Looker is positioned as a powerful business intelligence tool, capable of transforming raw market data into visual dashboards that provide real-time insights. It’s especially appealing for DIY dashboards—letting market research teams build and customize views tailored to their business needs. However, when it comes to competitive analysis, things can quickly become more complicated.

Here’s the problem: dashboards can collect and display data, but they don’t automatically drive useful decisions. Many teams discover that their Looker dashboards fall short of expectations, not because the tool is flawed, but because of how it’s being used.

1. Misaligned Metrics and Business Questions

In competitive analysis, your metrics need to align with what matters most to your business: market position, share shifts, pricing moves, product launches, or customer perception. Too often, dashboards offer a general view of performance—without zooming in on comparisons that really matter.

For instance, a dashboard might show overall sales trends but not reveal how they benchmark against key competitors in a specific segment. Without this context, the data can’t inform strategic pivots.

2. Lack of Context and Narratives

Looker dashboards can excel at showing “what” is happening. But they often skip the “why.” Charts without explanation can spark more questions than answers.

For example, if your competitor’s share suddenly rises, does your dashboard help explain why? Did they change pricing? Increase promotions? Without context, data visualizations are just surface-level snapshots instead of deep strategic insights.

3. Inconsistent Adoption Across Teams

Another common hurdle is slow adoption. When different departments don’t use—or trust—the dashboards, it reduces the effectiveness of the analysis. Unclear visualizations, unfamiliar filters, or misaligned KPIs can discourage even well-meaning users from engaging with dashboards regularly.

4. Complicated or Unintuitive Dashboard Design

User experience matters. Dashboards that are hard to navigate, include too many filters, or hide key metrics behind multiple tabs can lower usage and reduce engagement.

Business intelligence only works when it’s accessible. If teams struggle to extract insights quickly, they’ll often default back to disconnected tools or outdated spreadsheets.

How On Demand Talent Can Help

This is where experienced research professionals come in. SIVO's On Demand Talent network includes insights experts who not only understand competitive dynamics but also know how to optimize platforms like Looker for strategic clarity. They can spot whether your dashboards are aligned to actual business goals, suggest improvements, and ensure that your competitive insights are driving key decisions—not just collecting digital dust.

By working alongside your internal teams, these professionals can guide setup, clean up dashboard logic, improve data storytelling, and boost cross-functional adoption of Looker. The result? A competitive analysis tool that works harder and smarter for your team.

Even well-intentioned teams can make missteps in building their Looker dashboards—especially when operating under time pressure or stretched resources. Understanding these common Looker pitfalls can help you avoid them and strengthen your competitive analysis efforts.

1. Data Mappings That Don’t Match Business Needs

It’s common for data mappings in Looker to follow data warehouse structures—but not always business logic. For example, metrics might be broken down by internal categories that don’t reflect how competitors are tracked or how market share is evaluated.

The result? You might have accurate internal metrics that can’t answer core questions like, “Where are we outperforming against key competitors?” or “How did our pricing decision compare to the category average?”

2. Dashboards Built for Analysts, Not for Decision-Makers

Reports that are too detailed or overly technical may serve power users, but they often alienate senior leaders who need quick, strategic takeaways. Dashboards should make insights easy to digest at a glance. Using too much jargon, cramming multiple data points into a single widget, or failing to highlight trends can limit a dashboard’s usefulness.

3. Key Metrics Missing or Hard to Find

One of the most common complaints about Looker dashboards is that they don’t show the numbers that matter—or require users to dig through filters and layers to find them. Whether it’s competitor share changes, customer churn drivers, or promotional impact, if your users can’t spot critical changes within seconds, you risk missing timely market signals.

• Are your dashboards showing change over time or just a static snapshot?
• Are benchmark comparisons visible and aligned?
• Can business leaders answer “Are we ahead or behind competitors—and why?”

4. Superficial Insights That Don’t Drive Action

Even visually impressive dashboards can fall short if they don’t connect data to decisions. If your team spends time interpreting reports instead of acting on them, your dashboard might be showing too much without suggesting a path forward. Insights should go beyond “what happened” to “what to do next.”

5. Overreliance on DIY Without Platform Expertise

Looker enables self-serve reporting, which is great for speed, but it also means many dashboards are built without experienced input. This can create long-term challenges with data governance, report redundancy, and incoherent visualizations across the organization.

Fixing the Foundations with On Demand Talent

Organizations don’t need to overhaul their tech stack—they need trustworthy, temporary talent who knows how to use it better. Bringing in On Demand Talent from SIVO means immediate access to professionals who have built and optimized Looker dashboards before—ensuring your reports are functional, insightful, and tied to real business objectives.

By embedding an expert who understands business intelligence and end-user needs, your team can:

• Fix data logic and align KPIs with competitive strategies
• Design dashboards with clear hierarchies and easy navigation
• Train internal stakeholders on how to interpret and use reports

The result is smarter reporting infrastructure, better adoption, and dashboards that not only show what’s happening—but reveal what to do about it.

One of the most valuable applications of Looker dashboards in competitive analysis is tracking share dynamics – understanding how market share is shifting between competitors over time. However, teams often struggle to set up these comparisons correctly, leading to vague takeaways or misleading conclusions. Poorly mapped data relationships, inconsistent metric definitions, or limited filtering options are common culprits.

To accurately map and compare behavior and performance between brands, you need a clear data strategy built into your Looker reporting dashboards. Here’s how to get started:

1. Define Key Metrics and Make Them Comparable

Start by identifying the most meaningful KPIs for your competitive landscape, such as share of voice, product views, sales conversion rate, or basket size. Then, ensure you’re measuring each metric consistently across competitors – for example, does “conversion rate” mean the same when applied to your brand and Brand B?

Without standardization, your data may show patterns that don’t reflect real behavior – misleading the business.

2. Leverage Filtering and Drill-Downs

Competitive analysis works best when you can slice the data by segment, time period, or product line. Use Looker’s built-in filtering tools to allow teams to dig deeper – from a topline market share trend down to performance by region or demographic.

Behavioral comparisons become much more useful when you can focus on a specific moment or audience.

3. Apply Visualizations Designed for Comparison

Heat maps, side-by-side bar charts, and time-series line graphs can all bring clarity to shifts in consumer behavior between competitors. Avoid over-cluttered dashboards. Instead, focus on visuals that make it easy to spot rising vs. falling performance, or seasonal trends.

Using these visualization best practices turns your Looker dashboard into a strategic tool rather than a data warehouse.

4. Connect Findings to Implications

Even when behavior data is presented clearly, teams may miss the bigger picture without guidance. A drop in basket size might have different implications if it’s seasonal, promotional, or due to a competitor campaign.

This is where On Demand Talent can offer crucial support. Their experience in market research tools and consumer behavior analysis ensures your dashboards are interpreted within the right context – giving insights that are both accurate and actionable.

You’ve built your Looker dashboards, the reports are live – but teams just aren’t using them. Low adoption is one of the most common Looker pitfalls, and it leaves companies wondering why their investment in business intelligence isn’t yielding better decisions.

In many cases, the issue isn’t the data – it’s how the dashboards have been built, communicated, or supported. Here's how experienced professionals can help fix low adoption and maximize the value of your reporting dashboards:

Clarify the 'Why' Behind the Dashboard

Dashboards are only valuable if users understand their purpose. Often, teams are handed a dashboard without much explanation, leading to confusion over how it addresses specific business questions. On Demand Talent can help reframe dashboards around real-world use cases, creating clearer lines between the data presented and the decisions it should support.

Design for Non-Technical Users

Many insights platforms are created by teams familiar with backend systems – but not necessarily with how end users interact with data. If your Looker dashboard isn’t intuitive, visually clear, or logically organized, people will simply avoid it. Experienced professionals can redesign dashboards with usability in mind, ensuring the layout supports seamless access to the most important insights.

Bridge the Gap Between Data and Action

Even well-designed dashboards can fall short if they don’t suggest what to do next. Looker dashboards are often interpreted differently depending on who’s viewing them – marketing may focus on trends, while product teams need granular insights. On Demand Talent adds value by translating raw metrics into business implications tailored to different roles across the organization.

• Highlight missed insights and underused features
• Integrate storytelling elements to guide interpretation
• Provide real-time or post-launch coaching sessions

Make Training Part of the Rollout

One-time training is rarely enough. If you’re introducing Looker dashboards to new or evolving teams, consistent exposure and accessible learning resources make adoption more likely. On Demand Talent can build internal capability by teaching teams how to navigate dashboards, ask the right questions, and build data fluency over time.

With the right support, Looker adoption doesn’t just increase – it becomes embedded in your business culture.

DIY dashboards and self-serve data visualization tools like Looker have revolutionized market research and business intelligence. They allow teams to move quickly, monitor competitive shifts in real time, and manage insights in a more hands-on way – especially under tighter budgets and timelines. But there's a growing challenge: having the tool doesn’t mean you’re getting the full value from it.

This is where SIVO’s On Demand Talent can make the difference – not just filling gaps in short-term bandwidth, but unlocking the actual strategic potential of the platform.

Why Expert Guidance Makes a Difference

Many market research tools offer great dashboards, but using them effectively requires more than a login. Consumer insights teams often run into issues like:

• Misaligned KPIs or unclear metric definitions
• Dashboards that confuse instead of clarify
• Underused custom fields or integrations
• Non-actionable charts that sit idle

On Demand Talent brings targeted experience to help resolve these pain points. These professionals know how to clean up reporting dashboards, add necessary context, and align output with the strategic priorities of the team – without the learning curve you'd face with general consultants or freelancers.

From Setup to Sustainability

Whether it's a full Looker dashboard refresh or interpreting an existing competitive analysis report, On Demand Talent professionals embed quickly and get to meaningful work. Their goal isn’t just to fix what's broken – it’s to build a foundation your team can build on long after they’ve gone.

That includes:

1. Building dashboard logic aligned to key business goals

2. Teaching your team how to update or iterate dashboards themselves

3. Creating documentation and internal knowledge transfer plans

With this support, your dashboards evolve from being just ‘tools’ to being trusted platforms that guide confident decisions.

The Human Layer That Maximizes Technology

As AI and flexible platforms reshape the future of work, market research teams need both speed and expertise. DIY dashboards offer speed – On Demand Talent provides the expertise. When used together, you get something better: clear, credible insights that drive smarter business outcomes.

From Fortune 500 companies to emerging startups, we’ve seen how the right expert at the right time can take a tool like Looker and make it indispensable. It’s not about replacing your team – it’s about expanding its capability and getting more value from the systems you’ve already invested in.