Most business owners I speak to can tell me what they spent on ads last month. Far fewer can tell me what each enquiry cost, channel by channel, without opening four platforms and a spreadsheet. A reporting dashboard closes that gap: one page, built in Looker Studio, showing spend, leads and cost per lead side by side and updating without anyone copying figures across.
What changes when your reporting works
The monthly question of whether marketing is paying its way gets answered from one place, the same way every time. Meetings stop being about whose numbers are right and start being about what to change next.
A good dashboard also shows you what is missing. When a channel records spend but no leads, either the channel is not working or the tracking behind it is broken. Both are worth knowing, and the second is often cheaper to fix.
Who this suits, and who it does not
- Owners spending on two or more channels, such as Google Ads, Facebook and Instagram ads and SEO, who want a single view of what each one returns.
- Marketing managers who report to a director or board every month and rebuild the same slides each time.
- Businesses that record what happens to each enquiry in a CRM or a spreadsheet and want those outcomes shown next to the spend that produced them.
It does not suit everyone. If your conversion tracking is unreliable, a dashboard will display the wrong numbers very neatly, so test whether your conversion tracking records real enquiries before paying for one. If you run a single channel, its own reporting screen is usually enough. And if you need reports emailed on a schedule from several systems with no manual step at all, that is an automation project rather than a dashboard build, and I scope it separately.
What the dashboard shows
I design around the questions the reader actually asks, not around whatever a platform happens to export. For most UK service businesses that comes down to four areas.
Spend, leads and cost per lead by channel
The headline table lists each channel with its spend, its leads and its cost per lead for the period, compared with the period before. You and I agree once what counts as a lead (a form submission, a call over a set length, a booking request), and that definition is used everywhere on the page.
What happened to the leads
Where you record outcomes, the dashboard can show how many enquiries from each channel became quotes and then customers. This is the view that tells you whether the cheapest leads are cheap for a reason. I report counts and rates, never names or contact details: personal data has no reason to sit in a marketing report, and keeping it out is simpler under UK GDPR.
Search visibility
Search Console clicks and impressions for the pages and queries that matter to you, split into searches for your brand name and everything else. That split shows whether SEO is bringing in new people or mostly catching those who already know you.
Website behaviour that affects enquiries
A short selection from GA4: the landing pages that produce leads and the conversion rate on mobile compared with desktop. I leave out the walls of sessions and page views that fill most templates, because a vanity metric on a dashboard invites debate without informing a decision.
Sources I connect
Looker Studio is Google’s free reporting tool. It has Google-built connectors for GA4, Google Ads, Search Console, BigQuery and Google Sheets, so those sources update without any work from you.
Facebook and Instagram ads, LinkedIn, Microsoft Advertising and most CRMs need either a partner connector, which is normally a monthly subscription paid to the connector’s provider, or a regular export into a Google Sheet. I recommend the cheapest option that stays reliable for your setup and tell you what it costs before anything is bought.
Figures from different platforms never agree exactly. Meta credits conversions under its own attribution rules, GA4 under different ones, and visitors who decline analytics cookies on your banner are partly missing from GA4, a gap known as consent-driven data loss. I label the source of every number and explain the difference rather than hide it. The article on why GA4 and Facebook conversion numbers do not match covers the mechanics.
How I build a reporting dashboard
- Decisions first. A short call about who reads the dashboard, how often, and which decision it should inform. You and I settle the definitions of a lead and a customer, and which date each one counts on.
- Access and data check. I ask for read-only access to each account and look at how campaigns are tagged. Inconsistent tags are the most common reason channel figures look wrong; a UTM link builder and an agreed naming convention prevent most of it.
- A one-page sketch. You see the layout on paper before I build anything, while changes cost nothing.
- The build. Data sources, calculated fields such as cost per lead and lead-to-customer rate, date and channel filters, and a layout that still reads on a phone.
- Reconciliation. I check each figure against its source platform for the same dates and write down any remaining difference and its cause.
- Handover. A walk-through on a call and a short written guide to reading and adjusting the dashboard.
Reporting problems I see most often
- Dashboards with dozens of charts and no answer to the owner’s actual question.
- Different lead definitions in different places, for example Google Ads counting visits to a thank-you page while the CRM counts genuine enquiries.
- Data sources connected through one employee’s personal login, so the dashboard breaks when that person leaves. I connect through an account the business controls wherever the platform allows it.
- Judgements made on the last day or two, which are often incomplete because the platforms are still processing data and late conversions are still arriving.
- Ad spend taken from the platforms (before VAT) mixed with costs typed in from invoices (which can include VAT), so channels are compared on different bases.
What you receive
- The dashboard, owned by your own Google account rather than mine.
- A list of the data sources and connectors used, with any subscription costs.
- A one-page definitions sheet: what each metric means and where it comes from.
- Notes from the reconciliation, so you know which differences between platforms are expected.
- A short guide to changing date ranges, filters and the people who can view it.
Where this fits
A dashboard reports against targets; it does not set them. If you have not yet decided what a lead is worth or how the budget should be split, a written digital marketing strategy comes first. If you want someone to act on what the dashboard shows by running Google and Meta ads against one cost-per-lead target, that is performance marketing.
What it costs
Each quote is written in pounds after a first call or a look at the accounts involved, and agreed in writing before work starts. It depends mainly on how many sources need connecting, whether lead outcomes come from a CRM, and how many pages the dashboard needs. Any partner connector subscription is billed separately by its provider.
Next step
Send me the channels you spend on, where your enquiries are recorded and the one question you want answered every month. I will tell you what the dashboard would need and whether your tracking is ready for it. You can get in touch through the contact page.