Marketing dashboard: what it is and how to build one in 6 steps

Marketing teams drown in data. Google Analytics tracks website behavior. Google Ads and Meta report on ad spend. HubSpot or Salesforce tracks leads and deals. Email platforms measure opens and clicks. And somehow, pulling all of this together into a coherent picture still involves a spreadsheet, three browser tabs, and a Monday morning that disappears into manual reporting.

The data exists. The problem is that it lives in a dozen different places, each with its own dashboard, its own metrics definitions, and its own export format.

A marketing dashboard fixes this — not by replacing those tools, but by pulling the metrics that matter into one place. When it's done well, you spend less time reporting and more time making decisions.

Here's how to build one that actually gets used.

What is a marketing dashboard?

A marketing dashboard is a centralized view of your marketing performance across channels, campaigns, and funnel stages. It pulls data from your analytics tools, ad platforms, CRM, and other sources into a single interface.

The goal isn't to replicate every report from every tool. It's to answer the questions your team asks every week:

• Where are our leads coming from?
• Which channels are driving revenue, not just traffic?
• Are we spending our ad budget on the right campaigns?
• How is this month tracking against last month?

A marketing dashboard should make these answers visible at a glance, without anyone needing to log into four platforms and stitch numbers together in a spreadsheet.

Marketing dashboard vs. marketing report: A report is a snapshot — a PDF or slide deck that summarizes a time period. A dashboard is live. It updates as your data changes. Reports tell you what happened. A marketing dashboard tells you what's happening now.

Which metrics belong on a marketing dashboard

The specific metrics depend on your business model and channels. But the common mistake is including everything your tools can measure. A marketing dashboard with 25 metrics is a data dump, not a decision tool.

Here's a practical starting point, organized by what each metric actually helps you decide.

Acquisition — where are people coming from?

• Traffic by channel — organic, paid, referral, direct, social. Not just total traffic — the breakdown tells you which investments are working.
• Cost per acquisition (CPA) by channel — what you're paying for each new lead or customer from each source. The channel with the most traffic isn't always the most efficient.
• Ad spend vs. return — total spend across platforms compared to the revenue or pipeline those campaigns generated. This is the number your CFO cares about.

Engagement — are they doing anything useful?

• Conversion rate by stage — visitor to lead, lead to MQL, MQL to opportunity. Each stage tells you something different. A high visitor-to-lead rate with a low MQL rate means you're attracting the wrong audience or your lead scoring is off.
• Landing page performance — which pages convert and which don't. A page getting 10,000 visits and zero conversions is worse than a page getting 500 visits and 50 signups.
• Email engagement — open rates and click rates by campaign. Useful for spotting when messaging resonates vs. falls flat, but don't obsess over opens since Apple's Mail Privacy Protection makes them unreliable.

Revenue — is marketing generating money?

• Marketing-sourced pipeline — total dollar value of opportunities that originated from marketing. This is how you prove marketing's impact beyond vanity metrics.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC) — total marketing and sales spend divided by new customers. Track it monthly and by channel.
• Payback period — how many months until a customer's revenue covers the cost of acquiring them. A 3-month payback is very different from a 14-month payback when you're managing cash flow.

What to leave off: impressions (unless you're running brand awareness campaigns with a specific goal), social media follower counts, email list size as a standalone metric, page views without conversion context. These feel productive to track but rarely change a decision.

How to build a marketing dashboard in 6 steps

Step 1: Start with the questions you need answered every week

Don't start with metrics. Start with questions.

Sit down with your team (or just yourself, if you're a one-person marketing team) and write down the questions that come up in every weekly meeting or Slack thread:

• "How are we tracking against our lead target this month?"
• "Which campaigns are actually generating pipeline?"
• "Are we spending too much on paid search relative to what it's bringing in?"
• "Is organic traffic growing or flattening?"

Each question maps to one or two metrics. That's your dashboard. If a metric doesn't answer a recurring question, it doesn't belong.

Step 2: Map your data sources

Marketing data is fragmented by nature. Each metric likely lives in a different tool:

• Website traffic and behavior — Google Analytics, Plausible, or Mixpanel
• Ad performance — Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads
• Email campaigns — Mailchimp, HubSpot, Customer.io
• CRM and pipeline — HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive
• Revenue — Stripe, your billing system, or your accounting tool

Write down which tool holds the data for each question you listed in Step 1. This tells you exactly which integrations your marketing dashboard tool needs to support.

The hard part: metrics that span multiple sources. "CAC by channel" requires ad spend data (from ad platforms) combined with customer data (from your CRM or billing system). "Marketing-sourced revenue" requires connecting campaign data to closed deals. These cross-source metrics are the most valuable — and the hardest to get out of individual tools.

Step 3: Choose your dashboard tool

Spreadsheets (Google Sheets, Excel)Fine for small marketing teams. You can pull data manually or use basic integrations (Google Sheets connectors, Supermetrics, etc.). Fine for a team of one tracking a few channels. Falls apart when you're managing 5+ data sources or need numbers that update without manual work.

Traditional BI tools (Looker, Tableau, Power BI)Powerful, but require data engineering support to set up and maintain. If you have a data team that can build and manage pipelines, these give you maximum flexibility. If you don't, the setup cost isn't worth it for a marketing dashboard.

Marketing-specific tools (AgencyAnalytics, Whatagraph, DashThis)Purpose-built for marketing reporting. Pre-built connectors for ad platforms, SEO tools, and social media. Quick to set up if your stack is supported. The limitation: they're designed for standard marketing reports, not custom analysis. When you need to answer a question their templates don't cover, you're stuck.

AI-native analytics (Fabi)This is the approach we built Fabi around. Connect your data sources — Google Analytics, HubSpot, Stripe, Postgres, and 100+ others — then ask questions in plain English:

"What's our CAC by channel for Q4?"

"Which blog posts generated the most signups last month?"

"Show me the conversion rate from MQL to closed deal, broken down by lead source."

You get a marketing dashboard, but you also get the ability to follow up on any number. When paid search CPA spikes, you can immediately ask "which campaigns drove the increase?" without switching tools or writing a query.

Step 4: Connect your data and validate the numbers

Connect each source you mapped in Step 2. Then — and this step gets skipped too often — validate the numbers.

Pick two or three metrics and manually check them against the source tool. Does the traffic number in your dashboard match Google Analytics? Does the ad spend match what Google Ads shows? Small discrepancies are normal (different attribution windows, timezone differences), but large gaps mean something is misconfigured.

It's better to catch this now than to present wrong numbers in a team meeting and lose trust in the dashboard permanently.

Step 5: Design the layout

A marketing dashboard should answer your top questions within 10 seconds of opening it.

Layout principles:

• Lead with the metric your team cares about most. For most marketing teams, that's either pipeline generated or leads this month vs. target. Put it top-left and make it big.
• Group by theme, not by source. Don't organize your dashboard by tool (Google Analytics section, HubSpot section, etc.). Organize by question: acquisition metrics together, conversion metrics together, revenue metrics together. Your team thinks in terms of business questions, not data sources.
• Show trends, not just snapshots. A current month lead count is useful. A 6-month trend line showing whether leads are growing or declining is much more useful. Always include a time comparison.
• Use color sparingly and consistently. Green for on-track, red for behind target. That's it. Rainbow dashboards look impressive in screenshots and are useless in practice.

Step 6: Make it part of your workflow

The most common failure mode for marketing dashboards isn't bad data or ugly design. It's abandonment. The dashboard gets built, used for two weeks, then forgotten.

How to prevent this:

• Open every team meeting with the dashboard. Spend 3 minutes reviewing the top metrics before discussing anything else. This creates a habit and surfaces issues early.
• Set up automated alerts. If CPA exceeds a threshold or leads drop below target, get a Slack notification. Don't rely on someone remembering to check.
• Assign an owner. Someone is responsible for making sure the data is accurate and the metrics still reflect current priorities. When nobody owns it, the dashboard drifts.
• Revisit quarterly. Channels change. Campaigns rotate. The metrics that mattered in Q1 might not be the right ones for Q3. Schedule a quarterly review to add, remove, or adjust what you're tracking.

Common marketing dashboard mistakes

Tracking channel metrics without tying them to revenue. Traffic is up, social engagement is up, email opens are up — great. But did any of it generate pipeline? A marketing dashboard that can't connect activity to revenue trains your team to optimize for vanity metrics.

Separate dashboards per channel with no unified view. A Google Ads dashboard, a social media dashboard, an email dashboard — each one looks fine in isolation. But you can't answer "where should we invest our next dollar?" without seeing all channels side by side with consistent metrics.

Wrong attribution window. Your dashboard shows that paid search generated 200 leads last month. But your CRM shows different numbers because it uses a different attribution model. Decide on one attribution approach and apply it consistently. Perfect attribution doesn't exist, but consistent attribution is useful.

Too much historical data. A marketing dashboard isn't an archive. Showing 24 months of data makes every chart harder to read without adding useful context. Default to 3-6 months for operational dashboards. Use a separate report for longer trend analysis.

Never updating it after launch. You added TikTok ads to your mix, but the dashboard still only shows Meta and Google. You hired a content marketer, but there's no section for organic content performance. A stale marketing dashboard doesn't just miss data — it actively misleads by showing an incomplete picture.

Stop reporting. Start deciding.

Most marketing teams spend 5-10 hours per week assembling data from different tools into reports. That's a quarter of someone's work week spent on data collection instead of strategy.

A marketing dashboard eliminates that tax. Your data updates automatically. Your metrics are visible to the whole team. And when something moves — a campaign spikes, a channel underperforms, leads drop off — you can investigate immediately instead of waiting for next week's report.

Start with the three questions your team asks most often. Connect the data sources that hold the answers. And pick a tool that lets you dig deeper when a number needs explaining.

Try Fabi free — connect your marketing data sources and build your first dashboard in minutes, not weeks.