How to Create a Retail Dashboard in Looker with AI

Building a powerful retail dashboard in Looker doesn't need to be a complicated, week-long project. By focusing on the right metrics and using Looker's built-in AI capabilities, you can create a clear, actionable overview of your business performance. This guide will walk you through exactly which KPIs to track and how to set up a smart dashboard to find the insights that matter most.

First Things First: Gathering Your Retail Data

Before you build anything, you need to know where your information lives. A great retail dashboard pulls data from multiple sources to give you a complete picture of your business. The goal is to see how efforts in one area (like marketing spend) impact results in another (like sales).

Most retail businesses rely on a handful of key platforms:

• E-commerce Platform: This is your online storefront data. Think Shopify, WooCommerce, or BigCommerce. It contains crucial information on sales, products, orders, and customers.

• Point of Sale (POS) System: If you have a brick-and-mortar store, your POS system (like Square or Lightspeed) holds your in-person sales data.

• Website Analytics: Google Analytics is the standard here. It tells you how people find and interact with your website, from traffic sources to on-site behavior.

• Marketing Platforms: Data from Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or your email platform (like Klaviyo) shows you how much you're spending and how effective your campaigns are.

• CRM Software: Systems like HubSpot or Salesforce contain valuable information about customer relationships, especially for B2B retail or high-value customer segments.

The first step in Looker (now part of Google and deeply integrated with Looker Studio) is connecting to these sources. Looker Studio has native connectors for Google products like Google Analytics and Google Ads, and you can easily import data from other platforms using its Google Sheets connector.

What Makes a Great Retail Dashboard? Key Metrics to Track

A cluttered dashboard is an ignored dashboard. The secret to an effective retail report is to focus on metrics that are directly tied to business goals. Resist the urge to visualize every single piece of data you have. Instead, organize your dashboard around key questions you need to answer about sales, customers, and operations.

Sales Performance KPIs

These are the headline numbers that tell you about the overall financial health of your retail business. They should be front and center on your dashboard.

• Total Revenue: The most basic yet crucial metric. Track it over time (daily, weekly, monthly) to understand sales trends and seasonality.

• Average Order Value (AOV): This shows you how much customers spend on average per transaction. Increasing your AOV is one of the fastest ways to grow revenue without needing more customers. Formula: Total Revenue / Number of Orders.

• Sales by Product or Category: Which products are your bestsellers, and which are lagging? This helps with inventory management, marketing focus, and merchandising.

• Conversion Rate: What percentage of your website visitors or store visitors make a purchase? This highlights the effectiveness of your website design, product pages, and checkout process. Formula: (Number of Sales / Number of Visitors) * 100.

Customer Behavior Insights

This group of metrics helps you understand who your customers are and how they interact with your brand over time. Profitable growth comes from building a loyal customer base, not just constantly acquiring new ones.

• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): How much revenue can you expect from a single customer over the course of their relationship with your business? This is a powerhouse metric for making smart decisions about marketing spend.

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): How much does it cost, on average, to acquire a new customer? Compare your CAC to your CLV to ensure your marketing efforts are profitable.

• Repeat Customer Rate: What percentage of your customers have purchased from you more than once? A high repeat rate indicates strong product satisfaction and brand loyalty.

• Cart Abandonment Rate: For e-commerce, this shows how many users add items to their cart but leave without completing the purchase. A high rate might point to issues in your checkout process or unexpected shipping costs.

Inventory and Operations Metrics

These KPIs help you manage the physical (or digital) products that drive your revenue. Efficient operations and smart inventory management are key to profitability.

• Sell-Through Rate: The percentage of inventory sold during a specific period. It tells you how quickly your products are moving. Formula: (Units Sold / Units Received) * 100.

• Top Selling Products: This seems simple, but it’s critical for knowing where to focus your marketing and purchasing efforts.

• Return Rate: What percentage of products sold are being returned? A high return rate for a specific item could signal a problem with quality, description, or sizing.

Building Your Retail Dashboard in Looker: A Step-by-Step Guide

With your data sources identified and your key metrics chosen, it's time to build. The beauty of Looker Studio is its user-friendly interface that lets you drag and drop your way to a professional-looking dashboard.

Step 1: Start with a Story, Not Just Data

Before you add a single chart, ask yourself: What question am I trying to answer? A dashboard should tell a story. For example, your top-level story might be "Overall Business Health," with KPIs like revenue and orders. A second section could tell the story of "Marketing Efficiency," showing ad spend versus revenue.

Step 2: Connecting Your Data Sources in Looker Studio

In Looker Studio, click "Create" and then "Data Source." You'll see a list of available connectors. For Google Analytics, it's a simple one-click authentication. For data from Shopify or other platforms, a common approach is to set up an automated data export to a Google Sheet and then connect Looker Studio to that sheet. This worksheet acts as a bridge between your e-commerce platform and your dashboard.

Step 3: Creating Your First Visualizations

Let’s start with a foundational chart: monthly revenue.

1. Once your data source is connected, click on “Add a chart” in the toolbar.

2. Select a time series chart.

3. In the chart’s ‘Setup’ panel on the right, drag your date field into the ‘Dimension’ box.

4. Drag your revenue or total sales field into the ‘Metric’ box.

That’s it! You have a basic line chart. For big-number KPIs like Total Revenue or AOV, use a scorecard chart type. It’s perfect for highlighting your most important figures at a glance.

Step 4: Designing for Clarity and Impact

Design isn't just about making things look nice, it's about making them easy to understand. Follow a few simple rules:

• Group related metrics: Keep your sales KPIs together, your customer metrics in another section, and so on.

• Use whitespace: Don’t cram charts together. Give your dashboard breathing room to make it easier to read.

• Prioritize: Put your most important metric (like Total Revenue) in the top-left corner, as that’s where people naturally look first.

• Be consistent with color: Use colors purposefully. For example, use one color for all revenue-related metrics and another for all cost-related metrics.

Leveraging Looker's AI Features for Deeper Insights

This is where you can save a ton of time and uncover insights you might have missed. Looker incorporates AI (now branded as Gemini internally by Google) directly into the dashboard creation process, helping you move from asking questions to seeing answers much faster.

Use AI to Create Charts with Natural Language

One of the most powerful features in Looker Studio is the ability to generate charts by typing a question in plain English. Instead of manually selecting chart types, dimensions, and metrics, you can just describe what you want to see.

Look for a feature called “Ask a question” or similar, often integrated directly into the interface. For example, you could type:

"Show me total revenue by product category as a pie chart"

Or something more complex like:

"Compare Average Order Value week over week for the last 90 days"

Looker will interpret your request and automatically generate the visualization. This is a game-changer for non-technical users, as it removes the learning curve and lets you explore your data conversationally. If the chart isn’t exactly right, you can refine your prompt or adjust it manually.

Get Automatic Insights and Trend Analysis

For any time series chart you create, Looker Studio can automatically add a trendline. In the ‘Style’ panel of your chart, simply click the option to “Add trendline.” You can choose from linear, exponential, or polynomial.

This small step is surprisingly powerful. At a glance, the trendline tells you the overall direction of a metric, smoothing out daily or weekly fluctuations. Is your conversion rate slowly trending up, even if it has some off days? A trendline makes that instantly visible.

Beyond the Build: Making Your Dashboard Actionable

Your finished retail dashboard isn't the end of the process, it's the beginning. An analytics dashboard is only valuable if it drives action. If you see that your CAC is rising, the dashboard should help you drill down to see which marketing channel is causing it. If a specific product has a high return rate, it’s a signal to investigate product quality or the accuracy of its online description.

Make sure to share your insights. Use Looker Studio's sharing and scheduling features to automatically send out a PDF of the report to your team every Monday morning. Making data visible and accessible is the first step toward building a more data-driven culture.

Final Thoughts

Creating a retail dashboard in Looker is about telling a clear story with your data. By focusing on the right metrics, organizing them logically, and leveraging AI-powered features, you can turn a complicated reporting task into a strategic tool that helps you understand performance and drive growth.

We know that managing all those different data sources and learning a new business intelligence tool can be a major headache. We built Graphed to remove that friction completely. Instead of juggling connectors and learning chart configurations, you just connect your sales and marketing platforms once, then use simple, natural language to get answers, build reports, and create real-time dashboards in seconds. It allows anyone on your team to get the insights they need without waiting on a data analyst.