Self-Initiated Project – Analytics / Growth
Project Overview
This project designs a marketing dashboard concept for monitoring traffic, advertising performance, leads and conversion metrics in one place, built to solve a problem most growing businesses share: performance data scattered across four or five platforms that never gets looked at as a whole picture.
The Problem
Most small and mid-sized businesses run marketing across multiple channels (Google Ads, Meta Ads, email, organic search) but track each one in its own dashboard. That fragmentation has a real cost: marketing operations research and industry surveys consistently identify manual reporting, exporting numbers from each platform and reassembling them into a report, as one of the most time-consuming recurring tasks marketers do, and the resulting reports are usually out of date by the time they’re read.
Research
- Catalogued the core metrics that actually drive decisions (cost per lead, conversion rate by channel, blended customer acquisition cost) versus vanity metrics that don’t change what anyone does next.
- Reviewed common dashboard-fatigue failure patterns: too many metrics with no hierarchy, no clear “what changed and why” view, and dashboards built once and never revisited.
- Mapped which data sources (ad platforms, site analytics, CRM) would need to feed a unified view, and how frequently each realistically needs refreshing.
Strategy
Designed the dashboard around decisions, not data. Every metric included had to answer a specific question someone would actually act on, such as “which channel is producing the cheapest qualified leads this month,” rather than including a metric simply because the platform makes it available.
Execution
- Defined a three-tier metric hierarchy: a top-level scorecard (spend, leads, cost per lead, conversion rate), a channel-comparison view, and a trend view for spotting movement over time.
- Mapped data connections from ad platforms and site analytics into a single consolidated view, removing the need to manually check each platform separately.
- Designed the layout so the most important number, blended cost per lead, is visible immediately, with supporting detail available on demand rather than displayed all at once.
Tools Used
Google Analytics and ad-platform data structures, dashboarding/reporting tool concepts (Looker Studio-style), and marketing operations benchmark research on reporting time cost.
Key Decisions
Every metric on the dashboard has to answer a question someone will actually act on. If a number doesn’t change a decision, it doesn’t belong on the main view.
Outcome / Learnings
Result: Full metric hierarchy, data-source map and dashboard layout completed.
Expected impact: For a business currently assembling performance reports manually across multiple platforms, consolidating that into one automatically updated view typically removes several hours a month of manual reporting work, time consistently identified in marketing operations research as one of the biggest recurring drains on a small team. The bigger, harder-to-quantify benefit is decision speed: a channel that’s underperforming gets noticed and adjusted in days instead of at the end of a reporting cycle.
What I Would Improve
With live accounts connected, I’d validate the metric hierarchy against what stakeholders actually referenced week to week, and cut anything that consistently went unused.
Final Takeaways
A dashboard’s value isn’t how much data it shows, it’s how much decision-making time it saves. The best dashboards are edited down aggressively, not built up to be comprehensive.