Looker Studio (beta)

Before you start

To connect Google Data Studio to Select Star, you will need...

Access to Google Workspace admin console
Access to Google Cloud project for BigQuery exports

1. Extract session

For the best outcome, we strongly recommend you follow the steps below using an new incognito window to sign into Looker Studio.

Google Data Studio does not currently provide APIs that are necessary for the functioning of Select Star. For this reason, Select Star is forced to intercept the user account.

To provide access to Google Data Studio, we recommend to create a dedicated user account for Select Star that serves as a service account. However, it is not necessary and not required, especially during the trial and evaluation stage.

1. Open "Incognito Mode" in your web browser. Perform this step even if you are currently logged in to the desired user account to obtain its cookies correctly.

2. Sign to a Google user account with access to Google Data Studio.

3. Open Google Data Studio dashboard in Google Chrome.

4. Open Developer console in Google. To open the developer console in Google Chrome, open the Chrome Menu in the upper-right-hand corner of the browser window and select More Tools > Developer Tools. You can also use Option + ⌘ + J (on macOS), or Shift + CTRL + J (on Windows/Linux).

5. Select tab "Network" in the Developer console. Refresh the browser tab to fill the "Network" tab with data. Search for request to "datastudio.google.com".

6. Find a successful request that is sent to lookerstudio.google.com, then open context menu and select Copy as cURL

7. Keep this value safe as you will need it to create integrations in final steps.

If the Domain column (or any other) is not displayed in your Network tab, you can enable it by right clicking the header of the request table, and making sure the corresponding column is checked.

The curl request should look like the one below

curl 'https://lookerstudio.google.com/batchedDataV2?appVersion=20231211_0700' \
  -H 'authority: lookerstudio.google.com' \
  -H 'accept: application/json, text/plain, */*' \
  -H 'accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.9' \
  -H 'cache-control: no-cache' \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -H 'cookie: [A VERY LONG STRING]
  .... MORE HEADERS ...
  --data-raw '[A VERY LONG STRING]' \
  --compressed

2. Setup Google Workspace exports

To set up a BigQuery Export configuration, you first need to set up a BigQuery project in the Google Cloud console. To analyze activity, including calculating the popularity of individual reports, it is necessary to provide Select Star access to audit logs and usage reports for Google Data Studio by exporting them to Google BigQuery.

To set up a BigQuery Export configuration, follow Google Workspace documentation about "Set up service log exports to BigQuery".

Note that the export only contains logs from its setup until it is disabled. Exporting them to BigQuery may take Google up to 48 hours, and then Select Star should ingest them within 24 hours.

3. Setup GCP service account for accessing exports

Next create a service account with the permissions to read the project with exports:

BigQuery Data Viewer
BigQuery Job User

This service account will be later used for reading the activity logs.

4. Connect Google Data Studio API to Select Star

1. Go to the Select Star Settings. Click Data in the sidebar, then + Add to create a new Data Source.

2. Fill form in the required information:

CURL command with cookies: CURL with cookies that you extracted in step 1.5 of the instructions.

3. Proceed to next step and select Skip Activity Source if you don't want to use popularity feature in Select Star.

4. Proceed to next step and select Add Activity Source dropdown and fill Activity Log Source together with supplying BQ service account json with credentials that you created in step 3.

4. Chart names

Pages in Looker Studio can contain one or multiple charts. Looker Studio offers a canvas on which to place those charts, but there is no way to assign a text field to a given chart.

Select Star will figure out automatically the chart titles by looking at text fields that are positioned immediately before a given chart.

To ensure your Looker Studio connection to Select Star properly ingests the names for all the Charts in your Pages, please make sure that you add a text box with the title of the chart above it.

Find an example in the images below of the layout that Select Star expects.

5. Refreshing data

Looker Studio has limitations that prevent automatic data refreshing. But we have ways to work around that, if you need automatic refresh, please get in touch with customer support. If you want to learn more about this integration we can show quickly you around, just shoot us an email.

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Last updated 6 months ago