It’s common to spend weeks building a flawless reporting dashboard, packed with metrics, only to have nobody open it two months later. The problem is almost never the tool — it’s what got decided to show, and for whom.
The mistake of showing everything
A dashboard that tries to answer every possible question ends up answering none of them well. The more metrics you add “just in case,” the harder it is to find the one that actually matters for a decision that week.
Design for the decision, not the data
Before choosing which metric to show, it helps to ask: what decision gets made by looking at this number? If nobody can answer that question, it’s a sign that metric probably shouldn’t be on the main dashboard, no matter how interesting it is.
Different dashboards for different audiences
A common mistake is building one dashboard for every audience. What the execution team needs to see day to day (campaign performance, spend, CTR) isn’t the same as what a director needs to see (CAC trend, LTV, overall investment efficiency). Mixing both levels into one view ends up serving neither well.
Automate, don’t repeat manually
If putting together the weekly report means hours of copying and pasting numbers by hand, that time is better spent automating the data connection once. Tools like Looker Studio, connected directly to ad platforms and GA4 via API, remove that repetitive work and reduce human loading errors.
The acid test
The best way to know if a dashboard works: ask the team, without warning, what decision they made last time they looked at it. If nobody has a concrete answer, it needs a redesign.
If your reporting today is more noise than signal, message me on WhatsApp and we’ll figure out how to simplify it.