How to Create a Marketing Dashboard in Google Sheets with ChatGPT

Crafting a marketing dashboard entirely within Google Sheets often feels like you're stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, you get a free, familiar tool. On the other, you're faced with hours of mind-numbing work: exporting CSVs from every platform, trying to remember a half-dozen VLOOKUP or QUERY functions, and manually updating everything each week. This article will show you how to use ChatGPT to automate the most tedious parts of this process, helping you build a functional marketing dashboard in a fraction of the time.

Why A Google Sheets Dashboard? (And Why AI Changes The Game)

Google Sheets is the go-to choice for dashboards for good reason: it’s free, accessible from anywhere, and deeply familiar to most teams. Sharing a link is far easier than trying to get a stakeholder to log into a complex BI tool. The collaboration features are built-in, allowing your team to leave comments, ask questions, and work together within the same file.

The traditional downside, however, has always been the immense manual effort required. You spend less time analyzing data and more time wrangling it. This includes:

Manually exporting data from Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, Shopify, etc.
Cleaning and formatting different CSVs so they can "talk" to each other.
Writing complex formulas to summarize and aggregate the data.
Constantly updating everything when you need a fresh report.

This is where leveraging an AI tool like ChatGPT can be a game-changer. Instead of struggling with formulas or complex data joins, you can use plain English to describe what you need. It effectively acts as your data analyst, writing the code and building the summary tables so you can focus on building the visual dashboard.

Step 1: Get Your Marketing Data Ready

Before you can bring AI into the picture, you need to gather your raw materials. This means logging into each of your marketing platforms and exporting the data you want to analyze as a CSV file. The process may be slightly different for each platform, but you can usually find an "Export" or "Download" button in their reporting sections.

Here are some of the most common data sources you’ll want to pull from:

Website Analytics: Log into Google Analytics and export a report of your website traffic by source/medium, including metrics like Sessions, Users, New Users, and Conversion Rate. Make sure to choose a relevant date range.
Paid Ads Performance: Go to services like Google Ads or Facebook Ads Manager. Export campaign-level data that includes metrics like Spend, Clicks, Impressions, and CPC (Cost Per Click).
E-commerce Sales: From your Shopify or WooCommerce admin, download sales data. It’s helpful to get reports broken down by day, product, or marketing channel.
Email Marketing: Export a summary from your platform (like Klaviyo or Mailchimp) showing campaign sends, open rates, and click-through rates.

The goal is to have a set of clean CSV files, with one for each data source. Keep your column headers clear and descriptive (e.g., "Date," "Campaign Name," "Ad Spend," "Revenue"), as this will help ChatGPT understand your data more easily.

Step 2: Upload Your CSVs to ChatGPT and Start Analyzing

Once you have your CSV files, it’s time to let ChatGPT do the heavy lifting. You'll need access to a version of ChatGPT with data analysis capabilities (currently part of the Plus plan).

Uploading Your File

In your ChatGPT window, look for the paperclip icon next to the message box. Click it and navigate to the CSV file you want to work with. You can upload one file at a time or even multiple files if you want to blend data from different sources.

Prompting ChatGPT for Insights

Now, start talking to your data. Begin with simple prompts to make a connection and ensure it understands the context of your file.

If you uploaded a Google Analytics traffic report, you could start with:

"Summarize this traffic data for me. What are the key columns and the main trends you see?"

ChatGPT will process the file and give you a high-level overview, confirming it understands what metrics are what. From there, you can get more specific. The goal here is to prompt ChatGPT to create the summary tables you'll need for your dashboard charts.

Example Prompts for Summarization:

For Google Analytics data: "Create a summary table that shows total sessions, bounce rate, and revenue by traffic source for the last 30 days."
For Facebook Ads data: "Aggregate my ad performance data. I need a table showing Total Spend, Clicks, and Cost Per conversion for each campaign name."
To combine data sources: "I've uploaded two files: 'facebook_ads_data.csv' and 'shopify_sales_data.csv'. Can you create a single table that shows Ad Spend from the Facebook file next to the Total Revenue from the Shopify file for each day?"

The AI will generate and display these tables directly in the chat interface. This process of drilling down and creating summarized views is incredibly fast and avoids the tedious work of building pivot tables yourself.

Step 3: Ask ChatGPT to Write the Google Sheets Formulas

While analyzing data within ChatGPT is powerful, our end goal is a dashboard inside Google Sheets. The next step is to use ChatGPT as a formula generator. Instead of an open-ended question, you'll give it specific instructions about your Google Sheet's structure.

First, set up your Google Sheet:

Create a new Google Sheet.
Create separate tabs for your raw data. For example, have a tab named 'GA Raw Data' where you copy-paste the contents of your Google Analytics CSV. Create another called 'Facebook Raw Data' for your ads data.
Create a fresh, empty tab named 'Dashboard'. This is where your charts and summaries will live.

Now, go back to ChatGPT and give it some precise instructions.

Example Prompts for Generating Formulas:

For a simple SUMIF: "In my Google Sheet, I have a tab called 'GA Raw Data'. Traffic sources are in column C, and sessions are in column E. On my 'Dashboard' tab, write a SUMIF formula to calculate the total sessions just for the 'google' source."
For a more advanced QUERY: "Using data from the 'GA Raw Data' tab, I want to create a table on my 'Dashboard' tab. Write a QUERY formula that pulls the top 5 traffic sources (column C) based on their total revenue (column H). The result should show the traffic source and its revenue."
For combining data with VLOOKUP: "I have campaigns in both my 'Facebook Raw Data' tab (Campaign in Column B, Spend in Column F) and 'GA Raw Data' tab (Campaign in Column D, Revenue in Column H). On my 'Dashboard' tab in cell A2 I have a campaign name. Write a VLOOKUP that pulls this campaign's spend from the Facebook tab. And in the next cell, write a VLOOKUP that finds the same campaign and pulls its revenue from the Google Analytics tab."

Simply copy the formulas ChatGPT provides and paste them directly into the corresponding cells in your 'Dashboard' tab. These formulas are dynamic - if you update the raw data, the results on your dashboard will update too (though you still need to get the new data into the sheet manually).

Step 4: Build Your Visualizations and Finalize the Dashboard

With your key metrics and data summaries calculated via AI-generated formulas, the finish line is in sight. Now it's time to create the visual elements - the charts and graphs that make a dashboard useful.

You can even ask ChatGPT for advice on this:

"Based on the tables we created, what are the best chart types to visualize my marketing performance?"

It might suggest:

A line chart to show Sessions over time.
A bar chart to compare Spend vs. Revenue across different campaigns.
A pie chart to break down your traffic mix by source.

To create a chart in Google Sheets, head to your 'Dashboard' tab:

Highlight the data you want to visualize (for example, the summary table created by your QUERY formula).
From the menu, choose Insert > Chart.
Google Sheets will automatically suggest a chart type, but you can change it and customize the labels, colors, and titles in the Chart editor sidebar.
Drag and drop the charts to arrange them in a logical layout. You could group website metrics on top, ad performance metrics below, and sales outcomes at the bottom.

Keep your design clean and simple. The goal isn't to create an art project, it's to communicate information clearly and quickly.

Important Caveats: Understanding the Limitations

Using ChatGPT as your dashboard-building assistant is powerful, but it's important to be aware of the limitations.

The Data is Still Static: This method speeds up the creation, but not the maintenance. Your dashboard is only as good as the most recent data you've manually exported and pasted into your raw data tabs. It is not live. The core chore of updating the data remains.
Potential for errors: AI can sometimes misunderstand prompts or make mistakes in calculations or formula syntax. Always double-check its work. Trust but verify.
Processing Caps: ChatGPT can struggle with extremely large CSV files, so this method is best suited for small to medium-sized datasets.

This approach transforms a two-hour weekly reporting task into a 15-minute one but doesn't eliminate the manual work entirely.

Final Thoughts

This guide demonstrates how you can pair the accessibility of Google Sheets with the intelligence of ChatGPT to sidestep some of the most annoying parts of building a marketing dashboard. By using natural language to summarize data and generate formulas, you can focus on making sense of the insights instead of fighting with spreadsheet functions. It’s a powerful workaround that automates much of the busywork.

That said, we created Graphed because we believe the final barrier - the manual data refresh - is the most frustrating one of all. Instead of the recurring loop of exporting CSVs, we connect directly and securely to your platforms like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Facebook Ads. Prompts like "Show me ad spend versus website revenue over the last month" instantly generate real-time, interactive dashboards that update automatically. We wanted to eliminate the spreadsheet busywork for good so teams can get straight to the answers.