What is a paid search dashboard?
A paid search dashboard is an interface tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., CTR, CPC, conversions), enabling teams and agencies to monitor campaign performance and create presentations for clients and executives.
Paid search 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 search dashboard?
An actionable paid search dashboard balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive paid search dashboards
Executive dashboards for CMOs, CEOs, and clients show paid search's bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- ROI analysis: by campaign, using attribution models for large budgets (≈100k/mo).
- Cost analysis: CAC, LTV, payback from paid search-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 search manager dashboards
Manager dashboards have campaign views with drill-downs to see performance by client, brand, region, team member, and campaign. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Campaign reporting: overall campaign, product, client, or region reporting
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for keyword and bidding strategies
- Keyword and audience research
Operational Paid Search 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
- Keyword performance: impressions, clicks, CTR, quality score
- Ad performance: ad copy testing, extensions, landing page experience
Operational paid search 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 search dashboard?
To build a paid search 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 Microsoft Advertising for PPC performance, GA4 for web analytics, and CRM or E-commerce for sales data.
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 paid search dashboard templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like PPC monitoring, budget pacing, 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 search reporting use cases, such as PPC monitoring, budget pacing, 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:
- Select the data source and the account connected to it
- Choose metrics (e.g. Clicks, spend, Sessions, ROAS, etc.).
- 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
Design
To make your paid search dashboards truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your paid search dashboards:
Share
Share your paid search dashboards via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a paid search dashboard?
Paid search 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 search campaigns towards business goals. They include:
Paid search funnel KPIs measure the buying process (from the marketer perspective), regardless of the channel:
- Visibility metrics: impressions, reach
- Engagement metrics: clicks, CTR, Sessions, average time
- Conversion metrics: custom conversions, leads, purchases, key events
Efficiency KPIs compare your paid search 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 search performance:
- Sales: customers, revenue
- Cost: ad spend, OPEX, payroll
- Efficiency: ROI, ROAS, CAC
- Effectiveness: AOV, ACV
To analyze these paid search KPIs, segment them by:
- Channel: Google Ads vs Microsoft Advertising
- 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
