How to Use Looker for KPI Dashboards

Building a powerful KPI dashboard in Looker can feel like a game-changer, turning raw data into a clear, actionable roadmap for your business. But getting from a blank screen to a dashboard that actually guides decisions requires a plan. This tutorial will walk you through defining your key metrics and give you a step-by-step guide to building a KPI dashboard in Looker that your team will actually use.

Before You Build: What Makes a Great KPI Dashboard?

Before jumping into Looker's interface, it’s important to understand the goal. A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a measurable value that shows how effectively a company is achieving its key business objectives. Your dashboard is simply the visual home for these KPIs, displayed in a way that’s easy to understand at a glance.

A great KPI dashboard isn’t just a collection of charts, it’s a story about your business performance. It should:

• Be Focused: It answers your most important business questions, not every possible question. Clutter is the enemy of clarity.
• Be Visual: It uses the right charts to make trends and comparisons instantly obvious without needing to read every number.
• Be Contextual: A number like "500 sales" is meaningless without context. Is that good? Compared to what? A good dashboard compares metrics to previous periods or goals.
• Be Actionable: When you look at your dashboard, you should know exactly what’s working, what isn’t, and be able to decide what to do next.

Choosing the Right KPIs: The Foundation of Your Dashboard

The success of your Looker dashboard depends entirely on the metrics you choose to display. Technology is the easy part, strategy is what's hard. Here’s how to choose meaningful KPIs.

Start with Your Business Goals

Work backward from your high-level business objectives. What are you trying to accomplish this quarter or this year? Each KPI should directly measure progress toward one of those goals.

• Goal: "Increase quarterly revenue by 15%."
• Goal: "Improve website lead generation by 25%."

Identify Leading vs. Lagging Indicators

A balanced dashboard includes both types of indicators to give you a complete picture of performance.

• Lagging Indicators: These are output-oriented and measure past results, like Total Revenue or New Customers Acquired. They are easy to measure but hard to influence directly in the short term. They tell you if you achieved your goal.
• Leading Indicators: These are input-oriented and measure the activities that drive future results, like Sales Calls Made, Website Sessions, or Content Published. You can influence these daily, and they predict whether you're on track to hit your lagging indicators.

Your dashboard needs both. Lagging indicators tell you the score, and leading indicators tell you if your current plays are going to win the game.

Practical Examples for Different Teams

KPIs are not one-size-fits-all. The metrics that matter most depend on the team's function.

For a Marketing Team:

• Cost per Acquisition (CPA): How much does it cost to acquire one new customer?
• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): How many high-quality leads is marketing generating?
• Website Traffic to Lead Conversion Rate: What percentage of website visitors turn into leads?
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): How much revenue does the average customer generate over their entire relationship with you?

For a Sales Team:

• Sales Conversion Rate: What percentage of leads become customers?
• Average Deal Size: What is the average value of a closed deal?
• Sales Cycle Length: How long does it take on average to close a deal from first contact?
• Quota Attainment: What percentage of the sales team is meeting their target quota?

For an E-commerce Business:

• Average Order Value (AOV): How much does the average customer spend per transaction?
• Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate: What percentage of customers add an item to their cart but don’t complete the purchase?
• Website Conversion Rate: What percent of visitors make a purchase?
• Repeat Customer Rate: How many of your customers come back to buy again?

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

Once you have a clear list of the KPIs you want to track, it's time to build your dashboard in Looker. Looker is an incredibly powerful tool, but it's not a simple plug-and-play solution. Its true power comes from its modeling layer.

Step 1: Connect Your Data and Define it with LookML

This is the most critical and often the most challenging part of using Looker. Unlike some tools where you just connect a source and start charting, Looker requires a developer or data analyst to create a semantic modeling layer using LookML.

Think of LookML as a dictionary that teaches Looker about your business data. It's where you define your metrics (we call these measures in Looker, like COUNT of users or SUM of revenue) and your categories (these are called dimensions, like country, traffic source, or date).

While this requires technical expertise, a well-structured LookML model is what allows business users to explore data freely without writing SQL. You cannot build a meaningful dashboard without this foundation in place first. This is a "garbage in, garbage out" situation – the quality of your Looker dashboard is entirely dependent on the quality of your LookML model.

Step 2: Exploring Your Data to Create Visualizations ("Looks")

Once your data is modeled, you can start building individual charts, which Looker calls "Looks." You do this in the "Explore" interface.

1. Navigate to an Explore. This is a user-friendly starting point for a query created by your data analyst (e.g., an "Orders" Explore or a "Web Events" Explore).
2. From the left-hand panel, select the dimensions and measures you need for your KPI. For example, to track Revenue by Week, you would select a Sale Date dimension (set to weekly) and a Total Revenue measure.
3. Add any necessary filters. You might want to filter for the last 90 days or for a specific product category.
4. Click Run. Looker will write the SQL query in the background and display the data for you.

Step 3: Choosing the Right Visualization for Each KPI

The next step is to choose the best chart type to communicate your data story. Looker's visualization tab offers many options. Here are some common choices for KPI dashboards:

• Single Value: Perfect for displaying your most important headline KPIs like Total Revenue This Quarter or New Users Today. Use the comparison feature to show change versus the prior period (e.g., an up arrow for growth).
• Line Chart: The best choice for showing a trend over time. Use it for tracking KPIs like Weekly Website Sessions or Monthly Active Users.
• Bar/Column Chart: Ideal for comparing values across different categories. Use a column chart for Sales by Region or a bar chart for Top 10 Performing Ad Campaigns.
• Table: Although less glamorous, tables are excellent for showing detailed data or multiple metrics for a list of items, like a sales leaderboard with columns for deals closed, pipeline value, and quota attainment.

Once you’ve chosen your visualization, click the gear icon and "Save as a Look." Give it a clear, descriptive name.

Step 4: Assembling Your Visuals into a Dashboard

Now it’s time to bring all your individual Looks together into a single dashboard.

1. Go to the folder where you saved your Looks and click New > Dashboard.
2. Give your dashboard a clear title, such as "Q3 Marketing Performance KPI Dashboard."
3. Click Add Tile to start adding your saved Looks. You can also create new tiles directly from the dashboard view.
4. Drag and drop the tiles to arrange your dashboard logically. A common layout is to have the most important, high-level Single Value KPIs along the top, followed by trend line charts, and then more granular bar charts and tables below.

Step 5: Adding Filters and Interactivity

A static dashboard is useful, but an interactive one is far more powerful. Add dashboard filters to allow your users to explore the data for themselves.

Common filters include:

• Date Range: Allow users to select "Last 7 Days," "Last 30 Days," or a custom range.
• Region or Country: Let your team drill down into performance for specific markets.
• Campaign Name or Traffic Source: Useful for marketing dashboards to isolate the impact of different initiatives.

To add a filter, go into Edit mode on your dashboard, click Filters from the top menu, and follow the prompts to link the filter to the specific fields in your tiles.

Final Thoughts

Building an effective KPI dashboard in Looker is about marrying clear business strategy with thoughtful technical execution. It starts with defining your goals and choosing the right metrics, then building clean visualizations and arranging them into a logical, actionable story. When done right, it can become the command center for your team's growth.

We know that process, especially the heavy lifting required with setup and modeling, can take a lot of time and technical resources. We created Graphed because we believe getting insights shouldn't be so complex. By connecting your data sources in a few clicks, you can ask questions in plain English - like "create a line chart of Shopify revenue vs Facebook Ads spend for the last 90 days" - and have a real-time dashboard built for you in seconds, not hours.