What is a SEA dashboard?
A SEA dashboard is an interface tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., Google Ads, Bing Ads, Amazon Advertising) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., CTR, CPC, conversions), enabling teams and agencies to monitor search engine advertising performance and create presentations for clients and executives.
SEA 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 SEA dashboard?
An actionable SEA dashboard balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive SEA dashboards
Executive dashboards for CMOs, CEOs, and clients show SEA's bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- SEA ROI analysis: by channel, using attribution (MMM, lift analysis, multi-touch) for large budgets (≈100k/mo).
- Unit economics analysis: CAC, LTV, payback, ARPU from SEA-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.
SEA 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
- Keyword and audience research
Operational SEA 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
- Search: keyword performance, ad position, quality score
- Shopping Ads: product performance, impressions, clicks
Operational SEA 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 SEA dashboard?
To build a SEA 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 Bing Ads for PPC performance, GA4 for web analytics, CRM or E-commerce for sales and conversion 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 SEA 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 SEA 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:
- 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 SEA dashboards truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your SEA dashboards:
Share
Share your SEA dashboards via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a SEA dashboard?
SEA dashboards should include a mix of funnel—visibility, engagement, conversion—,efficiency, effectiveness, revenue, and cost metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of SEA campaigns towards business goals. They include:
SEA funnel KPIs measure the buying process (from the advertiser perspective), regardless of the channel:
- Visibility metrics: impressions, reach, ad position
- Engagement metrics: clicks, CTR, quality score
- Conversion metrics: custom conversions, leads, purchases, key events
Efficiency KPIs compare your SEA 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 SEA performance:
- Sales: customers, revenue
- Cost: ad spend, OPEX, payroll
- Efficiency: ROI, ROAS, CAC
- Effectiveness: AOV, ACV
To analyze these SEA KPIs, segment them by:
- Channel: Google Ads vs Bing Ads
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Campaign: funnel stage, objective
- Business: client, branch, region
- Audience: geo, tech, demographics, interests, behavior, placement
- Content: creatives, format, keyword
