What is an agency dashboard?
An agency dashboard is an interface tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., project management tools, CRM systems, financial software) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., project timelines, client satisfaction, revenue), enabling agencies to monitor performance and create presentations for clients and executives.
Agency 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 an agency dashboard?
An actionable agency dashboard balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive agency dashboards
Executive dashboards for agency leaders and clients show the agency's bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Revenue analysis: by client, using attribution for large budgets.
- Client satisfaction analysis: NPS, feedback scores, retention rates
- Project performance analysis: timelines, budget adherence, resource allocation
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Agency manager dashboards
Manager dashboards have cross-project views with drill-downs to see performance by client, team, region, project stage, and resource allocation. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-project reporting: overall project, client, or region reporting across teams
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for service and strategy mapping
- Resource and capacity planning
Operational Agency Dashboards
Operational dashboards for analysts and project managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Project management: task completion, deadlines, resource utilization
- Client communication: response times, engagement, satisfaction
- Financials: invoicing, expenses, profitability
- Resource allocation: team workload, availability, efficiency
Operational agency 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 an agency dashboard?
To build an agency 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 project management tools for task tracking, CRM systems for client data, financial software for revenue and expenses, and communication platforms for client interactions.
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:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of agency dashboard templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like project tracking, client satisfaction, financial performance, and resource management.
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 client data, project milestones, financial metrics, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "success" and "performance".
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 agency reporting use cases, such as project tracking, client satisfaction, financial performance, and resource management.
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:
- Select the data source and the account connected to it
- Choose metrics (e.g. Task completion, revenue, client satisfaction, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, project name, client, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your dashboards
Design
To make your agency dashboards truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your agency dashboards:
Share
Share your agency dashboards via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in an agency dashboard?
Agency dashboards should include a mix of project performance, client satisfaction, financial, and resource metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of agency operations towards business goals. They include:
Project performance KPIs measure the progress and success of projects:
- Timeline metrics: deadlines, milestones, task completion
- Resource metrics: utilization, allocation, efficiency
- Client satisfaction metrics: feedback scores, NPS, retention rates
Financial KPIs compare your agency outputs to the cost, including:
- Revenue: total revenue, revenue per client
- Expenses: operational costs, project costs
- Profitability: profit margins, ROI
Resource KPIs compare the input with the output from one project stage to another
- Utilization: resource allocation, workload balance
- Efficiency: task completion rate, project delivery time
To analyze these agency KPIs, segment them by:
- Project: stage, type, client
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Client: industry, size, region
- Team: department, role, location
- Resource: availability, skill set, efficiency
