand to benefit more from this integration, considering Looker Studio’s user-friendly interface, simple report generation, and scheduled automated reports. Thus, Peaka’s Looker Studio integration democratizes access to reports without creating a burden on IT people.

As stated above, Peaka enables users to establish a semantic layer over all data sources, allowing them to view and query their data as relational databases. Peaka users can pull in data from various SaaS tools like HubSpot or Stripe and join it to form new datasets. They can then push the resulting dataset to Looker Studio for visualization.

Looker Studio’s native integration with other Google products pays dividends for users who are comfortable working within the Google ecosystem. Marketing teams using Google Ads and Google Analytics can turn their marketing data into charts and graphs with Looker Studio’s pre-made templates and quickly gain insights into their ad spend.

Conclusion

Data is just a cost factor unless it is turned into information and put into use. BI tools do a great job of extracting value from data as they turn tabular data into visual representations and reveal hidden trends and patterns. The question is, which BI tool suits your needs the best?

Peaka’s recent series of BI integrations solve this problem, giving users access to a range of highly capable tools with different areas of focus. Metabase, Apache Superset™, and Power BI all have their strengths and fit different use cases. Our Looker Studio integration is a nice addition that complements this group well with its ease of use and emphasis on simplicity. With many options in the market, there is a BI tool for every user persona, and Peaka is making sure that you will find the best one for your needs.

Check out Peaka’s growing library of custom connectors and book a free demo to see Peaka in action!