Maximizing the Impact of Data Analytics in Marketing: Looker Adds New Capabilities to Its Platform

Looker unveils new features on Google Cloud

Looker, Google’s new data analytics acquisition, today announced the availability of new features including complete support for the Google Marketing Platform, upgrades for application builders, and an update to Marketplace where customers can access and share newly built data experiences.

“Looker is continuously evolving to meet the unique and ever growing needs of every business in the way that is best for them,” said Colin Zima, head of Looker Analytics and Strategy at Google Cloud. “Whether we’re providing multiple choices of cloud providers, the ability to customize data experiences, or the unique solutions coming from our deeper integration with Google Cloud, Looker continues to focus on delivering solutions that have maximum impact on the day-to-day business outcomes of our customers.”

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Here’s a detailed overview of Looker’s new capabilities:

1. Looker Blocks provide a foundation for robust and shareable analytics for Google Marketing Platform advertising and web data. Marketers can now access data through an interactive interface, light machine-learning enabled predictions, paths for pushing insights back into Google Marketing Platform. Developed in conjunction with experts at Google, the following Looker Blocks are available now: Google Analytics 360, Campaign Manager + Display and Video 360, Search Ads 360, plus a refreshed version of the Google Ads Block.
2. Cross-filtering enables marketers to seamlessly uncover new customer insights and patterns not readily evident in a dashboard. Marketers can now surface metrics on tiles with a single click, which in turn provides them with endless opportunities for self-service and uncover new data points and insights.
3. Looker has also introduced performance enhancements such as aggregate awareness to make queries faster and less expensive; parallel persistent derived tables (PDT) builds for customers to increase how many PDTs can be built at a time per connection; faster data downloads when streaming query results; and pooled database connections to reduce query latency.
4. It has also attempted to improve the overall experience for model developers. Looker now sports a redesigned Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that makes workflows intuitive with more advanced controls; an object browser that simplifies product navigation and easily tracks and reuses available objects; a single repository that can be shared across instances to share model development; and folders that improve project organization and collaboration.
5. Google also plans to release more features for Looker system administrators to provide finer controlling capabilities to manage roles and groups across larger enterprises. These features include the ability to analyze and control system activity, manage users and groups, and merge Looker-based permission with those of other enterprise systems.
6. Looker has also debuted its new marketplace which will help marketers and sellers access and share newly built data experiences. They can also deploy custom applications built by the Looker community faster. The marketplace will also host all Looker Blocks including the recently released COVID-19 Data Block.
7. Looker’s Data Dictionary is yet another feature that has been introduced to help developers quickly build applications using Looker’s extension framework. It provides the ability to quickly audit all LookML fields for visualizing the relationship between datasets and explorers to understand what data sets are used the most and what explorers are duplicative.
8. A new development framework for Looker 7 has also been released which allows developers to customize data experiences within Looker and embed those experiences into existing enterprise applications and workflows.

What Does This Mean for Marketers?

Looker was acquired by GoogleOpens a new window earlier this year for a whopping $2.6 billion to bolster its footprint in the BI market. Looker’s latest release combines performance, data and development updates that have been designed to cater to marketers’ evolving needs as consumer behaviors continue to change.

Looker’s announcement comes at an interesting time for marketers as demand rebounds and businesses look to using data at a greater scale, faster, while optimizing costs. As marketing budgets come under scrutiny, reporting and analytics will play a key role in determining the future Martech investments.

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With its latest release, Looker is offering brands a compelling, end-to-end BI solution purpose built for marketers. While these enhancements seem promising, the BI space is already crowded, It will be fascinating to see how Looker is able to help marketers maximize the value of their BI investments in these turbulent times.