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How to Create a Business Dashboard in Looker

Cody Schneider••9 min read

Building a powerful business dashboard in Looker can feel like a big project, but it breaks down into a handful of manageable steps. Looker is an incredibly robust tool for getting answers from your data, and a well-designed dashboard can become the single source of truth for your team. This guide will walk you through the entire process, from initial planning to creating your final interactive display.

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Before You Build: The Planning Phase

Jumping straight into building without a plan is the fastest way to create a dashboard that nobody uses. The most effective dashboards are designed with a clear purpose before a single chart is made. Taking a few moments to strategize will save you hours of rebuilding later.

1. Define Your Audience and Goals

First, ask yourself two simple questions:

  • Who is this dashboard for? Is it for the marketing team lead, the sales reps, the C-suite, or a client? Each audience has different needs and levels of data comfort. A dashboard for a CEO should be high-level and focused on key performance indicators (KPIs), while a dashboard for a campaign manager needs granular data they can act on immediately.
  • What decisions will they make using this dashboard? A great dashboard drives action. Will it help the marketing team decide where to allocate their ad budget? Will it help the sales team identify which leads to prioritize? Your goal should be to provide the exact information needed to make smarter, faster decisions.

For example, if you're building a weekly marketing performance dashboard, your goal might be: "To give our marketing lead a clear overview of campaign ROI so they can decide which channels to scale up or down next week."

2. Identify Your Key Metrics

Once you know your goal, list the specific metrics needed to achieve it. Avoid the temptation to include every metric possible. A crowded dashboard is an overwhelming dashboard. Stick to the essentials.

For our marketing performance dashboard example, the key metrics might include:

  • Overall Spend: Total ad budget used this week.
  • Conversions: Total number of desired outcomes (e.g., sales, signups).
  • Cost Per Conversion: How much it costs to get one conversion.
  • Campaign Performance: A breakdown of Spend vs. Conversions for each campaign.
  • Channel Performance: A breakdown of Spend vs. Conversions by channel (e.g., Facebook Ads, Google Ads).

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3. Sketch a Quick Layout

You don't need to be a designer. Just grab a pen and paper (or a simple diagramming tool) and sketch a rough layout. This helps you visualize the flow of information before you get bogged down in the tool itself.

Think about arranging your dashboard like a story:

  • Top Left: The most important, high-level numbers (the "headline"). For our example, this could be Total Conversions and Total Spend.
  • Main Body: The trends and comparisons that provide context. This is where you’d put your line charts showing performance over time or bar charts comparing campaigns.
  • Bottom/Right: The detailed, granular data. A table with the performance of every single campaign could go here.

This top-to-bottom, left-to-right flow from summary to detail makes your dashboard intuitive and easy to read.

Getting Started in Looker: Key Concepts to Know

Looker has its own language. Understanding a few key terms will make the building process much smoother. Your data team will likely handle the complex part (the data modeling), but knowing what these things are is helpful for any builder.

  • LookML: This is the code Looker uses to describe your database schema. Data analysts or engineers write LookML models to define dimensions, measures, and how tables relate to each other. This is the foundation upon which all dashboards are built. You typically won't need to write LookML yourself, but you'll be using the model your team has created.
  • Explores: An Explore is a pre-configured starting point for a query. Think of it as a logical grouping of data built for a specific analysis, like "Order Data" or "User Sessions." You'll always start building a new chart from an Explore.
  • Dimensions: These are the descriptive fields or attributes in your data. They are things you might want to group your data by. Examples include Date, Traffic Source, Product Category, or Customer Name.
  • Measures: These are the numbers you want to calculate or aggregate. They are things you want to measure. Examples include Total Sales, Number of Users, Average Order Value, or a Count of Sessions.
  • Looks: A Look is a single, saved visualization - a chart, a map, or a table - that you've created from an Explore.
  • Tiles: Tiles are the individual building blocks of a dashboard. A tile can be a Look you've already saved, a brand new visualization you create on the fly, a text box, or a heading.

Step-by-Step: Creating Your First Looker Dashboard

With our plan in hand, we're ready to build. Let's create that weekly marketing performance dashboard we sketched out.

Step 1: Start a New Query from an Explore

Navigate to the "Explore" section from the top menu in Looker. Your data team will have set up a list of available Explores. For our marketing dashboard, we might choose an Explore called something like Marketing Campaign Performance.

Once you click into the Explore, you’ll see a list of available dimensions and measures in the left-hand sidebar.

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Step 2: Build Your First Visualization (Tile)

Let’s start with a high-level KPI: a line chart showing daily conversions over the last 30 days.

  1. Select your data: In the left sidebar, click on a dimension like Activity Date and a measure like Total Conversions. Looker will automatically run a query and show you the raw data table on the right.
  2. Apply filters: We want to see the last 30 days. Find the Activity Date dimension in the "Filters" section at the top. Set the filter to "is in the past 30 days." Click "Run" to apply it.
  3. Choose a visualization: Below the data table, click the "Visualization" tab. Looker offers many chart types. For this, a Line Chart is a perfect choice to show the trend over time.
  4. Customize the chart: Click the "Edit" gear icon in the visualization tab to open up customization options. You can change colors, label your axes (e.g., label the y-axis "Number of Conversions"), and add a title to your chart.

Step 3: Save Your Visualization to a New Dashboard

Once you're happy with your line chart, you're ready to add it to a dashboard.

  1. In the top-right corner of the Explore page, click the gear icon and select "Save."
  2. A menu will appear. Choose "To a new dashboard."
  3. Give your new dashboard a name, like "Weekly Marketing Performance."
  4. Give your tile (your chart) a title, like "Conversions Over Last 30 Days."
  5. Click "Save to Dashboard," and Looker will create your dashboard with its very first tile!

Step 4: Add More Tiles to Your Dashboard

Now, let's add a bar chart comparing performance across campaigns. You can either repeat the full process (go to Explore, build, save to dashboard) or build directly inside the dashboard.

  1. From your dashboard, click the "Edit Dashboard" button in the top right.
  2. Click "Add" and select "Visualization."
  3. This will prompt you to choose an Explore. Pick the Marketing Campaign Performance Explore again.
  4. Now, build your next tile. Select the Campaign Name dimension and the Total Spend measure. Then, select the Total Conversions measure.
  5. For the visualization, choose a Bar Chart. In the "Edit" settings, you can configure it to show spend and conversions as grouped bars for easy comparison.
  6. Once it looks good, click "Save." This new tile will be added directly to your dashboard.

Repeat this process for all the charts, tables, and single value visualizations you planned. Single value visualizations are great for your top-level KPIs like a simple display of "Total Spend."

Step 5: Add Interactive Filters

Filters are what make a dashboard truly interactive and useful. Let's add a date filter so your team can look at different time periods without needing to ask for a new report.

  1. In "Edit Dashboard" mode, click "Add" and select "Filter."
  2. A configuration window will appear. Give the filter a name, like "Date Range."
  3. For the type, select "Date Filter." Set a default value, like "is in the past 7 days."
  4. Next, go to the "Tiles To Update" tab. Here, you connect the filter to the data in your tiles. For each tile, select the data field that the filter should control. In our case, this would be Activity Date for all our tiles.
  5. Click "Add," and the filter will appear at the top of your dashboard.

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Step 6: Arrange and Finalize Your Layout

Still in "Edit Dashboard" mode, you can now drag and drop your tiles and filters into the layout you sketched earlier. Resize tiles by grabbing their corners until everything is clear and logically organized. Don’t forget to add Text tiles to give your dashboard a main title and provide context or explanations for specific charts.

Once everything looks right, click "Save" and you’re done! You now have a living, interactive dashboard that your team can use to make decisions.

Final Thoughts

Building an effective dashboard in Looker is about marrying a clear plan with a solid understanding of the tool's core components. Start by defining your goals, then use Explores to build individual tiles, and finally assemble them into an interactive and intuitive layout with filters. While the initial learning curve exists, the power it gives your team to self-serve insights is well worth the effort.

Of course, the entire process in tools like Looker assumes you have a data team to set up and manage the underlying data models, a step that isn't always feasible for fast-moving marketing or sales departments. That’s why we built Graphed — to remove that complexity entirely. We let you connect your data sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Facebook Ads in seconds and then simply ask for a dashboard in plain English. Instead of learning about Explores and Measures, you can just ask, "build me a dashboard comparing Facebook spend vs. Shopify revenue by campaign for last month," and get a live, interactive dashboard instantly, without needing a data specialist on standby.

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