What is a YouTube dashboard?
A YouTube dashboard is an interface tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., YouTube Analytics, Google Ads, Social Blade) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., views, watch time, subscriber growth), enabling creators and agencies to monitor channel performance and create presentations for clients and executives.
YouTube 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 YouTube dashboard?
An actionable YouTube dashboard balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive YouTube dashboards
Executive dashboards for CMOs, CEOs, and clients show YouTube's bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Channel performance analysis: by video, using metrics like watch time, engagement, and subscriber growth.
- Revenue analysis: AdSense earnings, sponsorships, and merchandise sales.
- Cohort analysis: retention, engagement, and growth by viewer cohort (subscription period, content type)
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
YouTube manager dashboards
Manager dashboards have cross-video views with drill-downs to see performance by video, playlist, region, team member, and campaign. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-video reporting: overall channel, video, or region reporting across content types
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for channel and content mapping
- Topic, keyword, content, audience research
Operational YouTube Dashboards
Operational dashboards for analysts and channel managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Video performance: views, watch time, engagement, CTR
- Subscriber metrics: growth, churn, demographics
- Content analysis: top-performing videos, audience retention, traffic sources
- SEO: keyword rankings, impressions, clicks, video tags
Operational YouTube 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 YouTube dashboard?
To build a YouTube 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 YouTube Analytics for video performance, Google Ads for ad performance, and Social Blade for competitive analysis.
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 YouTube dashboard templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like video performance monitoring, audience analysis, and revenue tracking.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your channel or agency. Map your specific metrics, especially custom conversions, viewer data, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "engagement" 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 YouTube reporting use cases, such as video performance monitoring, audience analysis, and revenue tracking.
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. Views, watch time, Subscribers, Revenue, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, video title, traffic source, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your dashboards
Design
To make your YouTube dashboards truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your YouTube dashboards:
Share
Share your YouTube dashboards via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a YouTube dashboard?
YouTube dashboards should include a mix of funnel—visibility, engagement, conversion—,efficiency, effectiveness, revenue, and cost metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of your channel towards business goals. They include:
YouTube funnel KPIs measure the viewer journey (from the creator perspective), regardless of the content type:
- Visibility metrics: impressions, reach, subscribers, video uploads
- Engagement metrics: views, likes, comments, shares, watch time, average view duration
- Conversion metrics: subscriber growth, key actions, revenue events
Efficiency KPIs compare your YouTube 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 YouTube performance:
- Sales: revenue, sponsorships
- Cost: ad spend, production costs
- Efficiency: ROI, ROAS, CAC
- Effectiveness: AOV, ACV
To analyze these YouTube KPIs, segment them by:
- Channel: organic, paid, YouTube Ads vs other platforms
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Campaign: content type, objective
- Business: client, branch, region
- Audience: geo, tech, demographics, interests, behavior, placement
- Content: creatives, format, topic, keyword
