What is a D2C dashboard?
A D2C dashboard is an interface tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., Shopify, Google Analytics, Klaviyo) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, conversion rates), enabling teams to monitor sales and customer engagement performance and create presentations for stakeholders.
D2C 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 D2C dashboard?
An actionable D2C dashboard balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive D2C dashboards
Executive dashboards for CEOs and stakeholders show the bottom-line impact of D2C strategies. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Sales performance analysis: by channel, using attribution for large budgets.
- Unit economics analysis: CAC, LTV, payback, ARPU from direct 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.
D2C manager dashboards
Manager dashboards have cross-channel views with drill-downs to see performance by product, region, team member, funnel stage, and campaign. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-channel reporting: overall sales, product, 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
- Customer, product, and market research
Operational D2C Dashboards
Operational dashboards for analysts and channel managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Sales: order volume, average order value, conversion rates
- Customer engagement: email open rates, click-through rates, customer feedback
- Inventory: stock levels, turnover rates, supply chain metrics
Operational D2C 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 D2C dashboard?
To build a D2C 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 Shopify for sales data, Google Analytics for web analytics, CRM for customer data, and Klaviyo for email marketing.
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 D2C dashboard templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like sales monitoring, inventory management, customer engagement, and performance analysis.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your business. 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 D2C reporting use cases, such as sales monitoring, inventory management, and customer engagement.
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. Sales, customer count, Sessions, conversion rate, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, product category, customer segment, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your dashboards
Design
To make your D2C dashboards truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your D2C dashboards:
Share
Share your D2C dashboards via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a D2C dashboard?
D2C dashboards should include a mix of funnel—visibility, engagement, conversion—, efficiency, effectiveness, revenue, and cost metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of D2C strategies towards business goals. They include:
Funnel KPIs measure the buying process (from the marketer perspective), regardless of the channel:
- Visibility metrics: website visits, email deliveries, social media reach
- Engagement metrics: clicks, shares, customer reviews, average session duration
- Conversion metrics: purchases, sign-ups, key events
Efficiency KPIs compare your 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 D2C performance:
- Sales: customers, revenue
- Cost: ad spend, OPEX, payroll
- Efficiency: ROI, ROAS, CAC
- Effectiveness: AOV, ACV
To analyze these D2C KPIs, segment them by:
- Channel: paid, social, email
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Customer: demographics, behavior, segment
- Content: creatives, format, topic
