You will be able to connect GA4, Google Sheets and other sources to Looker Studio and understand what each connector brings.
Jun's sketch from lesson 6.1 had eight boxes on it. Six of them needed numbers from GA4. One needed Meta ad spend. And the most important one, sales against target, needed numbers that lived in the furniture shop's point-of-sale system and a spreadsheet the owner's sister updated every Friday. For two years, the shop's reports had been screenshots from three places pasted into one email. The dashboard would only be worth building if it could pull all of that into one page.
This lesson shows how Looker Studio connects to each kind of source, and what to watch for when you combine them.
Looker Studio is Google's free dashboard tool. You build reports in a web browser, drag charts onto a page, and each chart reads from a data source you connect. When the source updates, the charts update. There is a paid version called Looker Studio Pro with extra features for larger teams, but the free version does everything this module needs.
To start, open Looker Studio with the same Google account that has access to your GA4 property, create a blank report, and add data. You will see a list of connectors. Each connector knows how to read one kind of source.
Google's own connectors are free and cover its own products: GA4, Google Ads, Search Console, Google Sheets, BigQuery and a few others. Connecting GA4 takes a minute. Choose the GA4 connector, pick the account and property, and add it. Every dimension and metric from GA4 then appears in the panel on the right, ready to drag into charts.
Jun connected the shop's GA4 property, its Google Ads account and its Search Console property. That covered six of his eight boxes.
Data from platforms outside Google is less simple. There is no Google-built connector for Meta Ads or TikTok Ads. Instead, the connector gallery includes partner connectors, built by other companies, that pull data from those platforms. Many of them are paid, often as a monthly subscription, and some offer a free tier with limits. Check what a connector costs and what access it asks for before you authorise it, since it will be reading your ad account.
The free alternative is a Google Sheet you update yourself. Once a month, or once a week, export the numbers you need from Meta Ads Manager (date, campaign, spend, results) and paste them into a sheet with the same columns every time. Looker Studio reads the sheet like any other source.
For a small business that checks the dashboard monthly, the sheet is usually enough. It takes ten minutes a month and costs nothing. A paid connector starts to make sense when you need daily data, have many accounts, or the manual copying keeps getting forgotten.
Jun chose the sheet for Meta spend. The owner was not paying a subscription for one chart.
The same approach solves the bigger problem: the shop's real sales. Point-of-sale systems, booking tools and CRMs each store data differently, and few have a free Looker Studio connector. But almost all of them can export to a spreadsheet, and many small businesses already keep a sales sheet anyway.
Jun set up a Google Sheet called "Monthly sales" with four columns: month, channel, orders and sales in SGD. The owner's sister fills it in from the point-of-sale system when she does the Friday update. He added a second tab for monthly targets. Both tabs connect to Looker Studio through the Google Sheets connector.
A few habits keep sheets working as data sources. Put headings in the first row and nothing above them. Keep one kind of data per column, with no merged cells or subtotals in the middle. Enter dates in a consistent format the sheet recognises as dates, not as text. And never rename or reorder columns once the dashboard depends on them, because charts will break silently or show blanks.
Some charts need data from two sources at once. Jun wanted a chart showing Meta spend next to the purchases GA4 credited to Paid Social, and another showing GA4 sessions next to real sales by month.
Looker Studio does this with blending. You choose two or more sources and tell Looker Studio which field they share, called the join key: usually a date, a month, or a campaign name. It then lines up rows with the same value in that field and puts their numbers side by side in one chart.
The join only works when the values match exactly. A GA4 campaign called "2026-11-sofa-launch" will not join to a sheet row that says "Sofa launch Nov". This is where the naming rules from module 2 pay off a second time. If your UTM campaign names follow one pattern, and you use the same names in your sheets and ad platforms, blending works. If they do not, the chart shows blanks or zeros, with no error to tell you why.
Dates need the same care. If GA4 reports by day and your sheet records by month, blend on month, and make sure both sources express the month the same way.
When a blended chart shows unexpected blanks, look at the join key values in each source side by side. The cause is usually a spelling or a date format.
Each data source in Looker Studio uses someone's credentials to read the data. By default it is the person who connected it, which means viewers you share the report with can see the charts without needing their own GA4 access. Lesson 6.4 covers sharing in more detail.
Google also limits how much data the GA4 connector can request in a period. A report with dozens of charts on one page, refreshed by many viewers, can hit those limits and show errors until they reset. One more reason to keep the page short. Your first connections can be much smaller than Jun's: GA4 on one side, one sheet of monthly sales or leads on the other.
Create a Looker Studio report connected to your GA4 property and one Google Sheet holding monthly sales or leads.
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