Best Paid Media dashboard templates for marketing teams and agencies (2024)

What is a paid media dashboard?

A paid media dashboard is an interface tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., CTR, CPC, conversions), enabling teams and agencies to monitor campaign and channel performance and create presentations for clients and executives. 

Paid media dashboards are typically built using flexible tools like Google Looker Studio, Power BI, Google Sheets, or platform-specific solutions to enable high customization and integration of multiple data sources.

What to include in a paid media dashboard?

An actionable paid media dashboard balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.

Executive paid media dashboards

Executive dashboards for CMOs, CEOs, and clients show paid media's bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:

• Paid Media ROI analysis: by channel, using attribution (MMM, lift analysis, multi-touch) for large budgets (≈100k/mo).
• Unit economics analysis: CAC, LTV, payback, ARPU from paid media-acquired customers
• Cohort analysis: retention, expansion, and LTV by customer cohort (sign-up period, acquisition channel)
• Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.

Paid media manager dashboards

Manager dashboards have cross-channel views with drill-downs to see performance by client, brand, region, team member, funnel stage, and campaign. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:

• Cross-channel reporting: overall campaign, product, client, or region reporting across channels
• Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives
• Audits for prioritization and spotting issues 
• Competitive analysis for channel and tactic mapping
• Topic, keyword, content, audience research

Operational Paid Media Dashboards

Operational dashboards for analysts and channel managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:

• PPC: budget pacing, engagement, creative performance, CPA
• Social: ad metrics, audience growth, engaging content
• Display: impressions, clicks, conversion rates
• Video: views, watch time, engagement

Operational paid media dashboards are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating multiple sources.

How to build a paid media dashboard?

To build a paid media dashboard, connect your data sources, choose a template on Looker Studio or Sheets, build your queries by selecting metrics and dimensions, choose charts to visualize your data, customize the dashboard, design and share via link, PDF or email. 

Here’s the breakdown: 

Connect data sources

Define and connect the data sources to bring to your dashboard. Common sources are Google Ads and Meta Ads for PPC performance, GA4 for web analytics, CRM or E-commerce for sales and email data, and LinkedIn Ads for B2B campaigns.

To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the data sources to bring to your dashboard. 

You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:

• How to connect paid media data to Google Looker Studio
• How to connect your data to Google Sheets

Choose a template

Choose from dozens of paid media dashboard templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like PPC monitoring, budget pacing, funnels, and creative performance. 

Learn to copy Looker Studio templates. 

While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your business or agency. Map your specific metrics, especially custom conversions, CRM contact data, GA4 events, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "conversions" and "revenue".

Depending on your reporting tool—Google Sheets or Google Looker Studio, pick any of the dozens of templates created by our team and customers to solve your paid media reporting use cases, such as PPC monitoring, budget pacing, funnels, and creative performance. 

Select metrics, dimensions, and charts

Once your dashboard template is downloaded, you may 1)modify it or 2) create a blank page to build it from scratch. Whatever the case, setting up a query always follows these steps: 

1. Select the data source and the account connected to it
2. Choose metrics (e.g. Clicks, spend, Sessions, ROAS, etc.). 
3. Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, campaign name, ad image, etc.)

You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your dashboards

• Calculated fields
• Charts
• Data blending
• Grouping and tagging

Design

To make your paid media dashboards truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand. 

Follow these tutorials to design your paid media dashboards:

• Design dashboards on Looker Studio
• Best practices on designing paid media dashboards

Share

Share your paid media dashboards via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.

KPIs to include in a paid media dashboard?

Paid media dashboards should include a mix of funnel—visibility, engagement, conversion—,efficiency, effectiveness, revenue, and cost metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of paid media campaigns towards business goals. They include:

Paid media funnel KPIs measure the buying process (from the marketer perspective), regardless of the channel: 

• Visibility metrics: impressions, reach, ad views
• Engagement metrics: clicks, interactions, shares, video plays
• Conversion metrics: custom conversions, leads, purchases, key events

Efficiency KPIs compare your paid media outputs to the cost, including:

• Visibility: CPM (Cost per Mille)
• Engagement: CPC (Cost per Click)
• Conversion: CPA (Cost per Acquisition), CPP (Cost per Purchase) 

Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one funnel stage to another

• Visibility: Frequency
• Engagement: CTR, engagement rate
• Conversion: Conversion rate

Sales and cost KPIs show the bottom-line impact of your paid media performance:

• Sales: customers, revenue
• Cost: ad spend, OPEX, payroll
• Efficiency: ROI, ROAS, CAC
• Effectiveness: AOV, ACV

To analyze these paid media KPIs, segment them by:

• Channel: paid, social, Facebook Ads vs Google Ads

• Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly

• Campaign: funnel stage, objective

• Business: client, branch, region

• Audience: geo, tech, demographics, interests, behavior, placement

• Content: creatives, format, topic, keyword