What is a LinkedIn Ads dashboard?
A LinkedIn Ads dashboard is an interface tool that consolidates data from LinkedIn Ads to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., CTR, CPC, conversions), enabling teams and agencies to monitor campaign performance and create presentations for clients and executives.
LinkedIn Ads 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 LinkedIn Ads data.
What to include in a LinkedIn Ads dashboard?
An actionable LinkedIn Ads dashboard balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive LinkedIn Ads dashboards
Executive dashboards for CMOs, CEOs, and clients show LinkedIn Ads' bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- ROI analysis: by campaign, using attribution for large budgets (≈100k/mo).
- Unit economics analysis: CAC, LTV, payback, ARPU from LinkedIn-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.
LinkedIn Ads manager dashboards
Manager dashboards have campaign views with drill-downs to see performance by client, brand, region, team member, funnel stage, and campaign. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Campaign reporting: overall campaign, product, client, or region reporting
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for tactic mapping
- Audience research
Operational LinkedIn Ads Dashboards
Operational dashboards for analysts and channel managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Budget pacing, engagement, creative performance, CPA
- Post metrics, follower growth, engaging topics
Operational LinkedIn Ads dashboards are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating LinkedIn Ads data.
How to build a LinkedIn Ads dashboard?
To build a LinkedIn Ads 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 LinkedIn Ads data source to bring to your dashboard.
To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the LinkedIn Ads data source to bring to your dashboard.
You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of LinkedIn Ads dashboard templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like budget pacing, funnels, and creative performance.
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, 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 LinkedIn Ads reporting use cases, such as budget pacing, funnels, and creative performance.
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. Clicks, spend, Sessions, ROAS, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, campaign name, ad image, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your dashboards
Design
To make your LinkedIn Ads dashboards truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your LinkedIn Ads dashboards:
Share
Share your LinkedIn Ads dashboards via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a LinkedIn Ads dashboard?
LinkedIn Ads dashboards should include a mix of funnel—visibility, engagement, conversion—,efficiency, effectiveness, revenue, and cost metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of LinkedIn Ads campaigns towards business goals. They include:
LinkedIn Ads funnel KPIs measure the buying process (from the marketer perspective):
- Visibility metrics: impressions, reach, followers
- Engagement metrics: clicks, comments, shares, video plays
- Conversion metrics: custom conversions, leads, purchases, key events
Efficiency KPIs compare your LinkedIn Ads 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 LinkedIn Ads performance:
- Sales: customers, revenue
- Cost: ad spend, OPEX, payroll
- Efficiency: ROI, ROAS, CAC
- Effectiveness: AOV, ACV
To analyze these LinkedIn Ads KPIs, segment them by:
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Campaign: funnel stage, objective
- Business: client, branch, region
- Audience: geo, tech, demographics, interests, behavior, placement
- Content: creatives, format, topic, keyword
