How to Create a Digital Marketing Dashboard in Excel

Creating a digital marketing dashboard in Excel can feel like the best way to bring order to your chaotic data. Information from Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, your CRM, and your email platform all lives in different places, telling incomplete stories. An Excel dashboard can be your command center for stitching them together to see the whole picture. This guide will walk you through building a practical, actionable marketing dashboard in Excel, step-by-step.

Section 1: Plan Your Dashboard Before You Build Anything

Jumping straight into Excel without a plan is a recipe for frustration. A great dashboard starts with clear goals and a simple sketch. Take a few minutes to think through what you actually need to see.

Define Your Goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

First, answer this question: What marketing questions do I need to answer to do my job better? Your dashboard should be built around answering those questions. This will determine which metrics, or KPIs, are most important.

Here are some common goals and the KPIs that go with them:

• Goal: Increase Website Engagement → KPIs: Website Sessions, Pages per Session, Bounce Rate, Average Session Duration.

• Goal: Generate More Leads → KPIs: Form Submissions, New Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), Cost per Lead (CPL).

• Goal: Drive More Sales from Ads → KPIs: Ad Spend, Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Total Revenue from Campaigns.

• Goal: Grow Email Marketing Performance → KPIs: Email Subscribers, Open Rate, Click-Through Rate (CTR), Unsubscribe Rate.

Pick just a few essential KPIs. It's better to have a simple dashboard that you actually use than a complicated one filled with "vanity metrics" that don't drive decisions.

Identify Your Data Sources

Where will you get the numbers for your KPIs? List out every platform you'll need to pull data from. Most digital marketing dashboards require data from several sources:

• Google Analytics: For website traffic, user behavior, and conversion tracking.

• Ad Platforms (Facebook Ads, Google Ads): For ad spend, impressions, clicks, and campaign-specific conversions.

• CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce): For lead status, pipeline value, and customer data.

• E-commerce Platform (Shopify): For sales, average order value, and conversion rates.

• Email Marketing Tool (Klaviyo, Mailchimp): For email campaign performance.

Sketch a Simple Layout

You don't need fancy design software. Just grab a piece of paper or open a simple diagramming tool and sketch out where you want everything to go. A classic dashboard layout includes:

• Top-Level Metrics: Put your most important KPIs in big, bold numbers at the top (e.g., Total Revenue, Total Sessions, Total Leads).

• Primary Charts: Use the main area for your most important visualizations, like a trend line for website traffic over time or a bar chart comparing channel performance.

• Secondary Information: Use the bottom or side for more granular charts or tables that add context, like top-performing ad campaigns or a breakdown of MQLs by source.

Having a sketch beforehand keeps you focused and prevents you from getting lost in formatting options once you're in Excel.

Section 2: Gathering and Structuring Your Data in Excel

This is the most time-consuming part of managing an Excel dashboard, but getting it right makes everything else easier. Your dashboard needs three main tabs in your Excel workbook: a Raw Data tab, a Calculations tab, and your final Dashboard tab.

Export Raw Data from Each Platform

Log in to each of your data sources and export the data you need as a CSV or Excel file. Be consistent with your date ranges. If you're building a monthly dashboard, export the last 30 or 60 days of data from every source.

For example, to get channel data from Google Analytics 4:

1. Go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.

2. Set your desired date range.

3. Click the "Share this report" icon in the top right and select "Download File" > "Download CSV".

Repeat this process for all your data sources.

Create Your "Raw Data" Tab

Create a new tab in your spreadsheet named "Raw Data." Consolidate your exported CSVs here. Dedicate a separate section or, even better, a separate raw data sheet for each data source (e.g., "GA_Data," "FB_Data").

This is the most important rule: Never edit or format your raw data directly. Always work from a copy or reference it on your calculations sheet. Your raw data tab should be a clean, untouched source of truth that you can simply paste new exports into each week or month.

Use Excel Tables for Dynamic Data

Once your data is in the "Raw Data" tab, turn each dataset into an official Excel Table. This is a game-changer.

1. Click anywhere inside your data range.

2. Press Ctrl + T (or Cmd + T on Mac).

3. Ensure the "My table has headers" box is checked and click OK.

Excel tables automatically expand when you add new rows, meaning your charts and formulas refresh automatically when you paste in new data. It eliminates the need to manually update date ranges in formulas every time.

Section 3: Performing Calculations with PivotTables and Formulas

With your data neatly organized, it's time to build the engine of your dashboard. Create a new tab called "Calculations" or "Pivot." This sheet will pull data from your "Raw Data" tab and summarize it into the clean numbers and tables needed for your charts.

Summarize Data with PivotTables

PivotTables are your best friend for quickly summarizing a large dataset. They let you group, sum, count, and average your data without writing a single formula.

Let's create a PivotTable to summarize website sessions by marketing channel from our Google Analytics data:

1. Go to your "Calculations" tab.

2. Click Insert > PivotTable.

3. For the "Table/Range" field, select the Excel Table in your "GA_Data" tab.

4. In the PivotTable Fields pane, drag "Session default channel group" to the Rows area.

5. Drag "Sessions" to the Values area. Make sure it is set to "Sum of Sessions."

Instantly, you have a clean summary table showing total sessions for each channel, ready to be turned into a chart.

Use Simple Formulas for Top-Level KPIs

Sometimes you just need a single, big number for your dashboard, like Total Ad Spend. A simple formula works best here. A function like SUMIF allows you to sum a column based on a specific criterion.

For example, to calculate total Facebook Ads spend:

=SUM(FB_Data_Table[Amount Spent (USD)])

To calculate CPL (Cost Per Lead), you'd find your total ad spend and divide it by the total number of leads from your CRM data:

=[Total Ad Spend] / [Total MQLs]

Put each of these key calculations in a clearly labeled cell on your "Calculations" sheet.

Section 4: Visualizing Your Data and Building the Dashboard

Now for the fun part: bringing your dashboard to life. Create your final tab and name it "Dashboard." This is where you'll assemble all your charts and KPIs into the layout you sketched earlier.

Create Your Charts

Go back to your "Calculations" tab. Click inside your PivotTable, and go to the PivotTable Analyze tab in the ribbon. Click "PivotChart."

• For channels vs. sessions, a Bar Chart or Pie Chart works well.

• For a metric over time (like sessions per day), use a Line Chart.

Once a chart is created, right-click it and select "Move Chart." Choose your "Dashboard" tab as the destination.

Style your charts to be clean and easy to read. Remove unnecessary clutter like gridlines or borders, give it a clear title, and use your brand colors if you can.

Link Your Top-Level KPIs

To display your big KPIs at the top of your dashboard, we'll link directly to the cells on the "Calculations" tab.

1. On your "Dashboard" tab, insert a Text Box or just click on a cell you want to use.

2. Click in the formula bar, type =, then navigate to your "Calculations" tab and click the cell with the KPI you want (e.g., the cell with your Total Ad Spend formula).

3. Press Enter.

4. Now, format this cell to make the number big, bold, and easy to see.

This dynamic link means the number on your dashboard will update automatically whenever the underlying data changes.

Add Slicers for Interactive Filtering

Slicers are interactive buttons that let you filter your dashboard charts without opening a single menu. You can add a slicer for date range, campaign name, or marketing channel.

1. Click on any of your dashboard charts that are based on a PivotTable.

2. Go to the PivotTable Analyze ribbon tab and click "Insert Slicer."

3. Select the field you want to filter by - for example, "Date" or "Session default channel group."

4. To make one slicer control multiple charts, right-click the slicer, choose "Report Connections," and check the boxes for all the PivotTables you want it to filter.

Now, users can click a channel in the slicer, and all connected charts will instantly update to show data for only that channel.

Maintaining Your Excel Dashboard

An Excel dashboard is not a "set it and forget it" tool. It requires regular manual updates.

Each reporting period (weekly, monthly), you will need to repeat the process from Section 2:

1. Export the new raw data from all your platforms.

2. Paste the new data into the bottom of your designated Excel Tables in the "Raw Data" tab.

3. Navigate to the Data tab in the Excel ribbon and click "Refresh All."

This will update all your PivotTables and formulas, which in turn will update all the charts and KPI numbers on your main dashboard. Let's be honest: this process is tedious and prone to error, but it's the reality of maintaining a dashboard in a tool that isn’t connected live to your data sources.

Final Thoughts

Building a digital marketing dashboard in Excel puts you in complete control, allowing you to create a custom report that perfectly matches your team's goals. By planning your layout, carefully structuring your data, using PivotTables, and linking everything together, you can turn a blank spreadsheet into a powerful command center for your marketing efforts.

While an Excel dashboard is a great starting point, the weekly grind of downloading CSVs and refreshing data can quickly become a bottleneck. We built Graphed to solve this exact problem. Our platform connects directly to all your marketing and sales data sources - like Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and Shopify - and keeps everything updated in real-time. Instead of building PivotTables, you just ask questions in plain English, and we build the live dashboard for you in seconds.