How to Create a Supply Chain Dashboard in Google Analytics

Thinking about your supply chain might bring images of warehouses and shipping containers to mind, not Google Analytics charts. However, the data you're already collecting on your website is a goldmine for understanding product demand, predicting sales trends, and making smarter inventory decisions. This article will show you how to build a simple but powerful supply chain dashboard using the information inside your Google Analytics account.

What a Supply Chain Dashboard Does (and What GA4 Can Tell You)

A true supply chain dashboard integrates data from your entire operations stack - inventory systems, shipping carriers, and manufacturing software - to give you a complete picture of stock levels and logistics. While Google Analytics can't tell you how many units of a product you have sitting in a warehouse, it excels at providing the demand-side of the equation.

Essentially, you can use GA4 to build a "Demand and Forecasting" dashboard. It helps you answer vital questions like:

Which products are selling the fastest?
Where are my customers located? (So I can stock regional fulfillment centers appropriately.)
Are there certain times of the year, month, or week when sales for a specific product spike?
Which marketing campaigns are driving sales for my highest-volume products?

By answering these questions, you can move from reactive to proactive inventory management, ensuring your most popular products are always in stock without overspending on items that move slowly.

Key Metrics for Your GA4 Supply Chain Dashboard

Before jumping into building reports, it's helpful to know which data points matter most. Your dashboard should focus on metrics that act as strong signals for customer demand. These are the most valuable ones you can pull directly from GA4:

Units Sold & Revenue by Product: The most direct measure of demand. You'll want to see this by Item Name and/or ID/SKU. High units sold indicate popularity and the need for consistent stock.
Product Sales by Location: Knowing that your top-selling sweater is most popular in New York and Chicago helps you allocate inventory to warehouses closer to those customers, reducing shipping times and costs.
Sales Trends Over Time: A time-series chart showing daily or weekly sales for your key products can highlight seasonality and help you anticipate demand spikes for events like Black Friday or Mother's Day.
Sales by Channel: Understanding if your TikTok campaign or Google Ads are driving sales for specific items can help you align marketing budgets with inventory planning. If you're planning a big ad push for a product, you need to ensure you have enough stock to meet the resulting demand.
Product Views vs. Purchases: A high number of product detail page views but a low number of purchases might indicate an issue with pricing, product information, or an "out of stock" notice that's turning customers away. This is an early warning sign of either a conversion problem or missed sales due to stockouts.

Before You Begin: Essential GA4 E-commerce Setup

To access this product data, your Google Analytics 4 property needs to have e-commerce tracking set up correctly. This is the foundation for your dashboard. If you're using a platform like Shopify or BigCommerce, there are often native integrations or simple apps that handle this setup for you.

Specifically, you need to ensure the purchase event is firing in GA4 when a customer completes a transaction. This event should include details about the products purchased, such as:

item_id (your SKU)
item_name
price
quantity

You can check if this is working by navigating to Reports > Monetization > E-commerce purchases in your GA4 account. If you see products listed there, you're good to go.

Option 1: Building a Quick Dashboard in GA4's Explore Reports

The "Explore" section in GA4 is a flexible analysis tool that lets you build custom reports and visualizations. You can assemble a few key reports here to serve as a quick, ad-hoc supply chain dashboard.

Building the "Best Sellers" Widget

This report will show you your top products ranked by units sold and revenue. It's your primary at-a-glance demand signal.

In GA4, go to the Explore tab and select "Blank report".
In the "Variables" column on the left, click the plus sign next to DIMENSIONS. Search for and import "Item name" and "Item ID".
Click the plus sign next to METRICS. Search for and import "Items purchased" and "Item revenue".
Drag "Item name" and "Item ID" from the Variables panel to the Rows section under "Tab Settings".
Drag "Items purchased" and "Item revenue" to the Values section.
Sort the table by clicking the header for "Items purchased" to see your bestsellers at the top. You just built a real-time product performance report.

Building the "Geographic Demand Hotspots" Widget

This helps you see where in the world your sales are coming from.

Still in your Explore report, click the "+" symbol at the top of the tab to add a new tab. In the visualization options under "Tab Settings," select the map icon (Geo chart).
Under Variables, add the DIMENSIONS "Country" and "City".
Add the METRIC "Items purchased".
Drag "Country" or "City" to the Location field in Tab Settings.
Drag "Items purchased" to the Size field. You will now see a world map where darker shades indicate more sales, helping you instantly spot your key markets.

Building the "Demand Forecast" Widget

This line chart trends sales over time, allowing you to easily spot seasonality and weekly patterns.

Create another new tab in your Explore report. Choose the "Line chart" visualization.
Ensure you have the DIMENSION "Date" imported in your Variables panel.
Import the METRIC "Items purchased".
Drag "Date" to the X-axis.
Drag "Items purchased" to the Y-axis. The resulting chart will show you the daily trend of units sold. You can click on the "Date" dimension and change the granularity to "Week" or "Month" for longer-term forecasting.

Putting these three explorations together in one saved "Explore" report gives you a functional dashboard you can revisit anytime. The major downside is that it's not easily shareable and has to be managed within the complex GA4 interface.

Option 2: Creating a Polished, Shareable Dashboard with Looker Studio

For a more permanent and user-friendly solution, you can pipe your GA4 data into Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio). It's a free tool designed for building interactive, auto-refreshing dashboards that you can share with your team with just a link.

Step 1: Connect Google Analytics as a Data Source

Go to lookerstudio.google.com and click "Create" > "Report".
In the "Add data to report" pane, select the Google Analytics connector.
Authorize the connection and navigate to the GA4 Property you want to use.
Click "Add". You now have a blank report connected live to your GA4 data.

Step 2: Recreate Your Supply-Side Visualizations

The Looker Studio interface is much more drag-and-drop friendly. You can now build the same widgets you made in GA4 Explore, but with more customization options.

To build the "Best Sellers" table: Go to Insert > Table. In the "Data" panel that appears on the right, set your "Dimension" to "Item name" and your "Metrics" to "Items purchased" and "Item revenue".
To build the "Geographic Hotspots": Go to Insert > Google Maps. Set the "Location" field to "Country" or "City" and the "Size" metric to "Items purchased".
To build the "Demand Forecast": Go to Insert > Time series chart. Looker Studio will often automatically set the Date and a primary metric for you. Just ensure the "Dimension" is "Date" and the "Metric" is "Items purchased".

The clear advantage of Looker Studio is that once built, the dashboard updates automatically. You can add date filters, text boxes for context, and share a link with your operations or finance team. They can then check product demand anytime without needing to learn how to navigate Google Analytics.

Final Thoughts

Tapping into your Google Analytics data is a smart, low-cost way to get ahead of product demand and make more informed decisions about purchasing and inventory allocation. Whether you use the powerful ad-hoc reports in GA4's Explore section or build a permanent dashboard in Looker Studio, the insights you uncover about what's selling, where, and when are invaluable for operational efficiency.

Creating these reports manually can be time-consuming, and learning a new tool just to build a simple dashboard is a common headache. This is exactly where our tool can help. With Graphed, we connect directly to your Google Analytics, Shopify, and other marketing or sales data sources. Then, instead of building reports click-by-click, you can just ask a question in plain English like, "Show me a line chart of items purchased per day for the last 90 days" or "Create a bar chart of our top 10 selling products this month," and get a live, interactive visualization in seconds. It allows anyone on your team to move right to the insights without getting stuck in the setup.