Marketing dashboard: the KPIs worth checking every week

A good marketing dashboard fits on one screen and shows whether marketing is bringing in customers, and at what cost. For a small or medium-sized business, five marketing KPIs are usually enough: how many enquiries came in, how much each one cost, what share of visitors became an enquiry, where they came from and what happened to them afterwards.

Everything else, such as impressions, likes and followers, has its place in the analysis, not on the first page. The first page is for decisions.

The five numbers of the week

1. Leads: the enquiries that came in, from forms, calls, emails or messages. Define in writing what counts as a lead, for example “a form with a phone number” or “a call longer than one minute”, and do not change it every month.
2. Cost per lead: ad spend divided by the number of leads, per channel. If the same budget brings in twice as many enquiries, the cost per lead halves.
3. Conversion rate: how many of a page's visitors sent an enquiry. It helps you see whether the problem is the ad bringing the wrong people or the page failing to convince the right ones.
4. Sources: where each lead came from, for example Google Ads, Meta, organic search, Google Business Profile or a referral. Without this, you do not know where to put next month's money.
5. Sales follow-up: how many enquiries got a reply, how quickly, and how many turned into an appointment, a quote or a sale. This is where you see whether the leads are good or just numerous.

The fifth number is the one most often missing, because it is not in any ad platform. It lives in the CRM or, often, in a notebook. If you do not connect it, your dashboard shows how cheaply enquiries arrive, not whether they bring in business.

How to build a simple dashboard

You do not need an expensive tool to get started. A shared spreadsheet or a free reporting tool that connects to Google Analytics and Google Ads is enough for the first few months. What matters is the order of the steps:

1. Write down the decision you want the dashboard to help you make, for example “where should next month's budget go”.
2. Choose five to seven metrics that help with that decision, and note next to each one how it is calculated.
3. List the sources: Google Analytics 4, Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager, forms, CRM. Note how often each one is updated.
4. Add UTMs to every campaign link, that is, the parameters at the end of the link that say which campaign the visitor came from. Keep consistent naming rules, so your sources do not split into dozens of variations.
5. Show every number next to the previous period. A number on its own does not tell you whether you are doing well.
6. Make one person responsible and set a fixed time each week to review it with your team, with notes on anything that changed: a new campaign, a public holiday, a problem with a form.

In practice, the first page can be a table with one row per channel and five columns: spend, leads, cost per lead, conversion rate and the sales that resulted. Below it, a chart of leads per week for the last three months. That is enough. The details, such as ads, keywords and pages, go on a second page for whoever needs them.

Common mistakes

• Too many charts. If the dashboard takes ten minutes to read, nobody will open it.
• Adding up each platform's conversions. Google Ads and Meta each count by their own attribution rules and often claim the same enquiry. For the total, rely on the enquiries that actually reached you.
• Decisions based on a single day. Small numbers swing widely. Look at the week and the monthly trend.
• Leads without quality. A channel with cheap enquiries from people who never answer the phone costs more in practice.
• Treating the numbers as complete. With cookie consent, some visits are not recorded or are estimated with modelling. The dashboard should say what is measured reliably and what is not.
• Tracking that was never checked. If a form has stopped sending its event, the dashboard will show a drop that never happened. Make a test submission after every change to the site.

How we set it up at THPAUL

When we build a dashboard for a business, we choose the KPIs that matter and check which sources exist and how often they are updated. The dashboard shows what we know and what cannot be measured reliably. We deliver a KPI framework, a data source map, the dashboard design and a data refresh plan.

If the tracking is not right yet, that is where we start: a measurement plan, GA4 and Tag Manager, pixel and conversions for Meta and Google, respecting visitors' consent. And if enquiries get lost after the form, a CRM shows the team what happened, who is replying and what the next step is.