How to Create a Marketing Dashboard in Google Sheets
Want to see all your key marketing metrics in one place without buying a subscription to a complicated dashboard tool? Google Sheets might be the perfect place to start. Building your own custom marketing dashboard in a spreadsheet is a free and flexible way to track the health of your campaigns and make better decisions. This guide will walk you through the process step-by-step, from planning what to track to visualizing your data in professional-looking charts.
Why Use Google Sheets for a Marketing Dashboard?
Before diving into the steps, let's quickly cover why millions of marketers still rely on spreadsheets. In a world full of dedicated business intelligence tools, Google Sheets holds its own for a few key reasons.
It’s free and accessible. There's no cost to get started. All you need is a Google account, and you can access your dashboard from any device with an internet connection.
It’s highly flexible. You have complete control over what your dashboard looks like and what it tracks. You aren't limited by a software's pre-built widgets or templates.
It encourages collaboration. Like all Google Workspace apps, Sheets makes it incredibly simple to collaborate with your team, leave comments, and see changes in real-time.
Of course, there are trade-offs. The biggest challenge with Sheets is that data updates are usually manual. It can be time-consuming to download CSVs from all your marketing platforms and paste them into your report every week. But for getting started, it’s a fantastic option to gain clarity without the cost.
Step 1: Plan Your Dashboard Before You Build
The most common mistake when building a dashboard is jumping straight into a blank spreadsheet without a plan. A great dashboard answers your most important questions at a glance. To do that, you need to know what those questions are first. Take 15 minutes to think through this before you touch a single cell.
Define Your Goals and KPIs
Start with your high-level business goals. What is marketing ultimately trying to achieve? Is it generating leads, driving e-commerce sales, or increasing brand awareness? Your goals will determine which metrics, or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), matter most.
Frame it as questions and answers:
Question: "Where is our website traffic coming from?"KPIs: Sessions by Channel, New Users, Bounce Rate
Question: "Are our Facebook Ads campaigns profitable?"KPIs: Ad Spend, Impressions, Link Clicks, Conversions, Cost Per Conversion (CPA), Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
Question: "Is our email marketing driving sales?"KPIs: Open Rate, Click-Through Rate (CTR), Revenue from Email
Identify Your Data Sources
Once you know what you need to track, list where that information lives. A typical marketing dashboard pulls data from multiple platforms:
Website Performance: Google Analytics
Paid Advertising: Google Ads, Facebook Ads Manager, LinkedIn Ads
Sales/E-commerce: Shopify, Salesforce, HubSpot, Stripe
Email Marketing: Klaviyo, Mailchimp
Sketch a Quick Layout
Finally, grab a piece of paper or open a simple design tool and sketch a rough layout. Where do you want things to go? A common practice is to place your most important, high-level KPIs (like total revenue or total leads) in "scorecard" boxes at the top. Follow those with trend charts, and then more detailed breakdowns at the bottom. A visual plan will make the building process much smoother.
Step 2: Get Your Marketing Data into Google Sheets
This is often the most time-consuming part, but it's the foundation of your dashboard. Let's look at the most common method: manual CSV exports.
The Manual Export/Import Method
For this example, let's say we want to pull website performance data from Google Analytics and ad performance from Facebook Ads.
Google Analytics Data:
Log in to Google Analytics (we'll use UA for this example).
Go to the Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium report.
Select your desired date range (e.g., "Last 30 Days").
Click the blue 'Export' button in the top right corner and choose "Google Sheets". This will export the data directly into a new spreadsheet.
Rename this Google Sheet something clear, like "Marketing Dashboard Data." Rename the tab inside the sheet "GA Raw Data."
Facebook Ads Data:
Open Facebook Ads Manager.
Navigate to your campaigns and select the desired date range.
Ensure your columns match the KPIs you planned (e.g., Campaign Name, Amount Spent, Link Clicks, Purchases). You may need to customize the columns.
Click the 'Reports' icon and select 'Export Table Data...'.
Choose 'Export as .csv' and open the downloaded file.
In your "Marketing Dashboard Data" Google Sheet, create a new tab and name it "FB Raw Data."
Copy the data from the CSV file and paste it into this new tab.
Repeat this process for all your data sources, creating a separate tab for each one. Keeping raw data organized in its own sheets is a fundamental best practice that makes building your dashboard much easier.
Can You Automate This?
Yes, and if you plan to update your dashboard long-term, you should. The manual process is fine for a one-off report, but it’s a drain on your time when repeated every week. Tools like Zapier can help you send data to sheets from other apps, and specialized Google Sheets Add-ons (like Supermetrics or Coefficient) are built specifically to pull marketing data into your spreadsheet on a schedule.
Step 3: Build Your Dashboard using Pivot Tables and Charts
Now for the fun part! We’ll turn that raw data into a clean, easy-to-read dashboard. A critical rule is to keep your calculations separate from your presentation. We have our raw data tabs ("GA Raw Data," "FB Raw Data"), and now we'll create the main "Dashboard" tab where our final visuals will live. We will use Pivot Tables to do the heavy lifting of summarizing the data.
Create a Summary Table with Pivot Tables
Let's summarize our traffic sources from Google Analytics.
In your Google Sheet, click on the "GA Raw Data" tab.
Select all your data (a quick way is to click cell A1 and press
CTRL+AorCMD+A).Go to the menu and click Insert > Pivot Table.
In the 'Create pivot table' dialog, choose 'New sheet'. A new tab will appear, rename it "Processing" or "Pivot Tables."
The Pivot table editor will open on the right. We want to see sessions by channel, so:
Under Rows, click 'Add' and choose 'Source / Medium'.
Under Values, click 'Add' and choose 'Sessions'. Make sure it's summarized by 'SUM'.
You’ll now have a simple, neat summary table that shows the total sessions for each of your traffic sources. You've just distilled thousands of rows into a handful of insights without a single formula! You can repeat this process for any data you want to summarize, for instance creating another pivot table to sum Facebook Ad spend by campaign on your "FB Raw Data" tab.
Build Your "Dashboard" Tab
It's time to create the public-facing dashboard page. Click the '+' button in the bottom left to create a new tab and rename it "Dashboard." This is where you will organize your charts and key metrics.
1. Creating Scorecard KPIs
Scorecards are just big, prominent numbers that display your main KPIs. They grab immediate attention.
On your "Dashboard" tab, decide where you want your "Total Website Sessions" KPI to live, for example in cell B2.
To reference the total from your pivot table, just use a simple formula. In cell B2, type:
'Pivot Tables'!B10(Assuming B10 is the cell with the Grand Total of sessions in your pivot table sheet).Increase the font size to make it large and easy to read. You can add a text label like "Total Sessions" in the cell above or below it.
Repeat this for your other key KPIs (Total Clicks, Total Spend, Total Revenue).
2. Adding Charts for Trends and Comparisons
Next, let's visualize the data. Charts make it much easier to spot trends and compare performance.
Bar Chart for Traffic Sources:
Go back to your 'Pivot Tables' tab and highlight the data range of your source/medium summary table (including the headers).
Go to the menu and click Insert > Chart.
Google Sheets will default to a Pie Chart, which is a good choice for this type of data. In the Chart editor on the right, under 'Chart type', you could also choose a Bar Chart for easy comparison.
Click the three vertical dots on your new chart and select 'Copy chart'.
Return to your 'Dashboard' tab, click on an empty cell where you want it to appear, and press
Ctrl+VorCmd+Vto paste it.
Line Chart for Performance Over Time:To create a trendline, you first need data arranged by date. Create a new Pivot Table, but this time, add 'Date' to the Rows and 'Sessions' to the Values. Once you have that table, follow the same steps: highlight the data, insert a chart, but this time select 'Line chart'. This is perfect for seeing if your traffic is trending up or down.
Arranging the Layout
Paste all your charts and scorecards onto your dashboard tab and arrange them in a logical way, referencing the sketch you made earlier. Use the gridlines to align everything perfectly. Pro tips:
Give each chart a clear title (e.g., "Website Sessions by Channel").
Go to View > Show and uncheck 'Gridlines' to give your dashboard a clean, professional look.
"Freeze" your top rows so your KPIs and titles stay visible as you scroll. To do this, click on a row and go to View > Freeze > Up to current row.
Step 4: Supercharge Your Dashboard
Once you have the basics down, a few extra features can turn your static report into an interactive tool.
Add Sparklines for Quick Trends
Sparklines are mini line charts that live inside a single cell. They are perfect for showing a trend next to a total number without taking up much space. All you need is a row or column of numbers (like daily sessions). The formula is simple:
=SPARKLINE(A1:A30)
Use Data Validation for Dropdown Filters
Set up a dropdown menu to filter your data. For example, you can create a dropdown to choose between different ad campaigns. Go to a cell and click Data > Data Validation. Choose 'List from a range' as your criteria and select the cells containing your campaign names. Then, you can use formulas like SUMIFS that reference the dropdown cell, so when you select a new campaign, the dashboard updates automatically.
Final Thoughts
Building a marketing dashboard in Google Sheets is a fantastic way to take control of your data and create a single source of truth for your team. By carefully planning your KPIs, corralling your data, and using tools like pivot tables and charts, you can build a customized report that helps you make smarter decisions free of charge.
The main effort involved is the manual work of regularly fetching and updating your data. As your team grows, this can take up hours every week. We built Graphed to solve exactly this problem. We automate the connection to platforms like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Facebook Ads, so your dashboards are always pulling live, up-to-date data. You can skip the CSVs and formulas entirely and just ask for the report you want in plain English, getting real-time dashboards in seconds, not hours.