What is a content performance dashboard?
A content performance dashboard is an interface tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., Google Analytics, social media platforms, content management systems) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., page views, engagement rates, content shares), enabling teams to monitor content effectiveness and create presentations for stakeholders.
Content performance 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 content performance dashboard?
An actionable content performance dashboard balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive content dashboards
Executive dashboards for CMOs, CEOs, and stakeholders show content's impact on business goals. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Content ROI analysis: by channel, using attribution for large budgets.
- Engagement analysis: average time on page, bounce rate, and interaction metrics.
- Cohort analysis: user retention and engagement by content type or publication date.
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Content manager dashboards
Manager dashboards have cross-channel views with drill-downs to see performance by content type, author, region, and publication date. They help align teams, define strategies, and include:
- Cross-channel reporting: overall content performance across platforms.
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives.
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues.
- Competitive analysis for content strategy mapping.
- Topic, keyword, content, audience research
Operational Content Dashboards
Operational dashboards for analysts and content managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- SEO: keyword/page rankings, impressions, clicks, speed, errors, backlinks.
- Social: post metrics, follower growth, engaging topics/hashtags.
- Email: delivery, open, click-through rates.
Operational content 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 content performance dashboard?
To build a content performance 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 Analytics for web analytics, CMS for content data, and social media platforms for engagement metrics.
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 content performance dashboard templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like content engagement tracking, SEO performance, and audience analysis.
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 engagement metrics, CMS data, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "engagement" and "reach".
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 content reporting use cases, such as engagement tracking, SEO performance, and audience analysis.
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., Page views, engagement rate, bounce rate, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g., by date, content type, author, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your dashboards
Design
To make your content dashboards truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your content dashboards:
Share
Share your content dashboards via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a content performance dashboard?
Content performance dashboards should include a mix of visibility, engagement, conversion, efficiency, and effectiveness metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of content towards business goals. They include:
Content funnel KPIs measure the user journey (from the content perspective), regardless of the channel:
- Visibility metrics: page views, reach, followers, email deliveries
- Engagement metrics: clicks, comments, shares, video plays, average time on page
- Conversion metrics: sign-ups, downloads, key interactions
Efficiency KPIs compare your content outputs to the cost, including:
- Visibility: CPM (Cost per Mille)
- Engagement: CPC (Cost per Click)
- Conversion: CPA (Cost per Acquisition)
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one funnel stage to another
- Visibility: Frequency
- Engagement: CTR, engagement rate
- Conversion: Conversion rate
To analyze these content KPIs, segment them by:
- Channel: organic, social, referral
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Content type: article, video, infographic
- Business: client, branch, region
- Audience: geo, tech, demographics, interests, behavior
- Content: format, topic, keyword
