How to add Google Analytics measurement ID to Looker

Have you ever wondered, “Is anyone still looking at the dashboards I built in Looker Studio?” If you know a dashboard nobody cares about anymore, you can propose to stop updating it and save resources and effort. In this article, I’ll show you how to add a Google Analytics measurement ID to Looker Studio and how to check the view reports for your dashboards.

Get the Google Analytics measurement ID

I assume you already have a Google Analytics measurement ID if you’re interested in this topic. If you don’t have one yet, see the guide to getting a Google Analytics ID. You still create a GA4 measurement ID with a web data stream; in the website URL field of the data stream settings, enter lookerstudio.google.com.

Add the Google Analytics measurement ID to Looker Studio

Step 1: Open a dashboard in your Looker Studio. If you want to add the measurement ID to several dashboards, you have to open each one of them.

Step 2: Open the report settings. Click File on the menu and select Report settings.

Step 3: Enter the measurement ID in the “Google Analytics Measurement IDs” field. You can enter several IDs separated by commas.

After adding the measurement ID to your dashboards, you need to wait about 6 to 12 hours before the data shows up in the reports. The Realtime report is quicker: you can see visits there after about 5 minutes.

View dashboard views in Google Analytics

To see how many views your Looker Studio dashboards get, select the property you created in the top menu. Then, in the left menu, go to Reports > Engagement > Pages and screens. If you only see URLs instead of titles, choose “Page title and screen class” in the dropdown.

You can click a column name to sort the data in ascending or descending order and see which dashboard pages get the most or fewest views. Combine this with a date range, for example the last month, and you’ll know which dashboard pages people still open and which ones have been forgotten.

If you’re interested in a specific dashboard page, look it up in the search bar below the chart.

Conclusion

Adding a Google Analytics measurement ID to Looker Studio takes very little time, but it really helps data people review how useful their dashboards are on a regular basis.

It’s hard to get an honest answer when you ask each colleague whether they still look at a certain dashboard. Most people will tell you to keep it, either because they’re afraid they’ll need it someday or because they don’t know what their teammates think. With view numbers from Google Analytics, you’ll have a much stronger case when you propose to stop updating a forgotten dashboard.