This page provides you with instructions on how to extract data from Zapier and analyze it in Looker. (If the mechanics of extracting data from Zapier seem too complex or difficult to maintain, check out Stitch, which can do all the heavy lifting for you in just a few clicks.)
What is Zapier?
Zapier lets non-programmers integrate multiple applications and services to automate repetitive tasks. It uses a graphical web interface – no coding involved.
What is Looker?
Looker is a powerful, modern business intelligence platform that has become the new standard for how modern enterprises analyze their data. From large corporations to agile startups, savvy companies can leverage Looker's analysis capabilities to monitor the health of their businesses and make more data-driven decisions.
Looker is differentiated from other BI and analysis platforms for a number of reasons. Most notable is the use of LookML, a proprietary language for describing dimensions, aggregates, calculations, and data relationships in a SQL database. LookML enables organizations to abstract the query logic behind their analyses from the content of their reports, making their analytics easy to manage, evolve, and scale.
Getting data out of Zapier
Zapier exposes data through webhooks. You can use Zapier webhooks to push data to a defined HTTP endpoint as events happen. Zapier supports form-encoded, XML, and JSON webhooks.
It's up to you to parse the objects you catch via your webhooks and decide how to load them into your data warehouse.
Loading data into Looker
To perform its analyses, Looker connects to your company's database or data warehouse, where the data you want to analyze is stored. Some popular data warehouses include Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, and Snowflake.
Looker's documentation offers instructions on how to configure and connect your data warehouse. In most cases, it's simply a matter of creating and copying access credentials, which may include a username, password, and server information. You can then move data from your various data sources into your data warehouse for Looker to use.
Analyzing data in Looker
Once your data warehouse is connected to Looker, you can build constructs known as explores, each of which is a SQL view containing a specific set of data for analysis. An example might be "orders" or "customers."
Once you've selected any given explore, you can filter data based on any column available in the view, group data based on certain fields in the view (known as dimensions), calculate outputs such as sums and counts (known as measures), and pick a visualization type such as a bar chart, pie chart, map, or bubble chart.
Beyond this simple use case, Looker offers a broad universe of functionality that allows you to conduct analyses and share them with your organization. You can get started with this walkthrough in Looker's documentation.
Keeping Zapier data up to date
Once you've set up the webhooks you want and have begun collecting data, you can relax – as long as everything continues to work correctly. You'll have to keep an eye out for any changes to Zapier’s webhooks implementation.
From Zapier to your data warehouse: An easier solution
As mentioned earlier, the best practice for analyzing Zapier data in Looker is to store that data inside a data warehousing platform alongside data from your other databases and third-party sources. You can find instructions for doing these extractions for leading warehouses on our sister sites Zapier to Redshift, Zapier to BigQuery, Zapier to Azure Synapse Analytics, Zapier to PostgreSQL, Zapier to Panoply, and Zapier to Snowflake.
Easier yet, however, is using a solution that does all that work for you. Products like Stitch were built to move data automatically, making it easy to integrate Zapier with Looker. With just a few clicks, Stitch starts extracting your Zapier data, structuring it in a way that's optimized for analysis, and inserting that data into a data warehouse that can be easily accessed and analyzed by Looker.