In Looker Studio (lookerstudio.google.com), click Create, choose Report, and in the Add data panel select the Google Analytics connector. Authorize access if prompted, pick your GA4 account and property, and click Add. Your report canvas now has live GA4 data, and every chart you drop on the page pulls from it. You need at least Viewer access to the GA4 property, and the whole connection takes a couple of minutes.
Connecting GA4 to Looker Studio is the unlock for everything Looker Studio is good at: dashboards your boss will actually look at, built on the analytics data you already collect. The connection itself is a few clicks; this guide walks it end to end and gets your first chart on the page.
It assumes you have a working GA4 property (here’s the GA4 beginner’s guide if not) and you’ve seen Looker Studio at least once; the Looker Studio tutorial covers the tool itself.
Sign in to lookerstudio.google.com with the same Google account that has access to your GA4 property (Viewer role or higher). That’s the whole prerequisite list; the connector is free and there’s nothing to install.
Connect GA4 to a report
Create a report
On the Looker Studio home page, click Create in the top left and choose Report. A blank report opens with the Add data panel already showing.
lookerstudio.google.com Create ReportYou should see: a gallery of connectors, with Google’s own connectors (Google Analytics, Search Console, Sheets, BigQuery) at the top.
Choose the Google Analytics connector
Click Google Analytics. If this is your first time, Looker Studio asks you to Authorize access to your Analytics data; click through the consent screen.
You should see: a picker listing your Analytics accounts and, under each, its GA4 properties.
Pick your account and property, then Add
Select the account, then the property, and click Add (Looker Studio asks you to confirm adding the data source to the report).
You should see: the blank canvas again, usually with a starter table already placed, and your property’s fields (dimensions in green, metrics in blue) in the right-hand Data panel.
That’s the connection done. Every chart you add now reads from your GA4 property.
Build a first chart to prove it works
Two minutes of sanity checking beats an hour of debugging later:
- Click Add a chart in the toolbar and choose Scorecard. Set its metric to Sessions. You should see a plausible number for the default date range.
- Add a Time series chart with Sessions as the metric to see the daily trend.
- Add a Table with Session default channel group as the dimension and Sessions plus Total users as metrics; it should mirror what GA4’s Traffic acquisition report shows for the same dates.
If those numbers look sane against GA4 (same date range, expect small differences rather than identical figures), the connection is healthy.
What to know about the connector
It’s the GA4 Data API with a UI. The fields you get are the API’s dimensions and metrics. That covers the marketer staples (sessions, users, engagement rate, key events, channel groups, landing pages, campaign fields), but it is not a perfect mirror of the GA4 interface; a few interface metrics don’t exist under the same name, and some don’t exist at all. When something’s missing, look for it under another name first, then rebuild it as a calculated field.
Data is cached, not live. Looker Studio periodically refreshes its cache of your GA4 data rather than querying on every page view (for the GA4 connector, the freshness options are 1, 4, or 12 hours), and GA4 itself can take 24 to 48 hours to finalize each day’s data. Design dashboards for daily decisions and monthly reviews; leave realtime to GA4’s Realtime report.
Heavy dashboards can hit API quotas. The GA4 Data API has usage limits per property. A normal marketing dashboard never notices them; a 40-chart report with several viewers refreshing at once can, and it shows up as charts erroring until quota recovers. If you get there, fewer charts per page, longer cache intervals, and consolidating similar charts fix most of it.
Small numbers can vanish. GA4 applies privacy thresholding when a report includes demographic or interest data and user counts get small, so a filtered chart can show blanks where you’d expect small values. That’s a data-protection behavior, not a broken connection.
Where to go from here
The connection is plumbing; the dashboards are the payoff:
- Build your first real dashboard with our content performance dashboard walkthrough, which uses exactly this connector.
- Decide what belongs on it before adding charts; the marketing measurement plan keeps dashboards honest.
- Make sure the actions that matter are tracked as key events in GA4, because a dashboard of raw traffic answers half the question at best.
And if your reporting includes SEO, the same Add data flow connects Search Console to GA4 and to Looker Studio, so both datasets can live in one report.