How to Create a Monthly Report in Looker
Building a recurring monthly report in Looker is one of the best ways to keep your team informed and track your KPIs without starting from scratch every four weeks. Setting it up correctly means you can build it once and let it run automatically. This guide will walk you through creating a Looker dashboard, configuring it for monthly reporting, and scheduling it for automatic delivery.
Before You Build: Planning Your Monthly Report
Jumping straight into Looker without a plan is like starting a road trip without a map. Before you write a single line of LookML or create a single tile, take a few minutes to iron out the details. A little preparation now will save you hours of revisions later.
1. Define Your Purpose and Audience
Who is this report for, and what do they need to know? A report for your C-suite will focus on high-level outcomes like revenue, ROI, and customer acquisition cost. A report for your marketing team, on the other hand, will dive deeper into campaign performance, channel metrics, and conversion rates.
Ask yourself:
Who is the primary audience? (e.g., Leadership, Marketing Team, Sales Reps)
What single question must this report answer? (e.g., "How did our marketing channels perform last month?" or "Are we on track to hit our quarterly sales goals?")
What decisions will this report help them make? (e.g., Should we increase ad spend on a specific channel? Which sales reps need more coaching?)
2. Identify Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Based on your audience and purpose, list the specific metrics you need to include. Trying to cram everything into one report is a common mistake that leads to confusion. A focused report is an effective report.
A few examples:
For an E-commerce Monthly Report: Total Revenue, Average Order Value (AOV), Conversion Rate, Top Selling Products, Revenue by Traffic Source.
For a SaaS Marketing Report: New Website Visitors, Free Trial Signups, Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), MQL-to-Paid Conversion Rate, Cost Per Acquisition (CPA).
For a Sales Team Report: New Deals Created, Deals Won, Average Deal Size, Sales Cycle Length, Win Rate by Rep.
3. Check Your Data Sources and Explores
Finally, confirm you have the necessary data available in Looker. Your company's Looker instance is built on "Explores," which are curated datasets prepared by your data team. Before you start building, check which Explores contain the fields (or dimensions and measures, in Looker terms) for the KPIs you just listed. If a metric isn't available, you may need to speak with your data team first.
Step 1: Build Your Dashboard for Reporting
In Looker, reports aren't built in a standalone "report builder." Instead, they are typically based on dashboards. You will build a dashboard that perfectly represents your monthly report, and then you’ll schedule that dashboard to be sent out. Think of your dashboard as the live, interactive template for the static PDF or PNG that gets emailed to your team.
Creating a New Dashboard
Start by creating a clean slate for your report.
From the Looker home page, navigate to the folder where you want your dashboard to live.
Click the New button in the top right and select Dashboard.
Give your dashboard a clear, specific name like "Monthly Marketing Performance Report" or "Executive KPI Summary - Last Month."
You now have a blank dashboard, ready for you to add your data visualizations, which Looker calls "Tiles."
Adding Visualizations (Tiles)
Each KPI on your list will be represented by a Tile on your dashboard. You can create these Tiles directly from an Explore and then add them to your dashboard.
Start from an Explore: Choose an Explore and find the core metric you want to visualize. For example, if you want to show monthly revenue, find the "Sales" or "Orders" Explore.
Select Your Data: In the Explore view, select the dimensions and measures you need. For a simple monthly revenue trend, you might select a timeframe (e.g., "Order Date - Month") as your dimension and a financial metric (e.g., "Sum of Order Total") as your measure.
Run the Query: Click Run to see the data table results.
Choose Your Visualization: Under the "Visualization" tab, select the chart type that best tells your story. Then, customize the labels, colors, and axes to make it clear and on-brand.
Save to Dashboard: Click the gear icon in the top right of the Explore and select Save to Dashboard. Find the dashboard you just created, give your Tile a title (like "Monthly Revenue Trend"), and click Save.
Repeat this process for every KPI you need on your report, methodically building it one Tile at a time.
Choose the Right Visualizations
How you present your data matters just as much as the data itself. A confusing chart can hide important insights.
Line or Area Charts: Perfect for showing a trend over time, such as revenue by month or website traffic over the last year.
Bar or Column Charts: Use these to compare values across categories, like sales by region or leads by marketing channel.
Single Value Visualizations: Ideal for highlighting a single, critical KPI like total MQLs for the month or the overall conversion rate. It's a big, can't-miss-it number.
Tables: Great for showing detailed, row-level data like top-performing campaigns with all their associated metrics (Spend, Clicks, Conversions, ROI).
Pie or Donut Charts: Use these sparingly, and only when showing parts of a whole that add up to 100%, such as the traffic or budget share per channel.
Step 2: Set Up Your Filters for Monthly Views
Once your visualizations are arranged on the dashboard, you need to add filters to ensure the report always shows data for the correct timeframe - in this case, for the previous full month.
Adding a Date Filter to Your Dashboard
While in edit mode on your dashboard, click Filters from the top toolbar and select Add Filter.
A window will pop up. Choose the date field you want to filter by, like "Order Date" or "Lead Created Date." Note: All the Tiles on your dashboard need to be built from Explores that contain this date field for the filter to work on them.
Once you add the filter, you'll need to link it to each Tile. For every Tile, click the three-dot menu, select Edit Filter, choose the date field to connect to, and save.
Setting a Default Timeframe
This is the most critical step for automation. You want the filter to default to "previous month" so it updates automatically a few days into a new month.
Still in edit mode, click on the filter you just created from the top of the dashboard.
In the settings, look for the "Default Value" option.
Instead of a static date range, choose one of Looker’s relative date options. From the dropdowns, select is in the past, type 1, and then select complete months. This tells Looker to always show the last full month's worth of data.
Save your dashboard changes.
Now, anytime someone opens this dashboard, it will automatically be showing data for the previous full month. More importantly, when it's automatically emailed, it will have the right data.
Step 3: Schedule Your Report for Automatic Delivery
With a visually clean dashboard and smart filters in place, the final step is to put it on autopilot. Looker's scheduler is a powerful tool that transforms your dashboard from an on-demand resource into a proactive reporting engine.
From your dashboard (not in edit mode), click the gear icon in the top-right corner and select Schedule delivery.
Under Destination, choose where you want the report sent. This could be email, a Slack channel, or a webhook. For email, you can enter multiple comma-separated addresses.
For Format, PDF is usually the best option for a visual monthly report that needs to be shared. If your audience needs to work with the data, you can choose CSV.
Now for the Recurrence. Set it to Monthly. You can choose the day of the month (e.g., the 1st or 2nd) and the time you want it to be sent. A good practice is to schedule it for the morning of the first business day of the new month.
Under Filters, double-check that your date filter is set to "is in the past 1 complete months." The scheduler allows you to override the dashboard's default filters for scheduled deliveries if needed.
Finally, click Save. Your monthly report is now fully automated!
Tips for a More Effective Looker Report
Automation is just the first step. To make your report truly valuable, consider these final touches.
Add Context with Text Tiles: Numbers are great, but context is better. Add a Text Tile to your dashboard to include a short summary, explain any anomalies ("Note: We ran a flash sale from the 15th to the 18th, which explains the revenue spike"), or remind the reader of goals.
Don't Overwhelm the Reader: A good report has a visual hierarchy. Place the most important KPI (your "north star" metric) as a Single Value visualization at the top left, as this is where people's eyes go first.
Test Your Schedule: Before entrusting your report to run for a year, send a one-time test to yourself to ensure the formatting, filters, and data all look correct in the final PDF or email.
Final Thoughts
Creating a monthly report in Looker comes down to thoughtful planning, building a clean dashboard with the right visualizations, applying smart date filters, and letting the scheduler do the heavy lifting. Once it’s set up, you have a reliable reporting system that delivers consistent insights directly to your team's inbox every month.
While Looker is a powerfully customizable platform, we know the learning curve can be steep for busy teams who need answers now, not after weeks of training. The process of wading through Explores and configuring each report piece by piece costs time you don't have. That’s why we built Graphed. We connect directly to your data sources—like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce—and let you create real-time dashboards just by asking questions in plain English. Instead of building manually, you can simply ask, "create a dashboard showing last month's revenue by channel," and have a fully built, shareable dashboard in seconds, letting you get straight to the insights.