Looker Source

Looker is a business intelligence software platform that helps you explore, analyze and share real-time business insights easily. Create custom cohorts of customers in Looker’s powerful and flexible exploration tool and pass your analysis into your marketing tools for activation and engagement using the Looker Source in Segment.

Getting Started

To enable the integration service in Looker, contact your account representative. They will walk you through the implementation on the Looker side.

From Segment’s end, you will need to create a Looker source, and copy your write key into the Looker integration admin settings.

Defining Looks

Using this Source, Looker will send Look (query) results into Segment as identify calls. This is the only API method that Looker sends to Segment. Any user trait that you include as a column in your Look will be included as a user trait on these identify call. Note: Arrays are not currently supported. Only properties that are strings or numbers are supported.

Note: When you set up your Look and generate new user traits (column names), avoid using trait names that may already exist in your marketing tools. If you create a new user trait in Looker (e.g. “churn risk”) and that trait already exists in your tools, syncing the user profile to the downstream tool will override the existing trait value with the new one.

Below is an example of a cohort of users in Looker who have been active on toastmates.com (example website) at least once in the last 30 days.

Below is an example of the identify() call Looker will send to Segment for the first user in the Look shown above:

{
  "type": "identify",
  "traits": {
    "name": "Ty Arthur",
    "email": "ty.arthur@segment.com",
    "sessions count": 2
  },
  "userId": "00MWWFOLRcETcTCf"
  }

Rename fields

If you don’t like the formatting of field names as they appear in Segment, you can use Table Calculations to create a new version of the field with the desired name. Then you can hide the original field from the table visualization.

Send Looks to your Segment Destinations

Customer identifiers to include The end goal of using the Looker Source is to trigger actions in your marketing tools, or Segment Destinations. These Destinations require either a userId or an email with an identify() call. To err on the side of caution, we recommend including userId and email whenever possible.

Below is a chart of all the server side Destinations that will accept identify() calls from Looker and any required identifiers you must pass through. Be sure to include the required trait(s) when setting up your Look, otherwise your user profiles will not make it into your Segment Destinations.

Supported destinations