What is an ROI dashboard?
An ROI dashboard is an interface tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., financial systems, CRM, ERP) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., ROI, ROAS, net profit), enabling teams and executives to monitor financial performance and create presentations for stakeholders.
ROI 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 ROI dashboard?
An actionable ROI dashboard balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive ROI dashboards
Executive dashboards for CFOs, CEOs, and stakeholders show the financial impact of business activities. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- ROI analysis: by project or department, using financial metrics for large budgets.
- Profitability analysis: net profit, gross margin, and operating margin.
- Cost analysis: breakdown of fixed and variable costs by department or project.
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Manager ROI dashboards
Manager dashboards have cross-department views with drill-downs to see performance by project, team, region, and financial period. They help align teams, define strategies, and include:
- Cross-department reporting: overall financial performance by department or region.
- Goal tracking: compare current financial performance vs objectives.
- Audits for prioritization and spotting financial discrepancies.
- Benchmarking for industry and competitor financial performance.
Operational ROI Dashboards
Operational dashboards for analysts and financial managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Budget tracking: budget allocation, spending, and variance analysis.
- Revenue tracking: sales performance, revenue streams, and growth rates.
- Expense tracking: operational expenses, cost centers, and efficiency metrics.
Operational ROI 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 ROI dashboard?
To build an ROI 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 financial systems, CRM for customer data, ERP for operational data, and accounting software for financial transactions.
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 ROI dashboard templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like budget tracking, profitability analysis, and cost 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 financial metrics, CRM data, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "revenue" and "cost".
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 ROI reporting use cases, such as budget tracking, profitability analysis, and cost 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. Revenue, costs, ROI, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, department, project, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your dashboards
Design
To make your ROI dashboards truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your ROI dashboards:
Share
Share your ROI dashboards via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in an ROI dashboard?
ROI dashboards should include a mix of financial, efficiency, effectiveness, revenue, and cost metrics and KPIs to fully understand the financial performance towards business goals. They include:
Financial KPIs measure the financial health and performance of the business:
- Revenue metrics: total revenue, revenue growth, revenue per customer
- Cost metrics: total costs, cost of goods sold, operating expenses
- Profitability metrics: net profit, gross margin, operating margin
Efficiency KPIs compare your financial outputs to the cost, including:
- Revenue: ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
- Cost: CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
- Profitability: ROI (Return on Investment)
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one financial period to another
- Revenue: revenue growth rate
- Cost: cost reduction rate
- Profitability: profit margin improvement
To analyze these financial KPIs, segment them by:
- Department: sales, marketing, operations
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Project: budget, timeline, objectives
- Region: domestic, international
- Customer: demographics, behavior, segment
- Product: category, lifecycle stage
