A dashboard management reads: the numbers that belong there

A marketing dashboard is a page that brings together the numbers from your ads, your website and your sales in one place. Often it shows whatever the tools count on their own. Impressions, clicks, sessions and click-through rate end up in large tiles, and management has to hunt for the things that say something about the business.

The person running your advertising finds those numbers useful every day. Management reads the dashboard less often and wants to know whether marketing brings in business, what that business costs and whether anything needs a decision.

My recommendation is that management's dashboard has only three to five metrics that can be tied to the business, and that each metric is counted in one way only. Everything else moves to a working view for the people who run the channels.

Two views for two readers

This is what I look at first when we build a dashboard: who will read it and which decision it should help with. A CEO who reads it once a week needs fewer numbers than someone who adjusts bids every day.

That is why we split the dashboard into two parts.

• The management view shows the results, what they cost and how they are developing. It should take a minute to read.
• The working view shows everything that explains the results. Clicks, keywords, ads and landing pages belong there.

Both views draw on the same data. Only the selection differs.

The numbers that belong with management

The management view should answer a handful of questions.

1. Are we getting more or less business than last period?
2. What does each deal or enquiry cost?
3. Which channels are delivering the results?
4. Is spend on budget?

The answers usually come down to four or five metrics.

Metric	What it tells management
Enquiries, booked meetings or purchases	The results in the business's own terms. For an online shop it is online sales.
Cost per enquiry or purchase	What the results cost in advertising.
Change in per cent	Whether things are going up or down compared with last period and with the same period last year.
Results by channel	Whether it is the ads, organic search or something else that is delivering.
Spend against budget	Whether the money will last the month.

The same period last year is needed for seasonality to show. A weak January may be completely normal in your industry, and you only see that when you compare it with the year before. How seasonality shows up in search volumes is covered in the post on planning Q1 already in Q4. How to follow spend day by day is covered in the post on a budget that lasts the whole month.

Consider adding a comment line at the top. My view is that two sentences on what has happened and what is being done now say more than an extra tile.

The numbers that only add noise

Noise is numbers that move without telling you anything about the business. They can be accurate and still belong in the working view.

• Impressions and clicks. They show how much your ads are seen. More clicks can mean more business, but also more visits that lead nowhere.
• Click-through rate. It shows how the ads are performing, and it is the person writing the ads who can do something about it.
• Sessions and page views. Traffic says little without a link to results. A campaign that attracts the wrong visitors also pushes the number up.
• Total key events in GA4. Key events are the events you have marked as important in Google Analytics 4, and they used to be called conversions. The total mixes big and small, because a click on your phone number counts as much as a purchase.
• Engagement rate and time on page. They help when a page needs improving, but they give management little to base decisions on.

Each metric is counted in one way

A common reason management stops trusting a dashboard is that the numbers do not agree with each other. The tiles say one thing and the table below says another. This happens when metrics come from different sources or are counted in different ways.

• One source per metric. GA4 and Google Ads count conversions differently. Choose one source for each metric and state which one.
• Defined conversions. In Google Ads, the Conversions column shows only primary conversions. The All conversions column also includes secondary ones. According to Google's help page on primary and secondary conversions, only primary conversions are used for bidding.
• A fixed date. Google Ads normally reports a conversion on the date of the click. The Conversions (by conv. time) column shows it on the date the purchase happened. This is described on Google's help page on the columns. If you count by click date, the latest week looks weaker than it is because some purchases have not happened yet.
• Time for the latest days. According to Google, it can take 24 to 48 hours for GA4 data to be fully processed, and the numbers can change in the meantime. Show whole weeks or months and mark any period that is not yet complete.
• Consent. Visitors who decline cookies are missing from GA4. How to work out how many that affects is covered in the post on Consent Mode and what disappears from your data.

Percentages and bars you can read at a glance

A few design details shape how the numbers are read.

• Change in per cent. That enquiries rose by 12% on last week is read instantly. If last period's count sits alongside, the reader has to do the maths and it is easy to misread.
• Bars that show the share of the whole. A bar next to 5 of 45 should fill 11% of its width. If the bars are scaled to the largest row, a small share can look like a large one.
• Tables sorted by results. Sort by results first and cost second. That way whatever brings in business ends up at the top.
• The same counting in tiles and tables. The total in the table should match the figure in the tile above it.

How to build management's dashboard

1. Write down the marketing decisions management makes over a year.
2. Choose three to five metrics that help with those decisions.
3. Write a definition for each metric with its source, what is counted and which date applies.
4. Check the numbers against the source day by day before management sees the dashboard.
5. Add a comment line that is updated before every meeting.
6. Review the dashboard after a quarter and remove whatever nobody has asked about.

Step four usually takes the longest. It is also where errors are found before management finds them. The same check of your measurement is the first point when we audit a Google Ads account.

Your next step

We build dashboards with one view for management and one for the people working in the channels. Every number is checked against its source before it is used, and the dashboard pulls data from the platforms every day. You can read more under measurement and dashboards.

Which three numbers does your management team want to see first when they open the dashboard?