Performance Marketers: How do you handle reporting & analysis? (GA4, Looker, Excel?)

[History86]

Depending on your budget.

Fivetran -> bigquery -> Looker would be my way to go if you can do this yourself.

There’s lots of SQL capabilities in bigquery that can get you some fantastic tables for reporting.

Otherwise, have you considered a CDP or an alternative to a CDP?
Is your branch ecommerce, d2c, b2b?
Does your tech stack has a CRM?

[dani_estuary]

Honestly for a one person team I’d keep it simple. Looker Studio hooked up to GA4 plus the ad platform APIs will cover 80% of what you need without paying for anything. You can build a basic dashboard once and then it updates daily so you’re not copying numbers into Excel. Hubspot has some native connectors too which makes stitching conversion data back in a lot easier. If you want to get fancy later you can add BigQuery as a data store, but don’t overcomplicate yet imo

Couple qs for you: how often do you actually need fresh data, daily or weekly? Do you care more about top of funnel (spend, clicks) or closed deals and ROI in Hubspot? Knowing that helps figure out whether free tools are enough or if you’d want something that automates the plumbing.

And as a bit of shameless promo: if you ever get tired of wiring APIs and fixing dashboards, Estuary is good for just piping your ads + GA + Hubspot data into one place (like Snowflake or BigQuery) automatically so Looker or Hubspot reporting just works. I work there, so bias alert, but it’s nice for solo marketers.

[mrjyler]

a lot of tools, which can definitely eat up a lot of time. One thing that might help is automating your data collection and analysis using APIs – you can pull data directly from each platform and consolidate it in one place, like a Google Sheet or a BI tool like Looker Studio

[TheLordVader69]

I’m using looker studio for ease of reporting and real-time tracking. Using it for budget tracking, performance tracking and using a reporting ninja plugin to import meta, google, search console, youtube analytics, ga4, social Media organic performance, all in the same report.
I’m independently looking after analytics and ppc.

[GoogleAdExpert]

For lean setup: pipe Google Ads + GA4 straight into Looker Studio for live dashboards, then export weekly snapshots to Excel only for deeper dives.
Layer HubSpot offline conversions once ready, and you’ll cut 80% of the manual updating.

[ppcwithyrv]

I have a VA pull reporting manually and pivot and drop into a deck and I/ buyer write the insights. The most simple approach works best.

[Available_Cup5454]

Pick one source of truth, connect all platforms to it, and drop the extra metrics. That keeps reporting consistent and fast.

[Ok-Blackberry-8868]

We use looker

[MKNDigital]

Legit on the platform

[Viper2014]

>and then Excel that I’m constantly updating manually.

yeah we don’t do that anymore.

>I know tools like Looker Studio exist, but I’m not sure if that’s a good one for a one-person team.

it is the best free resource for resporting

That said, you will need to automate your data sources and then import them to lookerstudio. There are a gazilion ways to do that, paid and free.

That said, unless you have a gazilion of sourrces, the free version of Funnel.io might work in your case.

Have fun
: )

[rddevv]

Looker Studio is perfect for something like this. The key is setting up your data to automatically update your dashboard. A tool like SyncRange[.]com can do this for you and if you use Shopify as a D2C company there is app too. If you need more than the free plan, let me know and I can give you a few months access to a paid plan and help with the setup so you can see if looker will work for you. 

[QuantumWolf99]

I automate most client reporting through Looker Studio with direct API connections to all platforms… saves hours of manual data pulling and creates real-time dashboards that update automatically. Way better than jumping between native platforms.

For high-ticket B2B like you’re describing, I layer in HubSpot integration to track full customer journeys from first click to closed deal… the offline conversion setup is crucial for accurate attribution when sales cycles are 30+ days.

Triple Whale or Northbeam are worth considering if budget allows… they handle multi-touch attribution better than GA4 alone.

[MediumBullfrog8688]

Depends on what the client prefers to be their source of truth, if they can trust GA4 data just report out of there but optimize from ads

[sumit_patil]

I was in a similar situation last year and then I discovered a google sheet extension called – adveronix. Now I have automated most of the reports in Google sheet and hardly need to go to the platform for data related queries. There’s a paid version of it if needed but the free version gets the work done with few monthly changes in automated report

[ThoughtMetric]

Full transparency, I am on the ThoughtMetric team (we also use ThoughtMetric internally so I can attest to it very well as it is a big part of my own reporting setup).

If you’re a one-person marketing team juggling GA4, ad platforms, and spreadsheets, the smartest move is to simplify. For e-commerce specifically, ThoughtMetric can take a lot of that manual work off your plate. It pulls in data from Meta, Google, TikTok, and Shopify (or other carts) automatically and gives you a clean attribution view without the spreadsheet chaos. You’ll see which channels, campaigns, and even ads are actually driving purchases.