As a digital marketer, you will end up using a wide range of tools / products to help your day to day life.
They will range from life-saving to infuriatingly useless (not going to mention any names, but be honest – a lot of products really do not help in any meaningful way and are trying to solve problems that just don’t exist), but I am sure that we all have a favourites. Google Data Studio is most definitely up there in my personal tools that I could not face life without list.
Considering its price (free……for now…..), Data Studio is incredibly powerful and truly wonderful at helping use data to tell a story. Out of the box, there are endless data connections and numerous reports that you can use to visualise numbers and create meaningful business reports. Even if the data you are importing isn’t quite right, or you need to blend multiple sources, Data Studio will almost always come to the rescue and help you create the ultimate digital marketing report.
I therefore panicked when I heard rumours that it was being axed. The good news is that it is simply being rebranded as ‘Looker Studio’ as part of a wider unification of Google’s business intelligence tools suite.
Google acquired Looker (a data analytics start up that Google thought was good enough to part with $2.6 billion) back in February 2020 and it became part of the Google Cloud Platform family. This week’s announcement is the maturation of Google’s business intelligence offering, which includes a wide range of products including artificial intelligence and machine learning. Famous for its mission to make it easier to find and access information across the internet, Google is claiming a similar goal to help businesses access meaningful insights from a mass of data.
Looker Studio Pro?
Whilst this week’s news appears to be little more than a rebranding of Google Data Studio, although there is promise of new Looker data models that I am interested in testing, the emergence of Looker Studio Pro may well hint at a future where Data Studio Looker Studio may not be free.
At this stage, the paid for Looker Studio Pro adds additional support, extra administrative features and enhanced collaboration. There is also talk of a third enterprise tier which will integrate the enterprise version of Dataplex.
I very much hope that the paid tiers are reserved for larger organisations that require more advanced collaboration features, but only time will tell. It would be a real shame if the freemium model was abolished in favour of a subscription only service, so make the most of it whilst you can!
