We talk a lot about “live dashboards, no PDFs”. This post shows what that actually means.
Every Austra Digital retainer above $2,000/month includes a Looker Studio dashboard built per stakeholder. This is what a typical $4K/month retainer dashboard looks like.
The four stakeholder views
A single dashboard with four tabs. Each tab is designed for a different audience inside the client.
Tab 1: Founder view
Five tiles. Updated daily.
- This month vs last month — Revenue. Big number with delta percentage. Annotated with anything we changed in the last 14 days (a budget shift, a creative refresh, a new landing page).
- This month vs last month — Leads. Same format. Includes attribution split: organic, paid, direct, referral, email.
- Cost per lead. Trailing 30-day average plus 90-day trend line.
- Top 5 winning campaigns/keywords/pages. What is working right now.
- Top 5 risks. What is broken or trending wrong. Auto-flagged when CPL exceeds threshold, CTR drops below baseline, or any conversion event drops to zero.
The founder spends 90 seconds per day on this tab. Anything that needs action gets a Slack DM, not buried in a report.
Tab 2: Marketing manager view
This is the operational dashboard. Eight to twelve tiles.
- Channel-level performance: organic search, paid search, paid social, direct, referral, email
- Campaign-level performance for active paid campaigns
- Top 20 keywords by impressions, clicks, conversions
- Top 20 landing pages by traffic and conversion rate
- Form submission funnel — pageviews → form starts → form completions
- Email metrics — opens, clicks, revenue per send (if Klaviyo connected)
This tab is where weekly check-ins happen. Marketing manager opens it, sees what shifted, has questions for us. No 40-page deck required.
Tab 3: Ops / fulfilment view
For service businesses, this tab connects marketing data to fulfilment capacity.
- Leads by day of week / hour of day
- Lead quality grade if we tag leads (some clients run lead scoring; some do not)
- Response time SLA — average minutes from lead to first response
- Booking conversion rate from lead
Ops uses this to staff inbound response correctly. If Tuesday 6-8pm is consistently the biggest inbound window, that is when phones need to be answered.
Tab 4: Board / investor view
For clients who have boards or quarterly investor reporting. Updated weekly. Simplified.
- MQL → SQL → Closed-Won funnel
- Customer acquisition cost by channel
- LTV:CAC ratio
- Payback period
- Pipeline value
Board does not need to see daily CTR fluctuations. They need to see whether marketing is contributing to enterprise value.
What is not on the dashboard
We deliberately exclude:
- Vanity metrics with no decision-implication. Pageviews without conversion context, “engagement rate” defined by GA4 default, bounce rate (which GA4 effectively retired).
- Channel-by-channel attribution wars. Last-click vs first-touch vs data-driven gets a religious-war energy. We pick one model per client, document it, stick with it.
- Pretty graphs that say nothing. Every visualisation must answer a specific question. If we cannot name the decision a graph informs, it does not go in.
Why not a PDF report?
Three reasons.
1. PDFs are stale the moment they ship. A monthly report dated 1 May is wrong by 2 May. Live dashboards update overnight every night.
2. PDFs encourage shallow review. Anyone can scan a PDF, nod, and move on. A live dashboard makes you click through, ask questions, see context.
3. PDFs are an agency margin tactic. It takes a junior 6-8 hours to format a monthly PDF. That time costs the client roughly $600-800 hidden in the retainer. We would rather spend that time on actual work.
Why not Google Analytics directly?
GA4’s native UI is not built for stakeholder reporting. It is built for analysts running ad-hoc queries. Founders, marketing managers and board members open GA4, see 18 menu items, click around, give up.
Looker Studio sits on top of GA4 and gives you the reporting layer that GA4 should have shipped with. It is also free.
The technical stack
What we actually use to assemble these dashboards:
- GA4 — primary traffic and conversion source.
- Google Tag Manager + GTM Server (or Cloudflare Workers, or Stape.io) for server-side tracking.
- Google Search Console connected via the GSC connector — for organic rankings and impressions.
- Google Ads via the native connector.
- Meta Ads via Supermetrics or Funnel.io (paid connectors — Meta does not provide a free Looker Studio source).
- Klaviyo via Supermetrics for email revenue.
- HubSpot / Shopify via native connectors where applicable.
- Custom BigQuery layer for anything complex (only ~10% of our clients need this).
Supermetrics costs roughly US$39-99/month depending on connectors. We bill it through to the client at cost or include it in the retainer above $4K/month.
How long does it take to build?
For a typical SMB client: 8-14 hours to design and build the dashboard during onboarding. 2-4 hours per month to maintain — usually fixing connector issues, adding new conversion events, refining segmentation.
This is one of the highest-leverage things we do for clients. Once a dashboard exists and is trusted, every other conversation gets faster and clearer.
Want to see one?
Once you become a client, you get the live dashboard on day one. Before then, we can share an anonymised sample on request — book a strategy call and we will walk through it on Loom.
More resources
- Analytics & Tracking Melbourne service page — full breakdown.
- Free 3-min Loom audit — drop your URL and I will record a Loom on whether your current analytics setup is trustworthy or broken.