How to Create a Sales Dashboard in Google Analytics

Struggling to get a clear picture of your sales performance from Google Analytics 4? You see the revenue numbers, but connecting them to your marketing efforts feels like piecing together a puzzle in the dark. This guide will walk you through building a custom sales dashboard directly in GA4, giving you a single, clear view of the metrics that actually matter to your bottom line.

Before You Build: Is Your Sales Tracking Set Up?

A dashboard is only as good as the data it's built on. Before we jump into the fun parts, let's do a quick reality check on your GA4 setup. Without proper tracking, your dashboard will be full of zeros, which isn't very motivating.

Got E-commerce Tracking?

For GA4 to know anything about your sales, e-commerce tracking must be enabled. This involves sending specific data to Google Analytics when someone's purchasing behavior occurs on your site. The key event you need is the purchase event, which should include details like the transaction ID, value, currency, and the items purchased.

Most modern e-commerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, or BigCommerce have straightforward integrations or plugins that handle this for you. We recommend double-checking that your integration is active on all pages of your site and that your events are flowing as expected. You can check this in the Realtime report in GA4. If you have any traffic on your site making purchases, you should be able to see the purchase event in the report’s event card when visitors are online completing a purchase on your pages. Without this, none of the steps that follow will work properly.

Are You Using UTM Parameters?

If you want to know which marketing campaigns are actually driving sales, using UTM parameters is a must, no matter how good your integrations may seem. These small snippets of text added to the end of your URLs tell Google Analytics exactly where a visitor came from.

For example, if you're running a winter sale email campaign, your link might look like this:

www.yourstore.com/sale?utm_source=email&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=winter_sale

This tells GA4 that anyone clicking this link came from your "newsletter" via an "email" as part of the "winter_sale" campaign. This lets you attribute revenue directly to specific efforts instead of guessing what's effective. Consistent UTM use is one of the most powerful habits for data-driven teams because it prevents overspending on platforms like social media that generate impressive, yet ineffectual, user sessions and helps you focus on the platforms that bring you real ROIs on customer ad-spend.

Building Your Sales Dashboard in GA4: A Step-by-Step Guide

Once you've confirmed your sales data is flowing correctly, you're ready to build. We'll use GA4's "Library" function to create a completely custom report page that acts as our sales dashboard. You can think about this as more of a canvas than an off-the-charts guide that most integrations offer you. The key to building a good canvas that communicates well is finding only information you know you can reliably act on. More on that later.

Step 1: Navigate to the Library

In the left-hand navigation menu of GA4, click on Reports. At the very bottom of the reporting navigation pane, you'll see an option called Library. This is your command center for creating, organizing, and customizing all of your reporting.

Step 2: Create a New Report

Inside the Library, click on the blue + Create new report button, and then select Create detail report. A detail report lets you work with data in a granular format, typically a table with a chart at the top, which gets us familiar with how data flows within Google Analytics reports. While an Overview report has high-level summary cards, you begin building by using your data at the row-level.

Step 3: Start with a Blank Canvas

You can choose from several templates, but for our sales dashboard, we want full control. Select the Blank template to start from scratch. A blank slate is a great way to ensure that nothing gets lost and we can really isolate the information we're interested in with no noise that is typical of out-of-the-box integrations.

Step 4: Adding Sales Cards and Data

Once in the report builder, click Customize report in the upper right. We recommend renaming your report to “Sales at a glance report.” Move to the “Cards” section and click the button labeled “Add cards.”

GA4 dashboards are made up of "cards" (some call them widgets). Each card is designed to show a specific metric or dimension on a particular set of pages or event triggers. Your report will be composed of an area to view metrics about the entire data set that page has, as well as a section that consists of rows that contain particular information about your sales at the instance level, whether it's the SKU or the customer themselves.

The 8 Essential Cards for Your GA4 Sales Dashboard

Now, let's add the cards that will transform this blank report into a powerful sales monitoring tool. Click Add cards to add as many as needed to populate the following reports below in your overview page.

1. Total Revenue

This is your north-star metric. It’s what drives every business and no business should live without knowing how its health is faring from sales volumes over time.Why it matters: Gives you a quick, top-level view of your business’s financial health.How to build it: - From the "Add a card" library, click the "E-commerce revenue" card. Resize as necessary.

2. Total Transactions/Purchases

This tallies the total number of approved successful transactions on your website. Transactions and Purchases should ideally accompany one another in reports.Why it matters: This tells you acquisition levels. Your purchasers and revenue may have varying patterns depending on your product. Keep these figures top of mind as you grow your business over time.

3. Realtime Transactions

It’s important as an operator to stay up-to-date with activity occurring as close to present time as possible. Adding the "Total users in the last 30 minutes" card as well as the "Conversions by Event name" card will give you insights into who is converting across all your offers, in live time! Add in the Geo and Channel traffic breakdowns at the user level so you can get even more understanding of how your users are navigating your offer from a number of vantage points.

4. Return On Ad Spend At The Campaign Level

Google has included an awesome summary section on Return On Advertising Spending (RoAS) to provide insight on all associated advertising spending on various campaigns, whether on social media, a partner’s ad channel, or email campaign lists.

We recommend pulling data concerning the last thirty days, which works with campaigns in many contexts on various social media platforms quite seamlessly, as well as setting to weekly for a better vantage point if you maintain consistency with your content releases from a weekly standpoint.

Ultimately, if your company publishes on a weekly cadence over the last month across multiple platforms on a daily schedule, there may be some information loss if reporting daily versus weekly due to information crowding. Setting to weekly lets campaign level comparisons perform more accurately without noise. You’ll want granular level reporting to happen over the reporting detail.

Step 6: Putting it all Together

Once your cards are configured with the data sets we listed for you in prior sections, there may be things about the reporting that could get confusing for others who perhaps aren’t familiar with naming events, etc. Consider this in your journey by creating dashboards that explain events, pages, what values are to be measured by what type of user, and the actions to be taken given a particular deviation. This set of constraints is great for preventing teams from building dashboards that don’t quite hit the target or otherwise contain misleading information because it isn’t complete with important context about what makes your traffic good business. Experiment with filters when it makes sense. Save your project when you’ve set the configurations and metrics for all reporting at both levels.

Step 7: Add to Your Navigation

Don't let your beautiful new dashboard get lost in the Library. After saving, find your report in the list and click the three-dot menu on the right. Select Publish. This will let you add the dashboard to one of your report collections, making it a permanent part of your main left-hand navigation menu for quick access.

Taking Control of Your Data for Real Growth

Building dashboards manually as demonstrated may have nuances based largely on your business and the maturity of its reporting. If you need your data a particular way in a short timeframe with little room for development errors, it may be time not to hire a BI developer but invest in an AI agent.

AI is a promising addition to any business workflow where information is difficult to assess initially. AI agents can work with your data no matter its structure. All you as a business owner or stakeholder need to know is the type of information important to you for reporting, the platform should do the rest through great data modeling engineering practices via AI agents.

Final Thoughts

Building this custom sales dashboard in Google Analytics pulls you out of the weeds and gives you a mission control center for your marketing and sales efforts. Instead of digging through multiple reports to find answers, you have a single, shareable view that connects website activity directly to revenue.

While building reports manually in GA4 or in other programs across integrations for each of your platforms is always going to provide value, this can easily snowball across all your programs when more needs arise for other users on other teams. At Graphed, we feel strongly about minimizing BI developer onboarding when you really need the help most. That is why we allow your entire business to get set up on our state-of-the-art AI platform to query across all relevant reporting you provide to our engine and to start getting beautiful dashboards, today! It's one single location that tells all there is you need to know about any facet of your company while you spend the rest of that work week or sprint making game-changing moves at zero onboarding cost.