What is Looker Studio?
Looker Studio is a reporting and dashboard tool that "turns your data into informative dashboards and reports that are easy to read, easy to share, and fully customizable." You can learn more on the Looker Studio page.
If you are familiar with building reports using tools like Tableau or PowerBI, you'll feel right at home in Data Studio. With live connections to Google Analytics, Search Console, and Rival IQ, you'll be able to build live dashboards for your clients and teams.
Setting Up a Looker Studio Connector
Before you can create your first report, you must set up your Rival IQ Looker Studio connector.
Generating an API Key
To connect Rival IQ to Looker Studio, you first need to generate an API key.
📝 NOTE: Access to the API is not available on all Rival IQ plans.
To generate an API key:
1. Click Account at the bottom left of the screen and select Profile or go to Your Profile.
2. Click Create API Key.
3. Copy the generated key—you will enter it into a form in the next section.
Continue on to the next section to set up a Looker Studio Connector.
Setting Up the Connector
To set up a Looker Studio connector:
1. Click here to go to Looker Studio.
2. If you do not have an account, follow the prompts to set up an account.
3. Click the Data Sources tab and then Create New Data Source.
4. Search for Rival IQ and click it under Partner Connectors.
5. Click Authorize.
6. Follow the prompts to complete authorization. After successful authorization, the Authorize button changes to "Authorized" and displays the Credentials section.
7. Under Credentials, paste the API key you generated in the previous section and click Submit.
8. Under Parameters, select a Data Set. The option you choose depends on the type of report you want to build.
Social Posts (all posts, one row per post) gives you access to post-level data, including engagement metrics, post text, and metadata like published date. Each row of data corresponds to a single post. The social posts API documentation provides details on which metrics are available.
Social Posts (top posts by engagement rate, one row per post) is helpful for creating widgets that display a set of the most engaging posts in your landscape. It returns the top 100 posts by engagement rate in descending order. This small amount of data means it is very fast to load; however, it does not represent all of the posts in your landscape. To compute totals/aggregates on all social posts in the landscape, select the Social Posts (all posts) data set.
Daily Metrics (one row per company per day) gives you access to aggregate social and SEO metrics, with one row of data per company per day. The Rival IQ time-series metrics API documentation provides details on which metrics are available. If you want to create time-series graphs, select this data set; however, if you are aggregating over time periods that are longer than one day, you will need to create calculated fields for rate and average metrics.
Summary Metrics (one row per company) gives you access to aggregate social and SEO metrics, with one row of data per company that covers the entire time period. Our summary metrics API documentation has more details on which metrics are available.
📝 NOTES:
You can connect to multiple data sets in a single report, but you'll have to set up a new data source for each.
Depending on the complexity of what you're building, you might need to create multiple data sources from this connector using different data sets.
9. Select a Landscape.
10. Select a Channel value, either All Channels or an individual channel. You can improve the performance of reports that require post-level data by selecting an individual channel to control the amount of data you’re pulling into Looker Studio. You can override this setting on a per-widget basis to facilitate widgets showing top posts from different channels all in one report.
11. Select a Company Set value, either All Companies or Focus Companies Only. This allows you to easily switch between retrieving data for all of the companies in a landscape or just the focus company. Since you’re also able to override this setting on a per-widget basis, you can easily mix landscape and focus-company-only widgets in a single report.
12. Click Connect.
☝ TIP: By default, the connector has the name "Rival IQ Social Analytics." Because you can reuse previously configured connections in new reports—find them in your Data Sources screen within Looker Studio—having meaningful names makes the connector easily identifiable within a given report. Rename the connector by hovering over the name at the top left.
Example: Building a Report
After you finish connecting Rival IQ to Looker Studio, you can build a report. The example below shows how to build a bar chart showing Total Engagement for social posts broken down with one bar per company, and stacked by channel. The example uses a Connector where Data Set is set to Social Posts (all posts, one row per post).
1. Click Create Report at the top right.
2. Click Add a Chart on the second ribbon row and select a bar chart. By default, the metric shown is Engagement Total.
3. To color the bars by channel, click Add Dimension and select Channel.
4. Click the Style tab and select Stacked Bars.
What's Next
Interested in leveraging the Rival IQ API? For information on how to use the API and why it's beneficial for your team, see the API Guide.