How to Create a Tracking Dashboard in Looker

Building your first tracking dashboard in Looker can feel like a major undertaking, but it's much more manageable when you break it down into a clear process. This guide provides a step-by-step walkthrough for creating a useful and interactive dashboard in Looker, from connecting your data to arranging your final charts and adding filters.

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First, What Is a Dashboard (and Why Looker)?

A tracking dashboard is a visual interface that displays key performance indicators (KPIs) and other important data points, giving you a snapshot of your business performance at a glance. It pulls data from various sources and presents it in an easy-to-digest format using charts, graphs, and tables.

Looker (now part of Google Cloud) is a popular and powerful business intelligence platform used for this purpose. It excels at creating a single source of truth for all your company data, allowing teams to explore information, build reports, and share insights. Unlike some simpler tools, Looker is built around a modeling layer called LookML, which provides robust governance and consistency across reports. This power comes with a trade-off: it traditionally has a significant learning curve.

Still, once you get the hang of it, you can create some incredibly valuable dashboards. Let's get started.

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Before You Build: Plan Your Dashboard Layout

Jumping straight into building without a plan is a recipe for a confusing dashboard. Before you touch any data, take a few minutes to answer these questions:

• Who is the audience? A dashboard for a marketing lead tracking top-of-funnel metrics will look very different from one for a finance team monitoring monthly recurring revenue (MRR). Tailor the information to the specific user.
• What questions should this dashboard answer? Think in terms of actionable insights. Instead of "I want to see sales data," ask "Which marketing channels are driving the most sales this quarter?" or "How is this month's revenue pacing against our goal?"
• What are the most important KPIs? Identify the top 3-5 metrics that truly matter. These should be the most prominent visuals on your dashboard. Some examples include:

A quick sketch on a whiteboard or a piece of paper can be a huge help. Decide where you want your most important numbers (usually top left), how you'll group related charts, and the overall flow of information.

Step 1: Get Familiar with Your Data in an Explore

In Looker, the foundation for any chart or dashboard is an "Explore." An Explore is essentially a pre-defined starting point for a query, created by a developer using LookML. It joins all the necessary data tables together so you can start analyzing without writing SQL.

When you start to build, you'll first be prompted to choose an Explore. You might see options like “Order Items,” “Users,” or “Website Traffic,” depending on what your data team has set up.

Inside the Explore interface, you’ll see a list of fields on the left, which are divided into two main types:

• Dimensions: These are the "group by" fields. They are descriptive attributes, like Date, Product Category, Traffic Source, or Country. Dimensions usually appear in blue.
• Measures: These are the aggregated amounts or numerical values you want to calculate, like a Count of Users, Sum of Sales, or Average Order Value. Measures usually appear in orange.

Think of it this way: you choose a dimension (like Country) to see a measure (like Sum of Sales) broken down by it.

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Step 2: Build Your First Visualization (A Tile)

Each individual chart or number on a Looker dashboard is called a "Tile." You create a Tile by building a query in the Explore view and choosing a visualization for it. Let's make a simple line chart showing revenue over time.

1. Select Your Fields In your chosen Explore (e.g., "Order Items"), find a date dimension, like "Orders Created Date." Click on it. Then, find the revenue measure you need, like "Orders Total Revenue." Click that as well.
2. Run the Query You’ll see the selected fields appear in the "Data" pane. Click the "Run" button in the top right corner. In just a few seconds, Looker will generate a data table showing total revenue for each date.
3. Choose a Visualization Above the data table, you’ll see a "Visualization" pane. Looker offers many different chart types. Since we’re tracking performance over time, a Line chart is a perfect choice. Click the line chart icon to apply it. Your raw data table will be replaced by a visual representation.
4. Customize the Visualization Every visualization needs clear labeling to be useful. Click the "Edit" gear icon in the top right of the visualization pane to open up settings for Plot, Series, Y-axis, and X-axis. Here you can:

• Change colors to match your brand.
• Add value labels to data points.
• Rename your axis labels for clarity (e.g., change "Orders_Total_Revenue" to "Total Revenue").
• Adjust grid lines and scales.

1. Save as a "Look" or to the Dashboard Once you’re happy with your tile, you have two options. You can click the gear icon in the top right of the main page and select "Save as a Look." A "Look" is a single saved visualization, which you can revisit or add to multiple dashboards later. Or, you can save it directly to a new or existing dashboard by selecting "Save to Dashboard." Give your tile a clear name like "Revenue by Day - Last 90 Days," select the dashboard you want to add it to, and you’re done with your first tile! Repeat this process for every KPI you identified during your planning phase.

Step 3: Assembling Your Dashboard

Once you’ve created a few tiles, it's time to put them all together on your dashboard canvas. Your goal is to tell a coherent story with your data.

1. Create a New Dashboard If you haven't already, navigate to the folder where you want to store your dashboard (usually a Shared folder), click "New," and select "Dashboard." Give it a descriptive name like "Marketing Performance Dashboard."
2. Add and Arrange Your Tiles On your new, empty dashboard, you will be in "Edit Mode." Click "Add Tile" to either add an existing Look you saved or to create a brand new chart from scratch by choosing an Explore. Once added, you can click and drag tiles to position them on the grid. Resize them by dragging their corners. Here are some layout tips:

• Top Left is Prime Real Estate: Put your single most important KPI, often a single value visualization like total revenue or leads, in the top left corner where eyes are naturally drawn.
• Group Related Metrics: Place charts related to user acquisition next to each other, and sales conversion metrics in another section.
• Don't Be Afraid of White Space: A cluttered dashboard is an unusable dashboard. Give your charts room to breathe so each one can be understood clearly.

1. Add Text Tiles You can also add Text tiles. These are great for adding titles, section headings, or brief text explanations to give your users context about the data they are viewing.

Step 4: Make it Interactive with Filters

A static dashboard is fine, but an interactive one is much more powerful. Looker’s dashboard filters allow users to slice and dice the data themselves to answer their own questions.

The most common and useful filter is a date range selector. Let's add one.

1. While in your dashboard's "Edit Mode," click "Filters" from the top toolbar, then "Add Filter."
2. In the configuration window, give your filter a name, like "Date Range."
3. Choose the control type. "Date Range" is often the most user-friendly option.
4. Now, for each tile on the dashboard, go to the "Tiles to Update" tab in the filter configurator. Here, you connect the filter to the data field inside each chart. For each tile, tell Looker that this filter should apply to the "Orders Created Date" field (or any other relevant date field).
5. Save your filter and exit edit mode.

You will now see your date range filter at the top of the dashboard. Users can click it and choose a predefined period like "Last 7 Days" or select a custom range, and all connected tiles will update instantly.

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Final Thoughts

Building an effective tracking dashboard in Looker is about marrying strong planning with technical execution. By starting with clear questions, building individual visuals methodically, assembling them into a logical story, and adding interactive filters, you transform raw data into a dynamic tool that empowers your entire team to make smarter decisions.

There's no doubt that Looker is a robust platform, but that power comes with quite a steep learning curve. From understanding the underlying data models to figuring out all the settings, creating a dashboard can be time-consuming. We wanted to eliminate this friction, which is why we built Graphed. Our approach lets you connect all your marketing and sales data sources in just a few clicks and build beautiful, real-time dashboards just by asking questions in simple, natural language - no complex setups, no learning curves, and no more spending hours just building reports.