What is a growth dashboard?
A growth dashboard is an interface tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., CRM systems, product analytics, customer feedback platforms) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., user acquisition, retention rates, revenue growth), enabling teams to monitor growth strategies and performance and create presentations for stakeholders and executives.
Growth 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 growth dashboard?
An actionable growth dashboard balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive growth dashboards
Executive dashboards for CEOs, CFOs, and stakeholders show growth's bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Growth ROI analysis: by strategy, using attribution models for large budgets.
- Unit economics analysis: CAC, LTV, payback, ARPU from 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.
Growth manager dashboards
Manager dashboards have cross-channel views with drill-downs to see performance by product, region, team member, funnel stage, and strategy. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-channel reporting: overall strategy, product, or region reporting across channels
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for strategy and tactic mapping
- Customer feedback and behavior research
Operational Growth Dashboards
Operational dashboards for analysts and growth managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- User acquisition: channel performance, cost per acquisition, conversion rates
- Retention: churn rates, engagement metrics, cohort performance
- Revenue: MRR, ARR, upsell/cross-sell performance
- Product usage: feature adoption, user feedback, NPS scores
Operational growth 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 growth dashboard?
To build a growth 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 CRM systems for customer data, product analytics for usage data, and financial systems for revenue 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 growth dashboard templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like user acquisition monitoring, retention analysis, revenue tracking, and product usage.
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, product usage events, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "growth" 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 growth reporting use cases, such as user acquisition monitoring, retention analysis, revenue tracking, and product usage.
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. New users, churn rate, MRR, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, product feature, user segment, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your dashboards
Design
To make your growth dashboards truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your growth dashboards:
Share
Share your growth dashboards via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a growth dashboard?
Growth dashboards should include a mix of funnel—acquisition, activation, retention—,efficiency, effectiveness, revenue, and cost metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of growth strategies towards business goals. They include:
Growth funnel KPIs measure the user journey (from the growth perspective), regardless of the channel:
- Acquisition metrics: new users, sign-ups, lead generation
- Activation metrics: product usage, feature adoption, onboarding completion
- Retention metrics: repeat usage, churn rate, customer lifetime value
Efficiency KPIs compare your growth outputs to the cost, including:
- Acquisition: CPA (Cost per Acquisition)
- Activation: Cost per Activation
- Retention: Cost per Retained User
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one funnel stage to another
- Acquisition: Conversion rate
- Activation: Activation rate
- Retention: Retention rate
Revenue and cost KPIs show the bottom-line impact of your growth performance:
- Revenue: MRR, ARR, customer lifetime value
- Cost: acquisition spend, operational expenses
- Efficiency: ROI, growth rate
- Effectiveness: Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)
To analyze these growth KPIs, segment them by:
- Channel: organic, paid, referral
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Strategy: funnel stage, objective
- Business: product line, region
- Audience: geo, tech, demographics, interests, behavior
- Content: features, format, topic
