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How to build fast and stable Looker Studio dashboards
How to build fast and stable Looker Studio dashboards

Steps that will help speed up your Looker Studio report

Simon Erik Fransson avatar
Written by Simon Erik Fransson
Updated over a week ago

There are a few different factors that affects load times in Looker Studio, which also affects what you can do to improve performance. Here are our recommended steps.

1. Reducing the complexity of your Dashboard

  • Number of widgets - at present Looker Studio will perform one query against Funnel for each widget in your report, even if they are displaying the same data (i.e. the same segmentation or breakdown) filtered in different ways. Minimizing the number of widgets therefore will have great impact on performance. Splitting your report into multiple pages might be a good place to start.

  • Transformation logic - having Looker Studio do a lot of data crunching will slow down your report, for example using Blends and Calculated Fields. Try to move as much of this as possible into Funnel and allow Looker Studio to focus on loading your graphs, not running calculations.

  • Cardinality - viewing your data by Date, Traffic Source, Market and Campaign compared to say Traffic Source and Market only will mean both Funnel and Looker Studio will have to process a lot more data. So, basically removing dimensions that aren't absolutely crucial can have good impacts on performance.

  • Filters - filters applied to your report are performed in Looker Studio rather than in Funnel. That means Funnel will have to load, process and transfer all data relevant for your query, and then let Looker Studio apply the filtering. This goes for widget specific as well as report wide filters. A common pitfall is for example a "Top 5 Campaigns by Impressions" widget, which will have to load data for every campaign from Funnel, before Looker Studio filters out the top 5.

  • Time period - essentially the same thing as a filter, but treated somewhat differently in both Funnel and Looker Studio. However the consequence is the same, if you have a report wide or widget specific period setting for a year, that means data for a full year will have to be loaded, processed and transferred. Limiting the number of widgets that displays time series, reducing the length of each time series, or displaying time series data for a summary rather each of your campaigns are things that can have a positive impact here.

  • Type of widget - analogous to the item above, using the right widget for your use case can be important. I.e. using a time series widget when you are interested in totals will cause a lot of extra data to be queries.

2. Filter your Data Share in Funnel

Setting up a Data Share in Funnel gives you the ability to limit the number of fields available in Looker Studio which can make it easier to work with. It also gives you the ability to apply filters to further reduce the amount of data that gets sent back to Looker Studio.

3. Going via a Data Warehouse

If you are unable to get satisfying performance out of our direct integration to Looker Studio, or require highly segmented data in your reports, it might be time to upgrade your setup to use a Data Warehouse like BigQuery. You can check out our articles Share to Looker Studio via BigQuery or Google BigQuery for beginners.

Still having issues?

Please reach out via the in-app support chat or send an email to support@funnel.io. For us to give you the best possible help we refer you to the article How to report a problem. We'll do our best to help and will update this article with new tips as we learn more.

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