How to Create an Ecommerce Dashboard in Looker

Crafting a central ecommerce dashboard in Looker organizes your most important metrics in one place, giving you a clear view of your business's health. This guide will walk you through the essential components of a high-impact ecommerce dashboard and the steps to build your own, moving from initial planning to creating your first visual tiles.

First, Ask the Right Questions

An effective dashboard doesn't just show data, it answers critical business questions. Before you start building, decide what you need to know. A poorly planned dashboard becomes a cluttered collection of charts that nobody uses. Start by focusing on the insights that drive strategic decisions.

Consider framing your questions around key areas of your ecommerce business:

Overall Sales Performance

What is our total revenue, AOV (Average Order Value), and order volume for the day, week, and month?
How are we trending against our sales targets for this quarter?
Which products are our bestsellers, and which ones are underperforming?

Marketing and Customer Acquisition

What are our primary sources of traffic and conversions (e.g., organic search, paid ads, social media, email)?
What is our Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) for key campaigns on Google Ads and Facebook Ads?
What is our overall Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and how does it vary by channel?

Website & User Behavior

What is the conversion rate of our store's sales funnel, from landing page visit to completed purchase?
Which stage of the checkout process sees the most drop-offs?
How does user behavior differ between mobile and desktop visitors?

Customer Value & Retention

What is our customer repurchase rate?
What is the lifetime value (LTV) of a customer acquired from a specific channel?
Who are our most valuable customer segments?

Your goal is to choose a handful of the most vital questions. This focus ensures your dashboard is clean, actionable, and provides a true “at-a-glance” summary of your ecommerce operation.

Setting the Foundation: Data Sources and LookML

To answer these questions, your dashboard needs data. Looker sits on top of a data warehouse (like Google BigQuery, Snowflake, or Amazon Redshift) and analyzes the data stored there. That means your first technical step is to gather your data sources in one place.

Essential ecommerce data sources typically include:

Platform Data: Raw sales, order, and product data from Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento.
Web Analytics Data: Traffic, session, and user behavior data from Google Analytics.
Advertising Data: Spend, clicks, and impressions from Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.
Email & CRM Data: Campaign performance and customer information from Klaviyo or HubSpot.

Once this data is funneled into your warehouse, you use Looker's modeling layer, LookML, to define your business logic. While LookML requires a learning curve, understanding its purpose is simple. Think of it as a translator that turns human-friendly database table names (like ga4_sessions_20231128) into simple, reusable business terms your team can understand.

LookML defines your key building blocks:

Dimensions: These are the attributes or qualities of your data - things you can group by. Examples include Product Name, Traffic Source, or Order Date.
Measures: These are the quantitative metrics you want to calculate - things you can count or sum up. Examples are Total Revenue, Average Order Value, or Count of Orders.

A well-structured LookML model is the secret to a great Looker dashboard. It ensures that everyone in the company is calculating Total Revenue the exact same way, creating a single source of truth for your metrics.

Step-by-Step: Building Your Ecommerce Dashboard in Looker

With your questions defined and your data model in place, you can finally start building. The process involves creating individual data visualizations called "Tiles" and arranging them on your dashboard.

1. Create a New Dashboard

Start by navigating to your desired folder in Looker, clicking the "New" button, and selecting "Dashboard." Give it a clear name like "Ecommerce Daily Snapshot" and save it.

2. Add Your First KPI Tile: Total Revenue (Last 30 Days)

Key performance indicators (KPIs) should be at the top. Let's start with total revenue.

On your new dashboard, click "Add Tile." This opens the Explore interface.
Choose your pre-defined Explore that contains order information (e.g., "Orders").
In the left-hand panel, find and click your revenue measure (e.g., Total Sale Price).
Next, find your order date dimension (e.g., Order Created Date) and click the filter icon next to it. Set the filter to "is in the last 30 days."
Click "Run."
Under the "Visualization" tab, choose the "Single Value" chart type. This provides a clear, bold number.
Click "Save." Looker will prompt you to add this Tile to your dashboard.

You’ve just created your first building block! Repeat this process for other key KPIs like Average Order Value and Total Orders.

3. Visualize Your Sales Trend: Revenue Over Time

Next to your KPIs, it's helpful to see how sales are trending. A line chart is perfect for this.

Create another new Tile from your "Orders" Explore.
Select your revenue measure (Total Sale Price).
This time, alongside your measure, select your date dimension (Order Created Date). Make sure the date is grouped by Week or Day.
Set another filter for Order Created Date to your desired timeframe, such as "is in the last 90 days."
Click "Run."
For the visualization, select the "Line" chart. Looker will automatically plot the revenue for each day or week.
Give the Tile a name like "Revenue Trend (Last 90 Days)" and save it to your dashboard.

4. Identify Top Performers: Best-Selling Products

Understanding which products drive your business is crucial. A bar chart or table works well here.

Create a new Tile, possibly from an "Order Items" Explore that links order data to product data.
Select your Product Name dimension.
Select a measure like Total Item Revenue or Count of Items Sold.
In the Product Name dimension, use the settings cog to limit the row count to 10 or 15 to only show your top sellers.
Filter the date to "last 30 days" to keep the data relevant.
Click "Run."
Choose a "Bar" chart or a "Table" to display the results. Save it to your dashboard.

5. Track Marketing Performance by Channel

A great dashboard connects marketing efforts to sales results. This usually requires an Explore where your sales data (from Shopify) is joined with your web traffic data (from Google Analytics).

Create one last Tile from this combined marketing dataset.
Select your acquisition dimension, such as Session Source / Medium provided by GA4.
Select several key measures to see the full picture: Total Sessions, Count of Orders, Conversion Rate, and Total Revenue.
Run the query for the "last 30 days."
The best visualization for this is a "Table." You can even customize it to add bar visualizations within the columns to help quickly identify top-performing channels.
Save it to your dashboard with a title like "Performance by Channel."

Designing for Clarity and Action

Once your tiles are created, the job is not quite done. A well-designed dashboard is intuitive and guides the user's eye to the most important information. Think about layout and usability:

Arrange Logically: Place high-level KPIs at the top. Follow with trend graphs, and finish with more detailed breakdowns (like tables) at the bottom. The dashboard should tell a story from overview to detail.
Use Dashboard Filters: The most powerful feature of a Looker dashboard is interactivity. Add a "Date Range" filter to the dashboard and connect it to every tile. This allows anyone to instantly adjust the timeframe for the entire report without having to edit individual tiles.
Keep it Clean: Resist the urge to add every metric you can think of. Too much information creates noise and makes it harder to find actionable insights. Stick to the questions you outlined in the beginning.

Final Thoughts

Creating an ecommerce dashboard in Looker is about mapping your business questions to clearly defined metrics, building them tile-by-tile, and arranging them in a way that tells a coherent story. By focusing on your core sales, marketing, and customer metrics, you can transform Looker from a complex BI tool into an invaluable command center for your business.

While Looker offers incredible customization, we know that the setup - getting data into a warehouse and writing LookML - can be a big lift, especially for marketing and sales teams. We built Graphed to solve this. After connecting your Shopify, Google Analytics, and ad accounts with one click, you can create the same dashboards by describing what you want in plain English. Instead of building tile by tile, just ask for "a dashboard comparing our revenue, AOV, and ad spend by channel for the last quarter," and let AI build it for you in seconds.