Looker

Overview

Looker is Google Cloud's enterprise BI platform. It connects natively to BigQuery and uses LookML — a modelling layer that defines metrics and dimensions once and reuses them across all reports. Connecting it to the Decode GA4 events table gives your team a governed, self-serve analytics layer over GA4 data.

Requirements

A Looker instance (Looker Cloud or self-hosted)
A Decode GA4 installation with the events table accessible in BigQuery
A Google Cloud service account with BigQuery Data Viewer and BigQuery Job User roles on the project
The service account must have Storage Object Viewer access to the GCS bucket where Decode GA4 stores its Parquet files

Setup

1. Connect Looker to BigQuery

In your Looker instance, navigate to Admin → Connections → Add Connection and select BigQuery. Provide your GCP project ID and upload your service account JSON key.

Test the connection before proceeding.

2. Create a LookML project

In Develop → Projects, create a new LookML project and connect it to a Git repository.

3. Define the events view

Create a view file (e.g. views/events.view.lkml) referencing the Decode GA4 events table:

Replace your_dataset with the dataset containing the Decode GA4 events table.

4. Define an Explore

Add an Explore to your model file (e.g. my_model.model.lkml):

5. Explore and build dashboards

Deploy your LookML changes and navigate to Explore → GA4 Events to start building queries and dashboards.