Looker Studio becomes Data Studio…again
Shortly after the announcement of Looker Studio being renamed back to Data Studio, I thought back to a report I created a few years ago to track the adoption of the term “Looker Studio” using Google Trends data…it was the reverse phenomenon following the name change in October 2022.
Now, one might wonder how long it will take for the term “Data Studio” to be reused. I’m convinced that things should move quite quickly this time.
There are several reasons pointing toward a rapid re-adoption, but to highlight just two obvious ones:
- Users prefer the name “Data Studio”, and some never got used to saying “Looker Studio”… until recently.
- This time, the announcement of the name change was immediately followed two days later by a total switch: domain name change, documentation updates, renaming of the community forum, renaming of the Measure Slack channel, an info banner displayed within the tool, etc…
Shared report with Google Trends data
But now, we need to measure so that the data can confirm this belief: I reworked the original report to use the same foundation, more than three years after its creation.
However, I might as well take this opportunity to bring this interactive report to the next level:
- Data is no longer manually retrieved via the Google Trends web interface and stored in a Google Sheets file. This time, the data is ingested into Google Cloud and processed to be stored in a BigQuery reporting table with a daily refresh.
- The visual design has been overhauled.
- The reporting is more sophisticated in terms of dynamic data presentation and interactivity…I had a lot of fun with it.
A few hours of work produced a result that can be reused for various purposes and my different analytics activities.
As for the re-adoption of the name “Data Studio,” all that’s left is to track the search volumes of both terms and their respective shares.
Down the road, I’d like to migrate the ingestion system, which currently uses an unofficial solution, over to the Google Trends API. This recent API was presented at Superweek Analytics Summit by its lead, Daniel Waisberg. The API is currently only available in a test Alpha version, and I submitted an access request this week.
Over time, I will also add annotations for events and announcements that could influence the interest in the term “Data Studio” over time. The next milestone remains Google Cloud Next. To be continued.
The video demo
Here a small demo through this video
