Data Studio for agency client reporting.

Google renamed Looker Studio back to Data Studio on 16 April 2026, the name it carried before 2022. Its release notes describe a rebrand and an updated home page.

For an agency the rename changes nothing about how a report is built. Searches, help threads and connector listings still use both names, so expect to meet both for a while. Looker, Google's enterprise BI product, is a different thing.

Most agencies start their client reporting here, for good reasons.

• Cost

  The tool itself is free with a Google account, so there is no licence to justify before the first report.

• Sharing

  A report is a link. Access can be limited to named people, and clients view it without a seat being bought for each one.

• Google's own sources

  Connectors for Google's analytics, ads, search and spreadsheet products are built in.

• Reuse

  A finished report can be copied and pointed at another client's data, which is how most agencies first reuse their work.

The trouble is rarely the charts. It is what sits underneath each report once there are many of them.

• Copies drift

  Each client's report is its own copy. A fix made to one does not reach the others, so after a year the copies disagree on layout, filters and definitions.

• Live connections

  A connector usually queries the platform when someone opens the report. Many charts, many clients and a busy morning add up to slow pages and quota errors from the platform's API.

• Blends

  Joining two platforms happens inside the report, so each blend is rebuilt per report, and a mistake in one is invisible from the others.

• Definitions

  A calculated field lives in the report that defines it. Two reports can compute cost per lead two different ways and nothing flags it.

• Paid connectors

  Sources without a Google connector usually need a third-party one, often priced per account or per source, so the bill grows with the roster.

The fix agencies converge on is to stop asking each report to fetch and join data. Load every client's platforms into one data warehouse, model them once, and point every report at the modelled tables.

Then a report is a view, not a pipeline. Charts read tables that already agree, a definition changes in one place, and opening a report queries your warehouse instead of every platform's API.

The cost moves rather than disappears. The warehouse and the modelling are work and a bill, and that is the honest trade to weigh against fixing copies by hand.

SightShark is the layer underneath. Every client's sources land daily in a data warehouse you own, modelled to one name, one type, one grain and one currency per metric, and Data Studio dashboards read those tables.

Report templates arrive pre-wired to each client's own tables, so a new client's report starts from the same definitions as everyone else's. If part of your team prefers Power BI or Tableau, those read the same tables.