Google Analytics dashboard: GA4 dashboard and GA4 reporting with ad spend, orders, and revenue in one view

How to create a Google Analytics dashboard

You create a Google Analytics dashboard by choosing where it lives, connecting GA4 to it, and deciding which metrics belong on it. Inside GA4 itself you can customize the reports in the left navigation and build free form views in Explore. Outside GA4, most teams either build in Looker Studio using the free GA4 connector, or use a dashboard tool that treats GA4 as one source among several.

The decision that matters is the third one: which metrics belong on it. A dashboard built only from GA4 fields will show sessions, users, key events, and conversion rate by channel. That is a traffic dashboard. To make it a marketing dashboard you have to bring in cost from the ad platforms and revenue from the systems that actually take the money, which is where the work usually stalls.

MixedMetrics skips that step by connecting GA4, your ad accounts, your store, and your billing at the same time. There is no data model to design and no query to maintain, and the first board is ready the day you connect. If you want the reverse check on a single campaign, the ROAS calculator gives you return on ad spend and break-even ROAS from three inputs.

Is Google Analytics a dashboard?

Not quite. Google Analytics 4 is a measurement platform with reporting built into it, and its Reports section does behave like a set of dashboards you can customize. What GA4 is not is a place to combine data it did not collect. It has no native concept of your Stripe MRR, your Shopify refunds, or the invoice you paid an affiliate.

That distinction matters when someone asks for "the marketing dashboard." If they mean traffic and on-site behavior, GA4 reports are enough. If they mean spend, revenue, and efficiency ratios in one place, GA4 is a source that feeds the dashboard rather than the dashboard itself.

Can GA4 show Meta and TikTok ad spend?

Yes, and this changed. Google Analytics now supports direct third party campaign data import from Meta, Pinterest, Reddit, Snap, and TikTok, with a daily sync, alongside the long standing native Google Ads link. Any other network, including Microsoft Ads, LinkedIn, and Amazon Ads, still needs a manual campaign data import from CSV, Google Sheets, BigQuery, Amazon S3, or Snowflake.

The catch is the join. Imported cost only lines up with GA4 traffic when the campaign ID, source, medium, and campaign name in your import match the UTM parameters on your destination URLs exactly. One inconsistent utm_source across a team of three media buyers and the spend lands in a row that matches nothing. Teams that have lived through this are usually the ones looking for a dashboard that reads spend straight from the ad account instead.

Why do GA4 revenue and Shopify or Stripe revenue disagree?

Because they are measuring different events. GA4 records a purchase event when your site fires one, on the date the browser fired it, attributed to the session that led there. Shopify and Stripe record money that actually settled, net of refunds, chargebacks, failed payments, and any order placed through a channel that never touched your website.

The gap widens for subscription businesses, where a renewal is revenue in Stripe and no website event at all. It also widens when ad blockers, consent banners, or a broken tag suppress the purchase event. Neither number is wrong; they answer different questions. A dashboard that shows both side by side, as MixedMetrics does, is more honest than one that picks a winner.

A related quirk worth knowing: GA4 applies data thresholding, withholding rows in reports that include demographic or search query data when there are too few users to aggregate safely. You will see a data quality notice rather than a zero, and widening the date range sometimes brings the rows back.

How long does Google Analytics keep data?

A standard Google Analytics 4 property offers two retention settings for event data, 2 months or 14 months, and defaults to 14. Analytics 360 properties offer 2, 14, 26, 38, or 50 months and default to 50, except XL properties, which are capped at 2 months. Once the window passes, the underlying event rows are deleted and no report can bring them back.

For most standard properties that means a real year over year comparison is impossible: by the time August comes around, last August is already outside the 14 month window on a rolling basis for some of the range you want. Teams that care about long trends either export to BigQuery or keep the history in a dashboard tool. MixedMetrics stores connected history, so seasonality comparisons stay available.

How much does a Google Analytics dashboard cost?

GA4 and the self service tier of Looker Studio are both free to license, so the honest answer for a small team is that the licence costs nothing and the hours cost plenty. Looker Studio Pro, sold as a project subscription, is $9 per user per project per month and adds team content management, scheduling controls, and Google Cloud support. It does not add blended metrics.

MixedMetrics starts at $79 per month flat, with read-only connectors for GA4, Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, Search Console, Shopify, Stripe, and Klaviyo or HubSpot. If you want the same reasoning applied to agency client reporting rather than one brand, the agency reporting software comparison lays out per client cost across the main tools, and the Looker Studio alternative page covers the trade off in more detail.

Which metrics belong on a Google Analytics KPI dashboard?

Keep it to the ones someone will act on. From GA4: sessions and users by channel, key event completions, conversion rate by channel, and landing page performance. From the ad accounts: spend, impressions, clicks, and platform reported conversions per network. From the store and billing: orders, settled revenue, refunds, and new versus returning customers.

On top of those raw fields, the ratios are what leadership actually reads: blended ROAS, blended CAC, MER, and LTV:CAC. None of them can be computed inside GA4, because each one needs both a cost number and a revenue number that GA4 does not hold. That is the practical case for treating GA4 as a connector rather than a destination.

• Sessions and key events by channel, from GA4
• Spend and clicks per network, from the ad accounts
• Settled revenue and refunds, from Shopify or Stripe
• Blended ROAS, blended CAC, MER and LTV:CAC, computed across all three