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Digital Marketing Academy · Lesson

Dashboards That Drive Action

Looker Studio and BI.

Reports vs Dashboards

A report answers a fixed question once; a dashboard is a living interface people return to for decisions. The best dashboards are not data dumps, they are designed to drive a specific action.

Before building, ask: who reads this, what decision do they make, and how often? A dashboard with no decision attached is decoration that nobody opens twice.

Connecting BI to the Warehouse

BI tools, Looker Studio, Looker, Tableau, Power Bi, connect to your marts layer, never to raw tables. They query modeled, governed data so every chart inherits the same correct definitions.

For performance and cost, point dashboards at pre-aggregated mart tables rather than billion-row event tables. A dashboard that re-scans raw events on every refresh is slow and expensive.

BI connection rule
[ marts.marketing_performance ]  <- BI reads here
[ raw.ga4_events ]               <- BI NEVER reads here

Looker Studio -> BigQuery (marts dataset)
Looker        -> LookML on marts
Tableau       -> live or extract on marts

All lessons in this course

  1. Why a Warehouse
  2. ETL and Connectors
  3. Modeling Marketing Data
  4. Dashboards That Drive Action
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