What is a SaaS dashboard?
A SaaS dashboard is an interface tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., Stripe, Salesforce, Intercom) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., MRR, churn rate, customer lifetime value), enabling teams to monitor product performance and create presentations for stakeholders and executives.
SaaS 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 SaaS dashboard?
An actionable SaaS dashboard balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive SaaS dashboards
Executive dashboards for CEOs, CFOs, and investors show the bottom-line impact of the SaaS product. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Revenue analysis: by product, using metrics like MRR, ARR, and growth rate.
- Unit economics analysis: CAC, LTV, payback period, ARPU from 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.
SaaS manager dashboards
Manager dashboards have cross-functional views with drill-downs to see performance by product, region, team member, and customer segment. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-functional reporting: overall product, customer, or region reporting across teams
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for market and product mapping
- Feature usage and customer feedback analysis
Operational SaaS Dashboards
Operational dashboards for analysts and product managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Product usage: feature adoption, user engagement, session duration
- Customer support: ticket volume, resolution time, satisfaction scores
- Billing: payment success rates, refund rates
- Infrastructure: uptime, response time, error rates
Operational SaaS 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 SaaS dashboard?
To build a SaaS 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 Stripe for billing data, Salesforce for CRM data, Intercom for customer support data, and Mixpanel for product analytics.
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 SaaS dashboard templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like revenue tracking, customer retention, and product usage monitoring.
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 "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 SaaS reporting use cases, such as revenue tracking, customer retention, and product usage monitoring.
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. MRR, churn rate, active users, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, customer segment, product feature, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your dashboards
Design
To make your SaaS dashboards truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your SaaS dashboards:
Share
Share your SaaS dashboards via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a SaaS dashboard?
SaaS dashboards should include a mix of product usage, customer engagement, revenue, and cost metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of the SaaS product towards business goals. They include:
Product usage KPIs measure how customers interact with the product:
- Usage metrics: active users, session duration, feature adoption
- Engagement metrics: login frequency, feature usage, support interactions
- Retention metrics: churn rate, renewal rate, customer lifetime value
Efficiency KPIs compare your outputs to the cost, including:
- Customer acquisition: CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
- Revenue: MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue), ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue)
- Cost: OPEX, payroll
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one stage to another
- Product: feature adoption rate
- Customer: engagement rate, satisfaction score
- Revenue: growth rate
Sales and cost KPIs show the bottom-line impact of your SaaS performance:
- Sales: customers, revenue
- Cost: operational expenses, payroll
- Efficiency: ROI, LTV/CAC ratio
- Effectiveness: AOV, ACV
To analyze these SaaS KPIs, segment them by:
- Product: feature, version
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Customer: segment, lifecycle stage
- Usage: frequency, duration, engagement
- Feedback: ratings, comments, support tickets
