How to Create a Website Dashboard in Looker

Thinking about moving beyond the standard Google Analytics reports? Building a custom website dashboard in Looker Studio is the perfect way to visualize the data that truly matters to your business, all in one place. We’ll show you exactly how to connect your website data and build a professional-grade dashboard from the ground up, no complex coding required.

What is Looker Studio and Why Use It?

If you're still logging into your GA4 property every day and clicking through multiple screens to find basic metrics, you're doing it the hard way. Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) is a free data visualization tool that lets you pull in data from various sources - like Google Analytics, Google Sheets, and Google Ads - and turn it into interactive, shareable reports and dashboards.

Why bother building your own dashboard? Three main reasons:

It saves time: All your key website KPIs are in one view, updated automatically. No more hunting for metrics every morning. Your Monday morning report goes from being a 30-minute chore to a 30-second glance.
It's fully customizable: Unlike the rigid default reports in GA4, you control everything. You choose the charts, the metrics, the layout, and the branding. You can create a dashboard focused on lead generation, e-commerce sales, or content performance - whatever drives your business.
It tells a clearer story: A well-designed dashboard helps you and your team quickly understand performance. You can organize charts and data points to answer specific business questions like "Which marketing channels are driving the most qualified traffic?" or "Is our new blog content resonating with readers?"

Getting Your Data Ready: A Pro Tip for Better Dashboards

While you can connect Looker Studio directly to Google Analytics 4, there’s a better way that gives you more power and flexibility: using Google BigQuery as a middleman. Don’t panic - it sounds technical, but it’s mostly just a few clicks and it is completely free to get started.

Here’s the simple version of why this is a good idea: GA4's direct connector for Looker Studio sometimes has limitations on the amount of data you can pull at once (running into API quotas). By linking GA4 to BigQuery first, you create a complete, raw copy of your website data in a place Looker Studio is designed to pull from without limits. This ensures your dashboard is faster and more reliable.

Step 1: Link Google Analytics 4 to BigQuery

First, we need to tell Google Analytics to automatically send its data over to BigQuery every day. This creates a robust, unfiltered dataset for your dashboard.

Log into your Google Analytics 4 property.
Click on Admin (the gear icon) at the bottom left.
In the Property column, find Product Links and click on BigQuery Links.
Click the blue Link button.
You'll be prompted to Choose a BigQuery project. If you don't have one, it will guide you through creating a new one (it's fast and free).
Once you've selected a project, you'll configure the settings. Choose your data location (e.g., US) and check the box for Daily export. You can also turn on the streaming export for near real-time data if you want.
Click Submit, and you're done! Your GA4 data will now start populating in your BigQuery project. It can take up to 24 hours for the first data export to appear.

How to Build Your Website Performance Dashboard

With your data flowing into BigQuery, you’re ready for the main event: creating the dashboard in Looker Studio.

Step 2: Connect Looker Studio to Your BigQuery Data

Go to lookerstudio.google.com and click Blank Report to start a new dashboard.
Looker Studio will immediately ask you to connect to a data source. In the list of Google Connectors, find and click on BigQuery.
On the next screen, you’ll see a list of your projects. Navigate to your project name, then the dataset (it will be named something like analytics_XXXXXXXXX), and finally select the table called events_. The YYYYMMDD at the end means it's a date-sharded table, which is exactly what we want.
Ensure the Use date-sharded table option is checked, and click Add.
You’ll see a confirmation pop-up. Click Add to Report.

That's it! You now have a blank canvas connected to your raw website data. Now comes the creative part.

Step 3: Planning Your Dashboard Layout

Before you start adding charts, take a minute to think about the story you want to tell. A great dashboard answers important questions at a glance. A simple and effective layout is to organize it from a high-level overview to more granular details.

A typical website dashboard might follow a structure like this:

Top-Level KPIs: The big, important numbers (Total Users, Sessions, Conversions).
Audience Overview: Who is visiting your site? (Traffic by Channel, by Device, by Country).
Content & Engagement: What are they doing? (Top Visited Pages, Engagement Rate Over Time).

Step 4: Adding Your First Visualizations

Let's add some of the most common and useful visualizations to our dashboard.

KPI Scorecards

Start with the most important metrics at the very top. These scorecards give you a quick health check.

From the top menu, go to Add a chart and select Scorecard.
Place it at the top of your report canvas. By default, it might show something like Record Count. We’ll fix that.
With the scorecard selected, look at the Setup panel on the right. Under Metric, click the current metric and search for User pseudo ID. This unique ID represents each user. To get a count of users, change the aggregation from 'Count' to Count Distinct (CTD).
Important: Rename this metric to something readable! Click the little pencil icon next to the metric name and change it from User pseudo ID to something clear like Total Users.
Repeat this process to create more scorecards for metrics like Sessions (you'll need to count sessions using the (ga_session_id) field) and Conversions.

Traffic Sources Pie Chart

Now, let's see where your traffic is coming from.

Go to Add a chart and choose a Pie chart.
With the chart selected, in the Setup panel, change your Dimension to Session default channel group.
Set the Metric to Total Users (or the metric you created for user count).
You'll now see a clear breakdown of traffic from Organic Search, Direct, Organic Social, and more.

Sessions Over Time Line Chart

Is your traffic growing? A time-series chart instantly shows trends.

Go to Add a chart > Time series chart.
Place it across the width of your dashboard.
In the Setup panel, the Dimension should automatically be set to Event date. If not, find and select it.
For the Metric, use the Sessions metric you created earlier or Total Users. Now you can see your daily traffic trends.

Top Performing Pages Table

What content is getting the most attention? A table tells all.

Go to Add a chart > Table.
Set the Primary Dimension to Page title.
Now, add your desired Metrics. Click 'Add metric' and include Event count (which you can rename to Pageviews), User engagement duration to see how long people are staying on the page, and Total Users.

Step 5: Make Your Dashboard Interactive

A static dashboard is useful, but an interactive one is a game-changer. It allows anyone on your team to drill down and explore the data for themselves.

Add a Date Range Control

This is the most important control. It lets users view data for last week, this month, or a custom range.

Go to Add a control > Date range control.
Place this in the top-right corner of your report. That’s it! It automatically links to all the charts on the page.
Now you can easily see if that sales promo last week actually led to a traffic spike, or compare this month's performance to last month's.

Add Dimension Filters

Let users filter data by categories like device or country.

Go to Add a control > Drop-down list.
In the Setup panel, under Control field, select the dimension you want to filter by, such as Device category or Country.
Place this filter control next to your date range picker. Now users can easily see how mobile e-commerce traffic is performing or view data from a specific region.

Finally, use the Text and Shape tools from the toolbar to add headings, group related charts with a background rectangle, and add your company logo to make your dashboard look organized and professional.

Final Thoughts

By connecting your Google Analytics data through BigQuery, you've now built a refreshable, interactive website dashboard in Looker Studio that goes far beyond anything available by default. This central hub gives you and your team a clear, consistent view of website performance, streamlining your reporting and helping everyone make smarter, data-informed decisions.

While building your own dashboards is incredibly empowering, you can see that the setup - connecting data sources, configuring each chart, and making everything interactive - still requires time and specific knowledge. We created Graphed to remove this manual effort. After a one-click connection to Google Analytics and your other marketing platforms, you can simply ask in plain English for the dashboard you need - like, "Create a dashboard showing our main website KPIs and top traffic sources for this quarter" - and watch as the charts are built for you automatically, complete with filters and real-time data.