How do I build a reporting dashboard?

A good marketing dashboard answers three questions: Is traffic growing? Are leads converting? Is revenue trending up? Everything else is noise. Tool recommendation: Looker Studio (free, connects to GA4, Search Console, Google Ads, BigQuery). Alternative: Metabase (open-source, connects to databases), Geckoboard (simple, real-time), Databox (integrates with 70+ tools). Dashboard structure: Page 1 — Executive Summary: organic traffic (trend), total leads (trend), conversion rate, revenue from organic (if tracked), top 5 keywords by position change. Keep this to 6-8 metrics maximum. Page 2 — Acquisition: traffic by source (organic, direct, referral, social, paid), new vs returning visitors, top landing pages, geographic distribution. Page 3 — Content Performance: top blog posts by traffic, posts by conversion rate, content by pillar, publish date vs traffic correlation. Page 4 — Technical: Core Web Vitals status, crawl errors, index coverage, page speed trends, mobile vs desktop performance. Common mistakes: too many metrics (executives read 5-8 metrics, not 50), vanity metrics (impressions without clicks, pageviews without conversions), and no time comparison (always show current vs previous period). Update frequency: data should refresh daily. Review weekly with marketing team. Present monthly to leadership.