Dimension Control in Looker Studio: Make Your Dashboard Even Fancier

If working with tables had been satisfying and understandable enough, there wouldn’t have appeared data visualization tools, right?
Looker Studio makes the data look easier to understand, more organized and fancy. To make it even fancier and enjoyable to use, you can use a dimension control trick I am going to tell you about in this article!

Check out the video tutorial:

How does it work?

Dimension control allows us to use different dimensions on the same page. This would be super useful to compare two tables with the same data but split by different dimensions. 

Now I am going to tell you how to do it step by step.

Step 1.

Create a new table. Mine is based on Google Analytics 4 data. I used Session source / medium as a dimension, Sessions and Total Purchases as metrics. Also, it would be nice to add optional metrics, so I chose the Active Users, as well as the drill-down dimensions. 

We could add Session Source and Session Medium separately. This kind of setting would make a great table, suitable for certain tasks and needs. However, I want to show you a better way to work with your dimensions, and in this case you do not need the drill-down dimensions. 

Step 2. 

In the menu “Add control” choose “Dimension control”. Here you can choose as many dimension options as you like (they have to make a common sense with the metrics in the table, of course).

So, in this case I rename the suggested dimension’s name from “Default Channel Group” just to “Channel Group”, and also add the above-discussed Session Source and Session Medium. In addition, I’d love to add Session source / medium and Session campaign.

Step 3.

Enjoy the result! All the added dimensions are available to choose among in a drop-down list. The control affects all the charts, so you won’t have to go back and forth from editor to viewer mode just to present the different dimensions of the table without taking too much space on the canvas. 

Extra tip!

If you don’t want the control to affect all the charts existing on the page, just group the control and the elements you want to link to it. 

Conclusion

Could you imagine Looker Studio to be such a powerful tool for data visualization, in spite of it looking so easy to use? Actually, that is why I prefer it. You just need to know some tips and tricks to be able to create very complex dashboards.

If you want a ready-to-use dashboard, here is our template store. There you can find various types of marketing reports, all pre-set up for your convenience.

Hope this article and the trick was useful for you! If you have tried it already, leave your impression about it in the comments!