Why does this happen?
In some cases, when the amount of data coming from the API is too large, Looker Studio does longer to load your charts. This challenge is pronounced when:
iOS apps: Apple sends one file per day worth of data, making the API heavy and hard to process. If you're looking at 90 days of data, that's 90 different data files you're pulling at the same time;
We're processing large apps, with millions of data points (mostly from app units, sales, and revenue)
The key point here is that sometimes there are just too many lines on a given dataset so Looker Studio struggles to process it.
Here are a couple of things we learned from our clients when dealing with loading speed issues:
1) Use a Google Workspace account
Google has different quota limits for Gmail and Google Workspace accounts.
Paid accounts not only can do much more data fetch (when you open, change, or refresh your dashboard, each charts triggers a data fetch event) operations, but also have access to 5x higher loading speeds.
We recommend avoiding free gmail accounts and upgrade to a Google Workspace account if you can.
2) Use Google's Extract Data connector
You can find it on this link.
It adds up to 100MB worth of data on your cache, which can help a lot or a little (depending on how much data we're talking about).
Our recommendation: pick only the dimensions you really use to avoid importing data you won't need. You can also filter your data. In the example below I'm filtering for app installs, for example. You can then create multiple extractions to get only the data you need.
👇 This video provides more detail on how to use this data extractor
3) Calling your inner Looker Studio ninja
There are also ways to avoid this problem by adopting a few best practices:
Use multiple pages to organize your charts. Don't build one massive page with everything you need at once (that will constantly break your dash)
Always filter your data
Reduce the data freshness of your connector
Expand your date range as your data is cached, and avoid downloading multiple months' worth of data before downloading one
Most of all: we ask you to be patient. In the end, if it takes a lot of time it's because there are lots of data coming in. From our end, we're working on ways to overcome this.
And what about a more permanent solution, you may ask?
The long-term solution is to simply upgrade to BigQuery.
By enabling it, your dashboards will load 84 times faster (yes, we said times, not percentage), providing you with dashboards that load instantly every time you open it.