How to Create a Mobile App Dashboard in Looker

Your mobile app generates a ton of data, but numbers in a database don't tell you how to grow. To understand user behavior, track your growth, and make smarter decisions, you need a clear, organized mobile app dashboard. This article will walk you through how to create a useful and insightful mobile app dashboard in Looker from start to finish.

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Before You Build: Planning Your Mobile App Dashboard

A great dashboard starts with a great plan, not with picking chart types. Before you write a single line of code or drag and drop a visualization, you need to be crystal clear on two things: the questions you need to answer and the audience you're building for.

What Questions Are You Trying to Answer?

A dashboard is just a tool to answer questions. If you don't know the questions, you'll end up with a collection of charts that look nice but don't drive action. Start by defining your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) across a few core areas of your app's performance.

Think of it like this:

• User Acquisition: Where are our users coming from? Key Metrics: Downloads by source (Organic, Paid Ads, Social), Daily Active Users (DAU), Monthly Active Users (MAU), Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
• User Engagement: What are people actually doing in the app? Key Metrics: Average session length, screens per session, feature adoption rate (what percent of users use key features), user flow paths.
• User Retention: Are users coming back? Key Metrics: Churn rate (what percent of users stop using the app), retention rate by cohort (e.g., what percent of users who signed up in January were still active in March), daily/weekly/monthly retention.
• Monetization: Is the app making money? Key Metrics: Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), conversion rate (from free to paid), in-app purchase frequency, subscription revenue.

Pick a few critical metrics from each category. Aim for clarity over quantity. A dashboard with five meaningful KPIs is far more valuable than one with 20 confusing ones.

Who Is the Audience?

Not everyone needs to see the same information. The audience dictates the level of detail on the dashboard.

• Executive Team: They need a high-level "state of the business" view. Focus on headline numbers like MAU, total revenue, and overall churn rate. Keep it simple and visual.
• Marketing Team: They need to understand campaign performance. Their dashboard will focus on acquisitions - downloads by channel, CAC by campaign, ROAS (Return On Ad Spend), and conversion rates from specific ads.
• Product Team: They need to know how the app is being used. Their dashboard will be heavy on engagement and retention metrics like feature adoption, session duration, user feedback funnels, and crash reports.

Building one massive dashboard for everyone is a recipe for confusion. It’s better to create slightly different versions tailored to what each team cares about most.

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Getting Your Data Ready for Looker

With your plan in hand, the next step is connecting Looker to your app's data. This is where things get a bit more technical. Your app data likely lives in a database like Google Firebase, an analytics platform like Mixpanel or Amplitude, or a custom SQL database (like PostgreSQL, BigQuery, or Redshift).

To use this data in Looker, you first need to model it using LookML. Think of LookML as a dictionary that translates your raw database tables into business logic. It's where you define your metrics, tell Looker how tables are related, and essentially create the building blocks for your entire dashboard.

For example, in LookML, you would create a "measure" called total_revenue that Looker understands is the sum of the price column from your purchases table. This allows other people on your team to just select "Total Revenue" without needing to know any SQL. This modeling step is powerful but it's typically handled by a data analyst or developer with experience in both SQL and LookML.

Building Your Mobile App Dashboard in Looker: A Step-by-Step Guide

Once your LookML model is set up, you can finally start building the fun part: the dashboard itself.

Step 1: Create a New Dashboard

This is the easy part. Simply navigate to your desired folder in Looker, click the New button in the top right, and select Dashboard. Give it a clear, descriptive name like "Mobile App Performance - Executive Summary" or "Marketing KPI Dashboard."

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Step 2: Add Your First Tile (Visualization)

Dashboards in Looker are made up of individual components called "Tiles," which are essentially saved charts or visualizations. To create one, you'll start from an Explore.

An Explore is a starting point for querying your data that was defined in your LookML model. Let's say we want to create a line chart showing Daily Active Users (DAU) over the past 30 days.

• From your new dashboard, click Add Tile.
• Choose the relevant Explore, which might be named something like "User Activity."
• In the Explore interface, you'll see a list of "Dimensions" (attributes like date, device type, country) and "Measures" (aggregated numbers like active user count, total revenue).
• Select the "Date" dimension and the "Active User Count" measure.
• In the Filters section, set the "Date" to "is in the past 30 days."
• Click Run.

Looker will generate a data table. Now, click the Visualization tab and select the line chart icon. Just like that, you have your first chart. Click the gear icon in the top right and select Save to Dashboard to add this Tile to the dashboard you just created.

Step 3: Organizing Your Dashboard with Key Sections

A single chart isn't a dashboard. Now, repeat the process from Step 2 to build out visuals for all the KPIs you defined during your planning phase. The key is to organize them logically so the dashboard tells a coherent story.

Use text tiles to create headings for different sections:

User Acquisition & Growth

• A line chart showing DAU and MAU over time.
• A bar chart breaking down new user downloads by acquisition source (e.g., Organic Search, Facebook Ads, Google Ads).
• A single value visualization showing your overall MAU number for the current month.

User Engagement

• A single value visualization showing the average session duration.
• A table listing the top 10 most viewed screens in your app.
• A bar chart showing feature adoption rates for your key features.

Retention & Churn

• A single value visualization displaying your monthly churn rate.
• A cohort grid visualization showing user retention over time. This shows what percentage of users from a specific sign-up week or month return in subsequent periods.

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Step 4: Add Filters to Make Your Dashboard Interactive

Static charts are useful, but interactive ones are better. Looker filters allow you and your team to slice and dice the data directly from the dashboard view without having to edit individual tiles.

In dashboard edit mode, go to the Filters menu in the toolbar. You can add global filters that apply to all the tiles on the dashboard. Common filters for a mobile app dashboard include:

• Date Range: Allow users to toggle between Last 7 Days, Last 30 Days, or a custom date range.
• Device Type: Filter the entire dashboard to see data for just iOS or Android users.
• User Country: Zoom in on performance in specific geographic regions.

Connect each new filter to the relevant field in each tile on your dashboard. Now, anyone viewing the dashboard can change the date range, for example, and all the charts will update instantly.

Step 5: Automate and Share Your Work

A dashboard is only valuable if people see it. Instead of forcing your team to log into Looker every day, use schedules and alerts to push insights to them.

• Schedules: You can schedule your dashboard to be sent as a PDF or visualization via email or to a Slack channel. A good practice is to set up a weekly performance summary that gets sent to key stakeholders every Monday morning.
• Alerts: You can also set up alerts that trigger when a metric crosses a certain threshold. For instance, create an alert to notify the product team via Slack if the "app crash rate" metric goes above 2%.

Final Thoughts

Building a mobile app dashboard in Looker is a methodical process of planning your goals, modeling your data, and then strategically adding and organizing visualizations. Done right, it transforms your raw app data from a messy database into a clear, actionable command center for your entire team.

Of course, this process can feel pretty intensive, especially the LookML part. Looker is incredibly powerful, but its steep learning curve means many marketing and product teams are stuck waiting on data analysts to build these reports for them. That's why we created Graphed. It connects to all your data sources just like Looker, but instead of needing a developer to model your data first, you can instantly create dashboards and get answers just by asking questions in plain English - like "show me a dashboard of my monthly active users from Firebase broken down by country" and it gets built in seconds, not hours.