Looker Studio Dashboards Every E-commerce Brand Needs

Most e-commerce brands either drown in 47 different dashboards or run their entire operation off one spreadsheet that's never up to date. Looker Studio (Google's free dashboarding tool, formerly Data Studio) sits in a sweet spot — flexible enough to build proper operational dashboards, free, and connected to most of the tools you already use. These are the five dashboards we build for nearly every e-commerce client.

Why Looker Studio specifically

You can build dashboards in Tableau, Power BI, Metabase, or a dozen other tools. We default to Looker Studio for e-commerce because:

• Free for unlimited users and unlimited dashboards
• Native connectors for GA4, Google Ads, Search Console, Sheets, and BigQuery (the rest of the stack you'll likely need)
• Easy to share with clients/team — just send a link
• Refresh schedule — set hourly/daily/weekly auto-refresh

Its weakness is non-Google data sources (Shopify, Meta, Klaviyo, etc. require paid connectors or a BigQuery middle layer). For brands serious about reporting, we typically build a BigQuery layer that consolidates everything — but you can start without that.

1. Daily ops dashboard

The dashboard your team opens every morning. Single page, glanceable, designed for "is everything OK?" not deep analysis.

Layout (top to bottom)

1. Yesterday's revenue + comparison row — yesterday's revenue, vs same day last week, vs same day last year, with % change
2. Live KPIs row — today's revenue so far, today's orders, today's sessions, today's conversion rate
3. 7-day trendline — revenue and orders over the last 7 days vs the previous 7
4. Top-selling products today — table, top 10, with units and revenue
5. Inventory alerts — products with low stock (under threshold) or out of stock
6. Order issues — failed payments, pending fulfillment over 48 hours, refund requests

Data sources

GA4 (for sessions and conversion), Shopify (via BigQuery or third-party connector for orders/revenue/inventory).

2. Paid media performance

Cross-channel paid performance in one view. Weekly check-in for marketing teams, monthly check-in for executives.

Sections

1. Spend allocation pie — % of spend by channel (Meta, Google, TikTok, Amazon)
2. Performance summary table — by channel: spend, revenue, ROAS, conversions, blended CAC
3. Trend lines — daily spend, daily revenue, daily ROAS for last 30 days
4. Top-performing campaigns — ranked by ROAS, per channel
5. Creative performance — top performing creative assets if your platforms expose this (Meta does, Google PMax kind of does)

Data sources

Google Ads (native connector), Meta Ads (via Supermetrics or BigQuery), TikTok (via Supermetrics or BigQuery), GA4 for blended conversion attribution.

3. Organic & SEO dashboard

Monthly check-in for content/SEO performance. Shows whether your organic strategy is working.

Sections

1. Organic sessions and conversions — monthly trend, year-over-year
2. Top organic landing pages — top 20 pages, with sessions, conversion rate, revenue
3. Top organic keywords — from Search Console, top 50, with impressions, clicks, position
4. Position changes — keywords gaining/losing position month-over-month
5. Indexation coverage — indexed pages, excluded pages, errors (from Search Console)

Data sources

Google Search Console (native connector), GA4 for organic traffic and conversion data.

4. Email performance

Email and SMS performance, broken out by flow vs campaign.

Sections

1. Total email revenue — last 30 days, with % of total revenue
2. Campaign vs flow split — pie or table showing revenue from each
3. Flow performance — by flow (welcome, abandoned checkout, post-purchase, win-back): emails sent, opens, clicks, revenue, RPR (revenue per recipient)
4. Recent campaign performance — last 10 campaigns with the same metrics
5. List health — total subscribers, growth this month, churn this month, net change

Data sources

Klaviyo (via Supermetrics, Funnel.io, or direct BigQuery export). Klaviyo doesn't have a free direct Looker Studio connector — you'll need a paid bridge.

5. Executive overview

One-page summary for the founder/CEO who looks once a week and wants the big picture, not the detail.

Sections (one page only)

1. Monthly revenue + run rate — last 12 months bar chart, current month projection
2. Profitability snapshot — revenue, gross margin, ad spend, gross margin after ads
3. Acquisition channels — % of new customers by channel (paid, organic, email, direct)
4. Customer metrics — new vs repeat customers this month, repeat purchase rate, average LTV
5. Top 3 wins / top 3 issues — text annotations, manually updated weekly

The "top 3 wins / top 3 issues" section is the most valuable part. Dashboards alone don't drive action — context does.

Data source setup

The reason most brands don't have these dashboards isn't difficulty building them — it's the data infrastructure. Here's the pragmatic order:

Phase 1: Native Google connectors (free)

• GA4 → Looker Studio (free, instant)
• Google Ads → Looker Studio (free, instant)
• Search Console → Looker Studio (free, instant)
• Google Sheets → Looker Studio (free, instant)

You can build 60% of the dashboards above with just these. Start here.

Phase 2: Paid connectors (£50-200/month)

• Supermetrics or Funnel.io for Meta, TikTok, Klaviyo, Shopify
• Pulls data into Looker Studio or Google Sheets
• Worth it if your team uses dashboards weekly

Phase 3: BigQuery middle layer (engineering work)

• All data sources flow into BigQuery
• Looker Studio queries BigQuery
• Enables complex joins (e.g., cohort analysis combining Shopify orders + Google Ads spend)
• This is what we build for clients doing £500k+/month

"Most brands skip straight to phase 3 because it sounds sophisticated. Phase 1 is enough for 80% of the value. Start there, scale up only when you've outgrown it."