How to create a Google Sheets marketing dashboard

Google Sheets offers a flexible, user-friendly platform that makes building custom dashboards accessible to marketers, whether you're tracking social media analytics, client reports, or OKRs (Objectives and Key Results).

In this guide, I’ll show you how to create a Google Sheets marketing dashboard that meets your needs and empowers team collaboration.

Step 1: Decide what data and metrics you want to include in your report

Before building your dashboard, list the data sources you need. Typical ones include:

• Social media analytics: Facebook ads, Instagram Insights, LinkedIn.
• Website data: Google Analytics, Search Console.
• Client reports: CRM exports, performance benchmarks.
• Ad platforms: Google Ads, Bing Ads.

Next, you need to outline how you’ll structure your dashboard. Start by defining tabs for raw data, calculations, and visualizations. Next, identify key metrics, such as CTR, CPA, and engagement rates.

The metrics and KPIs you want to look at depend on your marketing objectives. Examples include:

• Paid ads: Impressions, conversions, ROAS.
• Content marketing: Page views, time on site.
• Email marketing: Open rates, click-through rates.

Before moving forward, ensure your team and stakeholders have appropriate permissions. Google Sheets allows you to grant view-only or editing access, making it ideal for collaborative reporting in marketing.

Step 2: Connect your data to Google Sheets

For this step, you have several options. Firstly, you can import data manually by copy-pasting it from different platforms. This is doable if you only need periodic updates or have a small amount of data sources. You can also download data manually in CSV or Excel format from platforms like Google Ads or Facebook Ads directly to your Google Sheets.

If you need continuous updates or have many sources, importing data automatically will be the way to go. Tools like Supermetrics offer a quick way to pull data directly into Google Sheets without manual input. Watch this tutorial to learn how you can get data into Google Sheets automatically with Supermetrics.

Because data often comes from multiple sources, you need to establish data blending techniques. These techniques simplify reporting and create a unified view of performance metrics across platforms.

Data is never static, so you’ll also need a data refresh schedule. Depending on how often you need to analyze your dashboard, you can choose daily, weekly, or even monthly updates. If you're wondering how to track OKRs in Google Sheets, this method allows you to monitor progress effectively by updating relevant data points regularly.

Daily updates allow you to track high-frequency metrics like social media or ad impressions. Weekly updates are ideal for summarizing campaign performance and tracking OKRs, while monthly updates are suitable for client reports and long-term performance overviews.

Step 3: Visualize your data

A dashboard’s primary goal is data visualization, so this step is critical in getting the results you want.

Charts and graphs are usually the go-to options. A bar chart will be perfect for comparisons, a line chart will help you view trends, and pie charts will help you understand distributions.

Don’t overlook data tables either. With them, you can group data by date, campaign, channel, or any other factors, to show key metrics like highest-performing campaigns. All this makes it easier to analyze data and view important information at a glance.

Sometimes, you may need to take your dashboard a step forward and add various formulas for calculations. Examples include SUM(), AVERAGE(), and IF() for real-time performance summaries, or ARRAYFORMULA() to apply functions across columns efficiently.

Finally, ensure your dashboard is clear and easy to read. For instance, you can remove duplicate entries, group any related metrics, and use sections to separate data by category.

Step 4: Level up your dashboard with advanced Google Sheets features

You probably won’t need advanced features for all your dashboards, but when added, they can improve reporting and data analysis.

Interactive elements and filters are one example. These include dropdown menus for dynamic filtering or slicers to filter visualized data across multiple graphs simultaneously.

Custom formulas and functions, such as custom calculations for specific metrics, like cost-per-conversion ratios, can help highlight trends and anomalies visually, making reports easier to interpret.

Conditional formatting can also be useful when you want to highlight trends. For instance, you can highlight positive performance areas in green and poor performance areas in red.

Finally, you can use Google Sheets’ automated reporting features, which can eliminate the need for manual updates so that stakeholders receive up-to-date information consistently. Supermetrics offers a wealth of reporting dashboard templates — take a browse and see if there’s one that fits your needs.

Google Sheets must-know functions

ARRAYFORMULA

Let’s start with my most-used and arguably the most important function in Google Sheets— ARRAYFORMULA. It lets you apply a formula to an entire column with just one cell. No need to manually drag the formulas down. This is a lifesaver when working with dynamic datasets where the number of rows keeps changing. ARRAYFORMULA is great if you want to keep things efficient and automated.

QUERY / OFFSET and VLOOKUP / XLOOKUP

Sometimes, you need to blend data from different platforms—combining Facebook Ads and TikTok Ads into a single table—to see the overall campaign performance. You can achieve this by using curly brackets {} to stack data from different sheets, but you'll often need QUERY or OFFSET to ensure a clean merge and avoid issues with trailing empty cells.

Here's how you can append data using QUERY:={QUERY(FacebookAds!A:E, "WHERE Col1 IS NOT NULL"); QUERY(TikTokAds!A2:E, "WHERE Col1 IS NOT NULL")} 

And here's the equivalent using OFFSET:={OFFSET(FacebookAds!A:E,0,0,COUNTA(FacebookAds!A:A),5); OFFSET(TikTokAds!A:E,0,0,COUNTA(TikTokAds!A2:A),5)}

These formulas work seamlessly if both sheets have the same column order. However, if the columns are mismatched, you'll need to use QUERY or OFFSET twice. First, to rearrange the columns in one of the datasets to match the other, and then again within the curly brackets {} to append the data. This ensures that both datasets have the same structure before merging, preventing any issues with data alignment.

Once you've combined your marketing data, you can enrich it with additional columns, such as session data from Google Analytics. To do this, you need to join datasets based on a common key, like a date, campaign name, or ad ID that exists in both sources. In some cases, you can create an additional column by combining different columns to form a new join key.

You can then use VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP to retrieve matching data from the other table based on this common key. These functions allow you to look up values from one dataset and pull in the corresponding data from another, ensuring the datasets are combined correctly.

Read more: Data blending in Google Sheets: 2 ways to combine data from multiple sources for in-depth marketing reports

Other useful Google Sheets functions

SPARKLINE: Quickly visualize trends in your data, like website traffic or ad performance, within a single cell using miniature charts.

CONCAT / CONCATENATE: Combine data from different cells, like campaign name and date, into a single, informative label.

IFERROR: Handle potential errors in your formulas, preventing them from breaking your reports and displaying cleaner results.

DATEVALUE: Convert dates stored as text into date values that Google Sheets can recognize for date-based calculations and filtering.

EOMONTH: Easily calculate the last day of a month, useful for setting date ranges in reports or analyzing month-end performance.

IMPORTRANGE: Import data from other Google Sheets, allowing you to consolidate information from different sources.

SPLIT: Divide text strings based on a delimiter (e.g., separate campaign names from IDs).

REGEXEXTRACT/REGEXREPLACE: Extract or replace parts of text strings using regular expressions, which are powerful for complex data cleaning.

TEXT: Format numbers or dates in a specific way for better readability.

VALUE: Convert text that looks like numbers (e.g., "1,000") into actual numerical values for calculations and analysis.

SUMIFS/COUNTIFS/AVERAGEIFS: Perform conditional sums, counts, or averages based on specified criteria.

UNIQUE: Extract a list of unique values from a range, which is helpful for identifying distinct campaigns or channels.

FILTER: Create a filtered view of your data based on specified conditions.

Over to you

Now that you know how to build a dashboard in Google Sheets and have some useful formulas at your fingertips, I hope you can start monitoring your performance and find valuable insights. And if you have any trouble with your first dashboard, feel free to ask for help from the Supermetrics Community. Or, if you want to jump-start your reporting immediately, check out our free Google Sheets templates.