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How user roles and permissions in Looker Studio affect Supermetrics

Someone’s level of access in your Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) report determines some of the actions they can carry out under your Supermetrics license. It’s important to carefully consider these roles when deciding what levels of access will be the best fit for your users.


Looker Studio user roles and permissions

Looker Studio has 3 main user roles: Owner, Editor, and Viewer. Any user can have any of these roles with or without a Supermetrics license.


This means, for example, that someone with Viewer access doesn’t need a Supermetrics license to see your report, and someone with Editor access doesn’t need a license to make changes to a report once the data has been imported. 


However, the person who creates the data source file needs Owner access and to be connected to a Supermetrics license, as they’re responsible for establishing the connection to Supermetrics. Anyone with Editor access who wants to import new data or set up a new data source needs a Supermetrics license, too.


Data source accounts

These permissions don’t have any impact on the data source account you use to access your data in Looker Studio. Data source accounts don’t need Looker Studio user permissions, and they don’t need to be directly assigned to a Supermetrics license (although each one will use up one of the license’s data source account quota).


If you've set the data source to use Owner's credentials, people with Viewer or Editor access to the Looker Studio report will see the data through the data source account you use to log in to the data source. Otherwise, they'll have to connect to the data source with their own credentials. With Owner's credentials, editors will be able to adjust how this data appears in the reports they have Editor access to.


Follow these steps to manage if people accessing your report can use the Owner's credentials or if they should log in using their own credentials:

  1. Click any report element to open Supermetrics.
  2. Click the Edit icon next to the data source’s name in the left-hand pane to open the configuration page.
  3. Click Data credentials at the top of the pane.
    • Select Owner’s credentials to use the report owner's data source credentials.
    • Select Viewer's credentials to require each viewer of the report to log in to the data source using their own credentials.
  4. Click Update.

You may need to reconnect to the data source. To do that, go to Edit connection.

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