How to Create a Project Portfolio Dashboard in Google Analytics

Juggling multiple websites, marketing campaigns, or even key sections of a single large website can feel like trying to watch several different ballgames at once. Instead of bouncing between browser tabs to check performance, you can build a project portfolio dashboard right inside Google Analytics. This article will show you exactly how to create a centralized view to monitor your most important digital initiatives at a glance using Google Analytics 4.

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What is a Project Portfolio Dashboard?

Think of a project portfolio dashboard as a high-level mission control center. It's a single screen that summarizes the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) for your different digital "projects." It consolidates data from various initiatives - like separate websites, ad campaigns, landing pages, or product categories - into one unified view.

For example, if you run a parent company with three distinct brand websites, a portfolio dashboard would let you see top-line metrics like users, sessions, and conversions for all three sites on one screen. No more logging into separate GA properties or running multiple reports. The goal isn't to see every single detail, but to get a quick, comparative snapshot of performance to see what's working and what needs your attention.

You might need one if you manage:

• Multiple brands or websites under one company.
• Distinct marketing funnels driven by different ad campaigns (e.g., Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads).
• Key subdomains or subdirectories on a large site (e.g., a main site at example.com, a blog at blog.example.com, and a store at store.example.com).
• Performance of key landing pages for different product launches or promotions.

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Define Your "Projects" and Choose Your KPIs

Before you jump into Google Analytics, the first step is to clarify what constitutes a "project" for you. A project is simply a distinct business initiative whose performance you want to track separately. It could be identified by:

• Hostname: Used when you have data from multiple websites or subdomains flowing into a single GA4 property (e.g., siteA.com, siteB.com).
• Session Campaign Name: Perfect for comparing the performance of different marketing campaigns (e.g., "Summer Sale 2024" vs. "Fall Product Launch").
• Page Path / URL: Useful for tracking specific sections of your website, like a blog (/blog/), a specific product category (/products/shoes/), or a set of landing pages.
• Traffic Source / Medium: Ideal for comparing how different channels like "google / organic," "facebook / cpc," or "email / newsletter" contribute to your goals.

Once you've defined your projects, choose 2-3 essential KPIs for each. Trying to track everything will just create noise. Stick to the metrics that truly measure success. Good starting points include:

• Users: How many distinct people are engaging with your project?
• Engaged Sessions: How many high-quality visits are you getting? (An engaged session lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or has at least 2 pageviews).
• Conversions: How many times did users complete a desired action? (e.g., purchase, form_submission, sign_up). This is often the most important metric.
• Average Engagement Time: How long, on average, are users actively engaged with your pages?

For an e-commerce agency running holiday campaigns for three clients, the "projects" might be the three client campaigns, and the agency might measure Users, Conversions (purchase events), and Total Revenue for each.

How to Build Your Dashboard in Google Analytics 4

GA4's customization features live in the "Reports" section, specifically in the "Library." We'll build a new "Overview Report" that will act as our portfolio dashboard. Here’s a step-by-step guide.

Step 1: Navigate to the Reports Library

On the left-hand navigation menu in your GA4 property, click on Reports. At the very bottom of the reports list, you'll see a folder icon labeled Library. This is where you can create and manage all custom reports, including our new dashboard.

Step 2: Start Creating a New Overview Report

In the Library, click the blue button that says + Create new report. From the dropdown menu, select Create overview report. This report type uses "cards" — individual boxes that can each display specific metrics and dimensions, perfect for our dashboard format.

You'll be presented with a blank canvas or a template you can modify. Let's start from a blank slate by adding our own cards.

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Step 3: Add and Configure Summary Cards

This is where we bring our dashboard to life. We’ll add a "card" for each project or KPI. Click on + Add cards.

The interface shows two tabs: "Summary Cards" and "Other Cards." Summary cards are linked to existing detailed reports, which is more advanced than what we need here now. For the moment, we’re sticking with “Other Cards”. Simply use this tab and find the metric and dimensions you care about most like Sessions or Conversions and visualize them in a variety of chart styles like line plots or bar charts. You can then adjust the visualizations.

Let's build a portfolio dashboard for a company that tracks three projects:

1. The main corporate website.
2. A new product launch campaign called "Project Alpha."
3. The blog traffic in the /articles/ subdirectory.

Example 1: A Summary Card for 'Main Website' Total Users

Let's start by adding a universal metric that defines how we are progressing overall:

Once you have decided on a card with a metric and chart that best fits your initial needs, follow these instructions to implement:

Check the box in front of the card and in the top-right select "Add Card".

Example 2: A Card for ‘Project Alpha’ Campaign Conversions

This card has two distinguishing new features. Firstly, it uses bar plots, and secondly, we have customized the dimension that GA4 uses.

1. Once the Card is in the "Overview Page" press the three dots and hit “Customize”.
2. Select the visualization you are looking for, some cards are restricted, but generally, they offer 2-4 ways of viewing your data.
3. Select a new dimension! In GA4, dimensions segment data in meaningful ways, and Metrics are the numbers that matter the most for tracking data.

Example 3: Adding Filters to Isolate Data for Your Blog

Follow the same process as our example earlier, but instead of using GA4 sessions, let’s define this section with Conversions instead:

1. Once the Card is in the “Add Card” section, in the same fashion as Step One and Two, make sure to add the “Conversion” card to the overview page.
2. In the same way as the example above, click on "Add Filter" on the side panel. Here, this is where the fun begins as you have a nearly infinite ability to build the dashboard of your reporting demands for the exact use case you can derive.
3. Click Add card and arrange the items on your final page exactly how you feel gets you the most out of your view! Good filtering is the most critical step in building a true portfolio dashboard.

Step 4: Arrange Your Cards and Save the Report

Back on the main canvas, you can now drag and drop your cards to arrange them logically. You might group all cards for one project together or arrange them in a funnel-like structure showing Users, then Engaged Sessions, then Conversions from left to right. Once you're happy with the layout, click the blue Save button in the top right. Give your report a descriptive name like "Company Project Portfolio" or whatever makes the most sense to you as it will become the title in the end.

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Step 5: Add Your New Dashboard to the Navigation

Your beautiful new dashboard is saved, but it's still hidden in the Library. To make it easily accessible, you need to add it to your main reporting navigation menu.

1. From the Library, find the collection you want to add this report to (or create a new one). Often, this will be "Life cycle" or "Business objectives."
2. Click Edit collection.
3. The pane on the left shows the menus in the collection like Acquisition, with the Overview section having a special icon and always at the top of a particular Collection, which is where this Portfolio dashboard should belong.
4. Drag this new overview Dashboard over to the left-hand menu.
5. Click “See All,” and this now lives in the collection under the given name "Company Project Portfolio." Good work.

Congratulations. Pat yourself on the back as you've not only done something few have, you've set up a way to automatically and in real-time access one of the most crucial areas for a small business. In doing so, you will be spending less time on building and exporting to spreadsheets and more time actually being proactive with building in the parts of the business that are thriving with your help or addressing areas needing a little love.

Limitations and Next Steps

Google Analytics dashboards are fantastic for a quick, free, and unified view of your owned web properties. However, it's essential to recognize their limitations:

• It's a Walled Garden: A GA dashboard can only show you data from within Google Analytics. It can't pull in a huge chunk of your operational needs for a healthy view into the business from other sources like your ad spend data from Facebook Ads, your deal data closing in Salesforce, Subscription information from a tool like Stripe or most importantly, your customer data from your CRM like HubSpot. This results in a partial picture that requires you, often the decision maker, to go and dig in other platforms to figure out how to act and on occasion lead to disastrous business outcomes if not seen by all stakeholders.
• Limited Customization: The visualizations and layout options on a Google product are never the prettiest and are great as a bare minimum, but for presentations or serious analytical review often lack the power needed for executive buy-in or external stakeholders like a Board to keep making the right investments in business with your department.
• The dashboards aren’t able to explore deep data insights. They have predefined cards that you add and the limitations often rear their head around questions that may only need to be asked a couple of times to discover huge opportunities to be gained or huge costs from leaking money unnecessarily.
• No Automated Insights: When leadership or team members ask questions, you can’t get on-the-fly insights out of the charts as you could with other software such as PowerBI, Tableau, or the new generative BI tools. Often, those with the greatest ideas don’t know who to ask in those moments of inspiration, losing the chance to make impactful contributions to the company. This can result in accumulating opportunity costs in a competitive market. At a high level, these lack of insights lead to more questions.

Final Thoughts

Creating a project portfolio dashboard in Google Analytics is an incredibly effective way to reduce the chaos of managing multiple initiatives. By consolidating your most critical KPIs onto a single screen, you can make quicker, more informed decisions without the constant context-switching of logging into dozens of tools just to get by.

We built Graphed to solve the frustrating "walled garden" problem of analytics. It connects all your data sources - Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, Shopify, Salesforce, HubSpot - into one central place. Instead of wrestling with GA's limited custom filtering, our team created an experience where you can ask any question in plain English like:

Show me a dashboard comparing Facebook Ads spend vs. GA purchase conversions for each campaign this month.

And within minutes, it gives you all the cards required to understand the current situation, letting you skip the boring manual labor and get straight to solving problems with deeper insights.