Marketing dashboard: what to put on it, and when a weekly digest beats it

A marketing dashboard should hold one goal KPI with its target, four to six leading indicators that explain it, one trend chart, and two tables for diagnosis (landing pages and campaigns), all on a single screen. The weakness of any dashboard is that someone has to open it and interpret it, so if the people who need the answer will not log in every week, a short written digest delivered where they work does the job better, with the dashboard kept behind it for detail.

Below: what goes on the dashboard and in what order, what to leave off, where to build it with GA4 data, and how to tell when a digest should take over.

What a marketing dashboard is for

A dashboard is a live view you open when you want to check or dig. A report is sent on a schedule and carries a verdict (the KPI report guide covers that format). A digest is a short written summary pushed to people at a fixed time. The three overlap, and most teams need more than one.

Decide two things before adding a chart:

1. Who opens it. You, a client, or a founder who checks once a month. Each needs a different depth.
2. What decision it supports. “Are we on track for leads this month?” gives you a dashboard. “Show me everything” gives you a wall of tiles.

What to put on a marketing dashboard

Lay it out as a funnel, top to bottom, so the eye goes from the verdict to the cause.

Row 1: the goal KPI, against a target

One scorecard for the number the business is judged on: leads, sales, booked calls or revenue. Show it against a target, not only against last month, because a 6% rise means nothing without one. In Data Studio, a scorecard can compare with a previous period, a fixed value or another metric, and “Show as progress” turns the comparison into a progress bar toward a target.

Row 2: four to six leading indicators

The numbers that explain the goal and can move within a week:

• Sessions by channel (organic, paid, email, referral)
• New users
• Key events (GA4 renamed conversions to key events)
• Session key event rate
• Cost per key event, if you run paid campaigns

Each scorecard shows the change versus the previous period. Choosing these numbers is covered in the 10 marketing KPIs worth checking every week; the rule here is that a tile earns its place only if someone acts when it moves.

Row 3: one trend chart

Weekly sessions and key events over the last 13 weeks, split by channel. A single number hides whether last week was a dip or part of a slide.

Row 4: two diagnosis tables

• Landing pages: sessions, key events and key event rate for the top 10 entry pages. This is where “leads are down” becomes “the pricing page stopped converting.”
• Campaigns or sources: the same columns per campaign, so a paid channel buying cheaper, worse traffic shows up.

Footer: data health

A line for what makes the numbers misleading: a tracking change, a consent banner update, a public holiday. Note also that GA4 data can take 24 to 48 hours to process, so the last day or two on any dashboard may still be incomplete.

What to leave off

Usually on the dashboard	Why it can go
Bounce rate next to engagement rate	In GA4 one is the inverse of the other; keep one (more on bounce rate)
Average session duration, pages per session	Descriptive, rarely tied to a decision
A tile per channel you do not run	Empty tiles train people to skim
Lifetime value, CAC, ROI	Real KPIs, but they need a month or more of data: put them on a monthly tab

Where to build a marketing dashboard with GA4 data

Option	Cost	Good for	Limits
GA4 Reports snapshot	Free	Your own quick view inside GA4	Readers need access to the property; Editor role to customize
Data Studio (formerly Looker Studio)	Free, paid Pro tier	A custom layout people can read without GA4 access	You build and maintain it; GA4 data refreshes every 12 hours by default
Agency reporting platforms	Mostly paid; priced per client, dashboard or data source	Many data sources, white-label client portals	Cost grows with the roster
Spreadsheet with a GA4 export	Free	Targets, status rules and pacing in one place	Manual or connector refresh

GA4 Reports snapshot. The first report in GA4’s Reports menu. Google lets you start it from three templates: User behavior, Sales and revenue, and Marketing performance, then add, remove or rearrange its metrics and edit its cards. You need the Editor role to customize it. It is the fastest way to a dashboard for yourself, but it lives inside GA4: a client without access to the property needs a PDF or CSV download instead.

Data Studio. Google’s report builder, now called Data Studio (formerly Looker Studio), connects to GA4 with Google’s own connector. The standard version is free; Data Studio Pro is the paid version. Things to know before you build:

• GA4 data in Data Studio refreshes every 12 hours by default, and reports are subject to GA4 Data API quotas: one that exceeds them may display an error.
• GA4 segments and comparisons are not available through the connector (Google’s documentation).
• Scheduled delivery emails a PDF of the dashboard with a link to up to 50 addresses. With Pro, it can post the PDF and link to Slack, up to 5 channels (or 10 users) per report.
• Pro also has chart alerts: Data Studio checks a condition you set on a chart field at the frequency you choose, and emails people in your organization when it is met. Alerts cannot go directly to a Slack channel’s email address; Google suggests forwarding them from an internal inbox. The condition is one you write, so deciding what counts as unusual on a Monday versus a Saturday is up to you.

Agency reporting platforms. AgencyAnalytics, DashThis, Swydo, Databox and Whatagraph all build client-facing dashboards across many sources. Their pricing units differ a lot; the client reporting tools comparison has the October 2026 figures from each vendor’s pricing page.

Why marketing dashboards go unopened

A dashboard waits for someone to come and look. That suits an analyst who opens it every morning, less so a client or a busy marketer:

• It shows the same grid whatever happened. A quiet week and a broken checkout look alike until someone reads every tile.
• It leaves the interpretation to the reader. “Sessions -8%” does not say whether that is a holiday, a lost ranking or noise.
• It lives in another tab, while the people who should react are in Slack or email.

Dashboards stay the right place to dig. They are a poor channel for news. The client reporting guide compares PDF, dashboard and written updates side by side.

When a weekly digest beats a marketing dashboard

A digest is a few sentences and a handful of numbers posted where people already read. It wins when:

• The readers will not log in. Clients and founders often do not open a dashboard unprompted; a message in their channel reaches them where they already read.
• The question is “what changed?” rather than “show me the detail.” A digest leads with the one or two moves that matter and skips the tiles that did not move.
• You need a reply or a decision. A message in a channel invites a question in the thread; a dashboard has no thread.
• You report on several sites or clients. Opening and interpreting ten dashboards every Monday is the work a digest removes.

The dashboard still wins when someone wants to dig (a filter, a custom date range, a campaign breakdown), when a contract requires a portal, and when you combine ad platforms, CRM and revenue in one view. The setup that tends to hold: the digest carries the weekly news, the dashboard sits behind it, and an alert covers the days in between.

If you report to clients

Build one dashboard per client, once, with the client’s goal KPI and target in row 1, and send a written weekly update that links to it. When the client asks for a new number, answer in the thread rather than adding a tile. Short written updates get read when long reports do not (why).

If you are the whole marketing team

The Reports snapshot with your own cards, or one Data Studio page, is enough. Spend the setup time on targets rather than chart styling, and check it once a week at a fixed time. When a number drops and you do not know why, the GA4 traffic drop checklist walks through the causes in order.

Where Dialytics fits

Dialytics is our product, and it covers the digest side for GA4. Every Monday at 8am (Paris time) it posts to a Slack channel the week’s key GA4 metrics compared with the previous week, a short written read of what moved and why, and the one point worth your attention. Every morning it compares yesterday’s sessions, users, new users and key events with the same weekday over about the last 12 weeks, and posts at most one alert a day, only when the move is large and unusual for that weekday. Anyone in the channel can mention the bot in the thread to ask a follow-up, and the answer uses what it remembers about the account.

Agencies can connect each client’s GA4 property from one account and route each digest and alert to that client’s own Slack channel (how agency mode works). It reads GA4 traffic, engagement and key events only: ad spend, CRM data and revenue stay in your dashboard.