Looker Reviews

Looker does a great job to reach its primary users. With respect to the users of the interface, those who use it for a simpler data recovery / revision, its interface is quite easy to use and logical to work with. They do a lot to make the system as simple as possible. It has a great ease of use, monetary value and ability to create prototypes and display data quickly. Your CS team and support are the best providers that I have worked with.

The initial configuration and development of Looker requires time, attention and work. The software is an excellent user interface for accessing data, but configuring the program to access your data requires a large amount of programming, troubleshooting and general work of the data science team. The utility of the program is definitely worth it, but you should not expect to start using the program as soon as you get it, as it requires some configuration.

Looker has the ability to personalize, visualize incredible data and allows me to automate and optimize processes. Even non-technical people are excited to use this product once they know how to do it. The most friendly and useful customer service. I like that the software is based on the web, so you can access it from anywhere. This means that people who need the information they need are much easier to help, and no longer have to spend a lot of time on consultations.

Looker has allowed my company to organize and deepen the data we collect in our CRM. You can really get to the specifics of things. I like that you can easily create an aspect when necessary and have the option of not saving it if it is not necessary again. I am also very happy that the analysis is now completely centralized in my company. This makes people who need the information they need much easier to help, and no longer have to spend a lot of time on ad hoc queries. I am currently analyzing large amounts of data with Looker and taking ideas to support business decisions.

The software makes it simple to pull reports. The labels are clear so whatever you need to look data on can be found easily. The software integrated into our system and which allows us to pull data on info less than a day from being done.

The software can crash if a lot of reports are being run at the same time. Otherwise, it can go slow too, so quarterly/monthly reports your whole team is doing can cause the software to run slow.

The software makes it easy for those who are not data analyst to use. After an hour training session and spending time trying looker out, I was able to learn it and see the full potential the software offers.

Being able to test and see if initiatives are effective. Also, it always us to show and present customers data that can help their business with data-driven proof.

Without Looker, we would be unable to efficiently analyze our core business metrics. When digging into retention and sales metrics Looker allows a general user the easy ability to visualize their own metrics. It also gives the developer level capabilities to run SQL queries and more in-depth data queries. It's great that you can also do calculations much like you could in excel without having to have programming chops.

The visualization tactics are fairly limited. It would be great to have some more options for charts.

It is good for all levels of experience with BI and data analysis tools. If you want something meat and potatoes, Looker is for you. If you want something that is going to be less robust but prettier it may be better to look into other products or tools.

We needed to figure out how to consolidate our data analysis across sales, services, and marketing. Looker was key in uniting that data and then it allows us to do analysis across our different departments. This means that we can see how marketing is impacting sales, how different types of sales or discounts impact things like revenue and customer retention.

Looker has nice visualization features and tools. We can connect Looker to wide array of data and sources to make several department more efficient with quick access to relevant data. We can quickly find, filter and sort data to work with it more efficiently. The overall user interface is clean and allows us to navigate and use different sections in a simple and smooth manner. The process of saving data is done with minimal steps.

We can filter data in the most precise ways. The pricing is probably expensive for many smaller organizations. Customizing certain features can be complicated without a thorough understanding of the software.

For organizations that deal with large amounts of data across different departments, Looker can be a very effective way to manage accessibility to the data and to leverage it for sales and other revenue generating opportunities. It can also be useful for reports and market data analysis.

Looker is used by many departments in our company as a central hub for business data. We are all able to access data in a smooth and up-to-date manner for various uses, including sales, marketing, research and design. It's a great way for everyone to leverage data and optimize client and lead experiences. We can use data from Looker for detailed analysis and reports with engaging visualization options.

I like the fact that i can create almost any form of presentation of the data accessible to the application, and share it with anyone set up as a user in my company. They, likewise, can do the same. I like the fact that I can explore new data slicing and presentation options as new needs and ideas present themselves. It is easy to use once you get over the initial steep learning curve, and terminology barrier (see "dislikes"). I also like the fact that once I set up a report I don't have to keep updating it to get current data (assuming I've set it up properly!)

I don't like the fact that they have use their own terminology for to many things, such as "Looks" and "Spaces" that users have to learn, and providing additional motivation to reluctant users for resisting adoption. That, on top of the fact it is fairly complex and has a fairly steep learning curve. That said, once you get it, though, its really easy to use.

Our implementation is via Salesfusion, our MA platform, and is paid for through that subscription. The biggest thing to watch for in my opinion is getting the right custom fields implemented from your data source platform. I don't know whether it is a limitation of Salesfusion or Looker, but we were only able to get a portion of the custom fields that we need implemented in this platform. As you know, your analysis is only as good as the available data, and if you don't have access to all of it, you get an incomplete picture. Also, setup is very complex and tedious. Although I didn't have to do it - Salesfusion did - it was clear that it was a long, complex process. It took about 3 months to get our instance up and running.

Several:

1. Presenting localized sales lead data to distributed sales managers that allow then to quickly view and act on their regional lead activity

2. See basic marketing stats more easily

3. Set up my own customized marketing reports as needed

4. Make both marketing and sales lead information more widely available to help enable better marketing and sales decision making

Looker extends analytical capabilities and the possibility of discovering insights beyond the traditional data or analyst role. This extended domestication of data across organizations adopting Looker has caused a rapid growth in insight driven, citizen analytics cultures. Looker's customer care team is industry-best, with immediate access to friendly, knowledgeable engineers who are always quick to understand the issue and troubleshoot.

With immense and rapid growth comes pressure to deploy higher and higher quality code, which typically results in slower time to market for feature requests. That said, Looker continues to maintain an above-average time to market for releases. Looker's rapid growth has also meant a shift in partnership dynamic away from the start-up mentality, however this is too be expected with the growth.

When considering Looker vs competitors, consider the majority of your end user base. Are they business users with more limited technical skills? Would they benefit from being able to explore the data rather than simply consume static reports/dashboards that are prebuilt for them? Consider these questions and their feedback relative to these questions when demoing Looker and competitors.

With an abstraction layer of LookML, organizations don't need to rely on the bread line of a data or analytics team as in years past. Data doesn't need to be consolidated, centralized, or even scrubbed/clean. All of this can be taken care of in the model layer, enabling end users to explore a domain their familiar with without having to write a single line of SQL.

It is a great product to give to people in all departments of your company as it has access to the data and allows them to explore what they can provide. It's amazing. In addition, the supplier is intelligent, responds and constantly improves the product, delivering a new version approximately every month. Their customer service is second to none and they are always happy to know the new features they need in the product. Also, I like that the software is based on the web, so you can access it from anywhere. I am also very happy that the analysis is now completely centralized in my company. This makes people who need the information they need much easier to help, and no longer have to spend a lot of time on ad hoc queries.

The visualization features have advanced a lot over the years, but sometimes it is still difficult to customize the visualizations. The loading of the control panels can be very slow. Validating the code can sometimes last forever and occasional errors cause it to fall temporarily for the entire company. I must say that there are not many opportunities for formal training or help documentation.

It is an excellent data exploration tool for users who would normally feel anxious to receive a large data set in something like Excel. In general, it is easy to use and there can be unlimited viewers through the business product. The data visualization is essentially done for you and the Exploers (users of the second level of permissions) can create new visualizations and turn them into interactive panels. On the Looker platform, Explorers can locate a view (called Explore) and then provide them with a list of dimensions and measures they can include in a table. Users can create new dimensions using calculated fields and then save their views so that any user with Visor permissions (and more) can see what was gathered.

Looker allows all team members to access the data. Looker is a powerful tool, useful for adding data visualizations to reports, making business decisions based on data and any other task that requires you to analyze the data. Looker has allowed my company to organize and deepen the data we collect in our CRM. You can really get to the specifics of things. I like that you can easily create an aspect when necessary and have the option of not saving it if it is not necessary again.

It allows us to consolidate all of our metric definitions in one place so everyone's working off the same set of numbers. It's infinitely flexible and has helped us solve complex data issues in a way that's scalable for the entire organization.

Ultimately, it's user-friendly enough that we've been able to democratize our data for the entire organization - it solves the needs of everyone from those working with BI software for the first time, to our most advanced power users.

Less an overt dislike but it's important to know there's a lot of work required to build out the data layer to a point where it's usable for the entire organization. Bring it on when you have someone who's expert-level in SQL, and who can dedicate to it ~full time as there is a lot of customization needed to build it out correctly, and continue to update and improve it for new use cases.

As long as you have the technical resources internally to build out and maintain Looker correctly, it's a fantastic tool.

Enabling every person in the organization access to the data that drives our business...not just those expert-level data fluency.

Automating every scorecard/dashboard in the company according to the KPIs that drive each team, and the business as a whole.

Deep dives into customers, acquisition sources, LTVs, etc. etc. to understand and monitor what's working, or not.

Forecasting and modelling to understand upcoming inventory and operation needs..

Uploading, tracking, and managing the business vs. operating plans in real-time.

Looker's visuals seem to be designed almost as if Google had a drag and drop product for your central reporting needs. The visuals are clean, and it is very easy to plop a number of visual representations on top of a query.

Looker forces a company into two streams of thought: an analyst first culture and essentially married to Looker. Looker really thrives at young or small companies with no centralized reporting or analytics/data science teams. For the few people who know SQL, they can create these items called Dimensions and Measures which are essentially saved queries for qualitative and quantitative data. Instead of having someone write a query with many caveats in a where clause or in cast type conversions, these Dimensions and Measures are meant to save you the trouble of writing them and be ready to drag and drop into an editor for a quick dashboard.

Unfortunately, this only useful for companies just getting out the gates with their data. If you have a column such as customerId, you cannot write SQL in looker to get an aggregate count of customer id's. You need to create a new dimension for it, and have it uploaded. If you have a count of customerIds restricted by some WHERE clause, then you will need to upload that new value as well. All the new measures and dimensions that you need have to be uploaded, which means that you will be responsible for learning Looker's LookML to upload new datapoints.

As a company gets larger and as more departments are formed, your Looker repository will suffer from a lack of grooming. There will be a ton of dimensions and measures all over the place in different schemas and with different underlying queries that no one person will be able to explain. There will also be a massive amount of unused charts and visuals that were created ad-hoc and are relatively unused because they were spur-of-the-moment replacements for an Excel sheet.

This also means that much of your business logic and data governance resides within the tool. If you were to divorce yourself from Looker, it would be a very messy process. Troubleshooting queries is already a challenge because you must look at the underlying code for a dimension or measure. Real trouble starts when Looker creates its own material views, which creates another layer of abstraction that you must then troubleshoot.

This process of ad-hoc adding usable dimensions and measures in a tool through LookML and then troubleshooting the queries underneath the hood is not scaleable and no company with a centralized analytics function should allow it to happen.

Invest in a tool which can intake an actual query through a database connection, and keep those queries thoroughly managed and groomed in a version control system. Create a dashboard environment in which a core group of people build an ecosystem of dashboards for specific requests and educate people on how to read and interpret them.

Do not get into the business of enabling everyone in your company to have the ability to create their own ad-hoc visuals and set of dimensions and measures; you will truly regret the chaos that comes with it.

Consider if you want a playground for people to create whatever dimensions, measures, and views that they want, or if you choose to proceed with more governance in your BI decision.

Also note that you will have to learn LookML, which isn't difficult, but it's also like why? You are paying to have to learn a company's proprietary wrapper on SQL on top of hiring people proficient in SQL.

If you do purchase Looker, I would highly consider centralizing the function of people who will create visuals and make things to address specific requests, and limit the views that Looker creates.

Looker is used to provide visuals for YoY trends and to produce lists of customerIds that are passed from BI platforms to downstream tools such as CRM and advertising platforms in lieu of a query.

I like the way that I can make practically any type of introduction of the information available to the application, and offer it with anybody set up as a client in my organization. They, in like manner, can do likewise. I like the way that I can investigate new information cutting and introduction alternatives as new needs and thoughts present themselves. It is anything but difficult to utilize once you get over the underlying steep expectation to absorb information, and phrasing hindrance (see "despises"). I additionally like the way that once I set up a report I don't need to continue refreshing it to get present information (accepting I've set it up legitimately!)

I personally haven't found much to dislike with Looker. My only complaint is the time it takes to run some reports, but it's my understanding this is being addressed with newer versions.

Put resources into preparing super clients inside each order. We representatives who were exceptionally talented with showcasing, tasks, promoting and building. Every workforce will have novel needs, so putting resources into a couple of masters will enable every division to benefit as much as possible from the apparatus.

Looker has helped us dispose of the information breadline and offer information to the clients when they need and how they need it without depending on somebody to hand it to them. It's likewise enabled us to spread information and information utilization to something beyond a bunch of clients, spreading it at organization level so everybody can get experiences out of their information.

Looker enables you to get going rapidly with it's prototyping ability and LookML usefulness. It makes it simple for our endeavor information group to get information before the client rapidly while then going in the background and adding it to our information warehouse.The models, investigates and looks are anything but difficult to explore once all set up. The SQL sprinter is an extraordinary element that assists with questioning the informational indexes that are accessible before making a plunge and making investigates. Dash-boarding and sharing reports are additionally extremely simple with Looker. It makes expanding information perceivability in the association extremely simple.

Security layer was somewhat perplexing. I think this because of the adaptability that they were attempting to incorporate with it.

Give colleagues appropriate preparing when you begin utilizing it as this will have an extraordinary long haul sway on the organization and ought to diminish the weight on the information science group.

Our organization was attempting to locate an incredible adaptable arrangement which could enable our workers to improve their way to deal with leading deals process, just as promoting by and large. Because of Looker, our organization has figured out how to increase our transformation rate, just as improve our profitability level and examination capacities.

Ease of use and amazing customer support are by far their best selling features. As a developer it's invaluable to have someone right away to help you with your problem, saving a lot of time and patience. As an end user, the navigating and use experience is really important on determining the level of trust in the data and the tool, and second, the likelyhood that they're going to continue trying to get insights from data. The platform used is very important and Looker achieves that successfully!

There isn't much I dislike, but some very minor inconveniences such as browsing between the documentation platform and the forums.

Looker has helped us get rid of the data breadline and give data to the users when they want and how they want it without relying on someone to hand it to them. It's also allowed us to spread data and data usage to more than just a handful of users, spreading it at company level so everyone can get insights out of their data.

I like the ease of use and the ability to share saved looks among coworkers.

I feel like custom dashboards are a missing element from the generic product offering. I would like to set up a page for every department leader that shows them relevant up-to-date information. There is an option to do this but it is far too complicated. When I reached out to looker for help I was surprised that they wanted to charge me so much to have someone help me set up these dashboards.

I'd recommend having one single employee spend the time and energy necessary to really understand the product and all of it's capabilities. I think we use looker for about 50-70% of it's capabilities. Since it is no longer one individual persons job, we often don't have the time to learn about further capabilities.

We use looker generally to access information for nearly all departments. KPI tracking, customer performance, sales and marketing effectiveness, detecting issues, and running reports.

Looker makes accessing customer and transactional data easy. From developing dashboards, charts and bespoke "Looks", our Marketing team were able to leverage insights about our customers, their purchasing history and trends with far greater easy than using BigQuery alone. Looker helped inform strategic decisions and business direction far more than we would have expected.

The ease at which a business user can navigate Looker is dependent on how well it has been set up by a technical expert. To add new dimensions or measures, or modify the way in which data is grouped, you will need to have technical support, which is often now always available.

Invest in training super users within each discipline. We employees who were highly skilled with marketing, operations, merchandising and engineering. Each faculty will have unique needs, so investing in a few specialists will help each department make the most of the tool.

Looker has helped us accurately report on current and historical sales performance, across multiple dimensions. We've been able to streamline our reporting processes. Specifically for marketing, we've gained a better understanding of our Customer LTV and identification of opportunity customer segments, as well as evaluate our highest performing acquisition channels. We also gained abetter understanding of the products customers were purchasing, which is a challenging task given we have a customisable product.

I like how Looker challenges me to push for more, dive deeper into the data and how easy to use it is. I really believe this is an amazing tool for data analytics and if you use it in a smart way it can help you improve your performance and business.

I don't like that sometimes there aren't enough variables to add to some looks and you have to request it to be done. I believe it would be more useful for the user to be able to implement any variable he wants.

Explore for yourself and never stop trying and learning. Looker is a great place to learn about every aspect of your business and space where you can improve your analytic skills.

I'm doing data analysis and it's helping me to perform better at my job. I've realised that looker has given me the tool to explore for myself and learn a lot, by making mistakes but making rights too.

I like the ability to look deeper into our sales and understand some of our key metrics that we're always tracking. I also like the ability to look into specific funnels of the business as opposed to the overall number.

I wish the user interface was better. Sometimes it is difficult to create the exact view I want in order to see the correct info. Also, unless someone has prior knowledge of the software it is very difficult to just pick it up.

I would recommend looker for data tracking

Being able to understand some of our trackables better. Without looker we wouldnt be able to see that detailed view.

That Looker allows you build a modelling layer over the data. It provides reusable SQL and also helps t ensure correct models and altering on common join problems. It's easy to explore data through the dashboards and then drill down into the data performing custom analytics.

Visualisations can be a bit limited and the PDTs always require processing the whole data set. This can be slow for very large and complex queries. It is also a bit wasteful for datasets with small updates. Would be nice to be able to do batch processing.

It has made our data warehouse available to the majority of our employees. It's particularly good for empowering the business development and marketing teams, allows them to create their own explores. Additionally it's makes it reliable to validate the explores people are creating by the data analysis team.

I love that you really don't need to know SQL to become an analyst and ask the right questions in Looker. I've trained my whole CSX team to use the tool and it has super charged us as a team.

I hate how long it takes since it never really caches the data. I have to really make sure the queries I write or the questions I ask are very limited as a result.

Looker is constantly making updates, they ship very quickly. I have a positive outlook of this product.

I have a real pulse on my business now. I know things basically in real time, and the visualizations have gotten much better in the 3 years I have used it.

Looker has done a nice job in understanding a users desire to use measures and dimensions to tell a story. The quick and easy accessibility of the data elements that are point click build are intuitive and very user friendly. Additionally, the top to bottom Filters, Visualization and data elements keep all of the information front and center and logically ordered for a power user and also to facilitate a discussion with stakeholders

The visualizations are somewhat limited compared to it's population. I would like to have an easier pathway for creating more different types of visuals (nods, etc.)

Integration of Health & Welfare data sets to provide reporting to Payers and Administrators in the space. We looked to create an exploration experience for users to uncover insights within their data that may not be apparent from the top level.

I love that its interface is so practical and easy to handle, it allows you to have visualizations of data to reports in a very practical and useful way, it also helps to make commercial decisions based on data and any other task that requires that analyze the data.

its learning curve is very complex to manage, although with some time and effort it is managed to manage in the best way

is a powerful and efficient tool for data analysis, thus achieving a greater reach and management of data

-Looker has an extensive data modelling layer ( not to be confused with statistical modelling). This is a feature that makes it stand apart from other tools. With the help of PDTs, we implement a lot of data transformation which wouldn't be very efficient on just another BI tool.

-With just a few lines of LookML code, you can join different data from source tables and view these fields in one place to be able to build Looks on it, without writing long lines of sql.

-Once you build a Look (one report) with drag/drop and filters, it is easy to to visualize data, add calculation fields, etc.

-When you run an individual look, you can see the underlying SQL generated and you can easily figure out if the report is doing exactly what you need it to

-Admin features like content validator let you check if changing views/dimensions/measures at one place is affecting anything else the rest of you ecosystem.

-Prompt Customer Support

-Slow learning curve - The terminologies like Looks, Explore, Model etc, as well as the site navigation for these is not very intuitive to a first time user, even thought he/she might be experienced in other BI tools. LookML might also seem non-intuitive at first, but is easy to learn and very useful.

-Data Visualization options are plenty, but not as great as other tools.

-Some complicated Looks tend to load very slowly, even though the actual query would have run pretty fast. Affects load time in Dashboards as well API

- Can be time consuming for exploratory analysis - but best once you know exactly what to implement.

If you need some tool to provide reports to a large amount of audience, make it self serve to an extent and have a strong team to manage it, you can go for it.

We have been able to implement a whole lot of our reporting requirements in Looker. Some of the savvy sales or higher management are able to gather simple insights from the UI by themselves. Daily/monthly tracking happens through dashboards in mails or UI.

I love how intuitive looker is as it means I can generally be more independent and it reduces the pressure on our data team.

I'm generally pretty happy with Looker - I think the only thing from my perspective that I would change would be the price as it would free up budget for other areas of the company.

Give team members proper training when you start using it as this will have a great long-term impact on the company and should relieve the stress on the data science team.

I use Looker to analyse the impact of our CRM campaigns. This generally involves analysing CTR, LTV, revenue, impressions etc. It allows us to target users in a more intelligent manner based on these insights.

Looker absolutely has the best people and technology in this industry. I was absolutely blown away by the quality of the support that they're able to provide, and with incredible speed. This is a company that really cares about its people and its customers; it's clear that they invest in both.

Within our proof of concept, Looker was able to form a genuine partnership, making solid recommendations that will yield rapid results.

On top of that, Looker has granular permissions, robust administration tools that allow for setting permissions by group or individual, and the ability to design what end-users can or cannot change within their environment.

Finally, Looker has a public help-center that has a wealth of excellent information, both written and on video. Don't overlook this, or you'll sell yourself short.

Unfortunately, Looker isn't free. While there is a need to learn a new language, the language is intuitive and relatively fast to learn if you're relatively experienced with SQL.

Compare Looker to other products in the same space simultaneously. For us, Looker was the clear winner.

- Health scores are becoming a reality

- Cohort analysis is starting to take shape

- Detailed analysis of a huge dataset

- Streamlining internal processes to ensure we are able to service more customers in a shorter timeframe, and with greater quality.

- Visualizations and the ability to embed those views and visualizations into a view that our customers could use.

I love the fact that our many different departments and people of different skill levels are able to investigate and explore our data without having to actively interact with an analyst. Also, the ability to create a single dashboard to be usable for multiple different people's individual information using user attributes saves me so much time!

I struggle with looker's slowness. We've noticed that at high login times, it can take up to 5 minutes just to load an explore or dashboard, not including running. If we could find a way to be able to allow people to not deal with that, it would be awesome!

Everything from Sales Operations to Product Optimization to Finance Spend. Being able to have all of our data on a single host is a huge advantage to cross-team communication.