How to Create a Company Dashboard in Looker
Creating a company dashboard in Looker can feel like a tall order, but it's one of the best ways to get a single, unified view of your most important business metrics. This is your command center for tracking everything from high-level revenue goals to daily marketing performance. This guide will walk you through the entire process, from planning your layout to building your first charts and making them useful for your whole team.
Before You Build: Planning Your Company Dashboard
Jumping straight into Looker without a plan is a recipe for a cluttered, confusing dashboard that nobody uses. The most effective dashboards are born from strategy, not just from dragging and dropping every available metric. Taking 15 minutes to plan will save you hours of rebuilding later.
1. Define Your Audience and Their Goals
First, ask the single most important question: Who is this dashboard for?
A "company dashboard" can mean different things to different people. The metrics your CEO cares about are very different from the ones your social media manager needs. Trying to build one dashboard to please everyone will result in a dashboard that serves no one.
Instead, define a primary audience:
Executive Team: Needs a high-level overview. They’re interested in top-line revenue, monthly recurring revenue (MRR), profit margins, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and overall growth trends. Their goal is to gauge the health of the business at a glance.
Sales Team: Focuses on pipeline and performance. They need to see deals created, conversion rates by stage, quota attainment, and sales cycle length. Their goal is to know if they're on track to hit their numbers.
Marketing Team: Needs to measure campaign effectiveness. They want to see website traffic, leads generated, cost per lead, and campaign ROI. Their goal is to understand what's working and where to allocate their budget.
If you need to serve multiple audiences, consider creating separate, tailored dashboards for each. For this guide, we'll focus on creating a general executive-level company health dashboard.
2. Identify Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Now that you know your audience, you can choose the right KPIs. A common mistake is to put every metric you can find onto the dashboard. This creates "analysis paralysis" where the most important numbers get lost in the noise.
Start with a small, focused set of 5-7 core KPIs. For a company dashboard for an executive team, these might include:
Total Revenue (by month): The ultimate measure of business performance.
New Customers Acquired (by week): Shows the pace of growth.
Customer Churn Rate: Measures customer retention and product satisfaction.
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): How much a customer is worth over their lifetime.
Website Traffic (Sessions): A leading indicator of top-of-funnel interest.
Marketing & Sales Spend vs. Revenue: To understand efficiency.
Stick to the numbers that directly relate to your primary business goals. You can always add more later, but it's best to start simple and focused.
3. Sketch a Rough Layout
You don't need fancy design software. Just grab a piece of paper or open a simple whiteboarding tool and draw some boxes. This helps you think about information hierarchy before you're clicking boxes in Looker.
A good rule of thumb is to place the most important, at-a-glance information in the top-left corner, as that's where people naturally look first. Big, single-number metrics (like total revenue this quarter) are perfect for this spot.
A sample dashboard layout sketch:
Top Row: Four "single value" visualizations showing Total Revenue (QTD), New Customers (QTD), Churn Rate (%), and CAC.
Middle Row: A large line chart showing Revenue by Month over the past year. Beside it, a bar chart showing New Customers by Marketing Channel.
Bottom Row: A table listing performance by sales rep and another showing top-performing ad campaigns.
This simple sketch acts as your blueprint for the build.
Building Your Dashboard in Looker: A Step-by-Step Guide
With your plan in hand, it's time to start building in Looker. The platform organizes charts into "Tiles," which are individual visualizations that you arrange on a dashboard canvas.
Step 1: Create a New Dashboard
Navigate to the folder where you want your dashboard to live (e.g., your "Shared" folder or a personal folder). In the top right, click the New button and select Dashboard from the dropdown. Give your dashboard a clear, descriptive name like "Executive Company Overview" and click Create Dashboard.
You'll start with a blank canvas, ready to be populated with your data visualizations.
Step 2: Adding Your First "Tile" (Chart)
From your blank dashboard, click the Add Tile button. You'll be asked to choose an "Explore" to start from. Explores are the starting points for data exploration in Looker - a curated data set for a specific subject area. For a company dashboard, you might start with a Sales, Users, or Revenue Explore.
Let's create our first chart: a line chart showing Revenue by Month.
1. Select Your Data in the Explore Interface
After you select the right Explore (e.g., Order Items), you'll see Looker's main data interface. On the left is a list of all available fields. These are divided into two categories:
Dimensions: These are grouping fields (the "by" in your analysis). This includes things like date, customer name, or geography. Dimensions are color-coded blue.
Measures: These are things that you can do math on - the "what?" These are aggregate numbers, like count, sum, or average of records. Measures are color-coded orange.
To create your revenue chart, select the following fields:
From the Dimensions list, find a Date field, like "Created Month".
From the Measures list, find a field that represents revenue, like "Total Sales Price".
2. Run Your Query and Visualize It
Once you've selected your fields, click the Run button at the top-right. Looker will run the query and display the results in a table below.
Now, to turn this into a chart, click on the Visualization tab above the data table. Looker is smart enough to suggest a line chart for a date and a number. You can experiment with other chart types, but a line is perfect for showing trends over time.
3. Save it To Your Dashboard
When you're happy with the chart, click the gear icon at the top-right of the visualization section and select Save to Dashboard. Give your tile a clear name (like "Revenue by Month") and confirm the dashboard you're adding it to.
Congratulations! You've added your first tile.
Step 3: Populating Your Dashboard with More Tiles
Now, it's just a matter of repeating the process for other KPIs. Here are a few more examples:
Total Revenue: Use a "Single Value" visualization type. Select only the measure "Total Revenue" and no dimensions.
New Customers by Channel: Use a bar chart type. Select your "Acquisition Date" dimension and a count of "Customer" measure.
Refer back to your rough sketch to guide the build. Remember, each tile should represent a key KPI.
Step 4: Arranging and Styling Tiles
Once you've added a few tiles, you can start arranging them. Click the Edit Dashboard button in the top-right of the dashboard to enter edit mode. Here you can:
Drag and drop tiles to move them around.
Click and drag the bottom-right corner of any tile to resize it.
Delete tiles you don't need.
Arrange your tiles according to your plan and sketch, making it easy to read and understand. Click Save when you're done.
Advanced Tips for a Powerful Looker Dashboard
Having the basics down is great, but here are a few additional tips to set your dashboard apart:
1. Add Smart Filters
Static dashboards are helpful, but interactive ones are even more engaging for your users. Add filters to let them dig into the data on their own. The most common and useful filter is a date range filter.
To add one, in edit mode, click Add Filter and choose the field you want to filter on (e.g., "Date"). Confirm this. Then, for each tile, you'll have to edit its settings to tell it which field to use for filtering. This lets users scan the whole dashboard to whatever time frame they need.
2. Use Text Tiles for Context
Numbers without context are just noise. Looker lets you add text tiles to your dashboard. Use them to explain how a metric is calculated (e.g., "We calculate CAC as..."). Small details make the dashboard more actionable.
3. Set Up Alerts and Scheduling
Dashboards are only useful if people see them. Use Looker's scheduling features to send your dashboard as an email every Monday morning.
For even more useful alerting, you can set up an alert that notifies you via email or Slack when a metric crosses a certain threshold. For example, you could set an alert to notify you whenever your churn rate exceeds a certain percentage. This turns your dashboard from a passive reporting tool into an active monitoring system.
4. Keep It Simple and Readable
Aim to avoid overcrowding your dashboard. Even if it's tempting to include charts for everything, less is more. Create a clean and clear dashboard that focuses on KPIs. Each section should have a clear purpose and be easily readable. It's often clear what action to take with informed decisions, which don't belong on every dashboard.
Final Thoughts
Leading a great company dashboard in Looker is about marrying strategy with a bit of technical know-how. By focusing first on what your team needs measured and then working through the steps to create and refine your visualizations, you can turn a blank canvas into a powerful source for informed decision-making.
Ready to get started? Try Graphed. We believe any improvement for your team should be your best source for informed decisions without becoming bogged down in clicking through menus and learning new platforms. You can just focus on simple integrations like "Create a dashboard showing sales vs. spend" and deliver beautifully crafted dashboards ready for automation.