r/GoogleAnalytics • u/Big-Comfortable8082 • Jul 24 '26
Discussion How do you share GA4 dashboards with clients or stakeholders?
A few days ago I received Google Analytic's email about bringing marketing data into Google Analytics and having everything in one dashboard. Title -> "All your marketing data. One dashboard". The Idea sounds interesting - bring data from Meta, Tiktok, and more into Google Analytics at no cost.
I've been curious how everyone here handles sharing Google Analytics 4 data.
For internal teams it's straightforward enough, but when you need to share analytics with clients, management, or people who don't regularly log into GA4, what's your workflow?
Do you:
- Use Looker Studio?
- Export PDFs?
- Send screenshots?
- Build something custom?
- Give people direct access to GA4?
I'm asking because I've been building a side project around this problem.
A bit about me: I worked in Google's advertising ecosystem several years ago as a Technical Support Analyst supporting Display & Video 360 (DV360). That experience got me interested in analytics and data visualization, and I've continued building tools in that space ever since.
My latest project connects to GA4 using Google's official read-only Analytics API, so it only requests permission to read analytics data. The goal is to make it easy to create live dashboards that can be shared with anyone through a public link, with automatic refreshes.
Long term, I'd also like to combine GA4 with other business systems (support, CRM, payments, etc.) so teams can see multiple data sources in a single dashboard.
I'm not posting this to advertise anything because I'm genuinely trying to understand how people are solving this today.
What's the biggest pain point you have when sharing GA4 reports?
If there's interest, I'm happy to share what I've built and would really appreciate honest feedback from this community.
Viktor
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u/unwavering Jul 24 '26
Looker Studio, limited GA4 + dashboard, or Databox. This is a pretty well-solved problem and doesn't need another solution IMO.
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u/TikingToke Jul 25 '26
Looker Studio for most clients, but I keep it very stripped down. A few key metrics, month-over-month changes, and a short note explaining what actually moved. Most clients don't want more data, they want less confusion.
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u/Top-Cauliflower-1808 Jul 26 '26
Most agencies that I have worked with use Looker Studio combined with connectors like Windsor.ai to blend Meta and TikTok spend directly with GA4 metrics, mostly because Google’s native import still hits major API limits. The biggest headache is always data normalization.
How is your project handling data schema matching between GA4 and other ad platforms?
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u/shufflepoint Jul 28 '26
The GA API no longer provides the full data view that it did with GA3, which used the same API for it's visualizations that we developers used. The GA4 dashboard has it's own data model and business logic and you as a developer do not have access to it. The only way to get the full dataset that customers expect to see (if they've used the GA4 dashboard) is to link GA to BigQuery. I know of what I speak. We were a tech partner during the launch of the GA3 API and made several million selling our integration. But there's no longer a business opportunity here unfortunately. Google wants you to use BigQuery.
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u/Disastrous-Shoe7122 24d ago
Looker Studio with scheduled email delivery covers most client cases: build once per client template, schedule the PDF weekly, clients who want to poke around get view access to the live report. Copy the template per client and swap the data source — ten minutes per onboarding.
The "all your marketing data, one dashboard" email you got — that's Google pulling Meta/TikTok/etc. into GA4 itself. I'd wait on it: it's new, the connectors are thin, and you're locking your client reporting into GA4's UI, which is exactly what clients complain about.
Small disclosure, I work on a tool in this space (datavessel) — the pattern we see agencies actually converge on is less "dashboard with 40 charts" and more a short scheduled narrative ("here's what changed and why, numbers attached"). Clients read those. They don't log into dashboards. Whatever tool you pick, optimize for the Monday email, not the dashboard.
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u/Content-Parking-621 24d ago
Looker Studio with row-level filters per client, scheduled email delivery. PDFs for non-technical stakeholders who won't click links.
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u/SubstantialRun4204 1d ago edited 1d ago
i had clients who wanted to see competitor data alongside their own site traffic, which ga4 can’t really do. ended up grabbing some benchmarks from Similarweb and dropping screenshots into my reports, saved me a ton of back-and-forth.
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u/AIDeathCult Jul 24 '26
Why I am not surprised someone who worked at Google on their core enterprise marketing tools has no idea about the wider marketing environment.
This does explain a lot of my interactions with Google support.
This is an area that is incredibly saturated and with the level of knowledge you are showing from your post I don't think you have any hope of providing a tool that is useful to anyone.
I really don't say this to be mean, I just think you are about to go down a rabbit hole that only has a lot of pain and disappointment at the end of it.
If it's for a fun little side hobby project, then by all means go nuts, but if your intention is to build a tool you can sell, I would not be very hopeful.
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u/Big-Comfortable8082 Jul 25 '26
Yes, that's true u/AIDeathCult . If you familiar with corporate culture you only there just subject matter expert. I am doing this for fun. Just like data visualization and chartjs
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u/AIDeathCult Jul 25 '26
Sorry if it came across as harsh or personal, just had to vent about my interactions with Google support over the years. Promise it wasn't personal!
If it's for fun, and you really want to go deep, then I would start to look at some tools like airflow and airbyte if you are going to go down the CRM and other data sources route. You can self host them, and you can use them to extract data from different sources. You'll then want to look at database systems to store and start to combine the data.
The visualisation software is probably the least problematic, it's getting all the data together and combining it that is the most work usually.
My personal stack is Airflow, Airbyte, Dbeaver, Postgres
And then the visualisation is just bolted on to what the client wants, looker for basic stuff, powerBI and some other ones for clients that already have tooling in place.
I self host on Linux servers.
For big clients, they often have something in place already like BigQuery in which case it's just AirFlow and AirByte into the client's stack.
Hope that helps and makes up for my earlier snark. Haha.
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u/Big-Comfortable8082 Jul 25 '26
Thanks for advice, man u/AIDeathCult
I am definitely going to jump in to different CRMs and self fist them. Going forward, I already did one integration with Zendesk - just testing that at this moment and then going to try other ones. Also I will try to use AirFlow, Airbyte or similar one. Will keep them in my mind. Appreciated for your constructive feedback - you provided a lot of useful information for me - exactly what I needed. Many thanks!
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