Looker Studio dashboard for Shopify brands
A founder once described their reporting setup to us like this: "I open eight tabs every Monday morning, copy numbers into a spreadsheet, and by the time I've finished the dashboards I've forgotten what I was looking for."
That's not a reporting problem. It's a dashboard problem. And it's one most Shopify ecommerce brands have, even ones doing seven figures.
A properly built Looker Studio dashboard fixes it. Not in a way that needs expensive software or a data team. In a way that takes a week to set up, runs itself afterwards, and gives you (and your board) a clean weekly read on whether the marketing is doing what it's supposed to.
Here's what goes in one, why it matters, and how to build one that doesn't break.
Why Looker Studio specifically
A reasonable question. There are a hundred dashboard tools. Triple Whale, Northbeam, Polar, Klipfolio, Tableau. Most are paid, some are powerful, quite a few are overkill for a £500k–£10m Shopify brand.
Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) wins for three reasons:
1. It's free. No subscription, no usage cap. You pay only for the data connectors you choose.
2. It connects to almost everything. Shopify, GA4, Google Ads, Meta, Klaviyo, Amazon, TikTok. All routable through Power My Analytics, Supermetrics, or native connectors.
3. It's flexible. You can brand it, structure it, restrict it, embed it, share it. None of the closed-platform dashboards offer that level of control.
Triple Whale and Northbeam are good products. They're built for ecommerce. They cost £200–£2,000+/month. If you've got the budget and you want attribution modelling, they're worth a look. For most brands, Looker Studio gets you 80% of the value at 0% of the cost.
What goes in a Shopify Looker Studio dashboard
A good dashboard has two pages. One for weekly review, one for period analysis. Anything more than that and people stop opening it.
Page 1: weekly overview
This is the page senior people open every Monday. It should answer four questions in 30 seconds:
1. How much did we sell last week?
2. How does that compare to the same week last year?
3. Where is the spend going?
4. Are we spending efficiently?
The components:
- Three big scorecards at the top. Net sales, total orders, average order value (AOV). Each one shows the current week's number with a YoY comparison underneath (e.g. "£13,220 / +18.2% vs LY"). Click-through to a detailed breakdown.
- WoW / YoY comparison table. Last week's headline numbers next to the same week last year, with percentage change colour-coded.
- Spend-to-sales ratio. A single big number with a traffic-light band behind it (more on the bands below).
- New vs returning customer metrics. Percentage split, revenue contribution, AOV difference. The single best signal of whether your acquisition or retention work is paying off.
- Channel breakdown. Net sales contribution by channel. Online store, TikTok Shop, Amazon, marketplaces, retail. Whatever your channel mix is.
Built right, this page should fit on one screen on a desktop monitor. Don't make people scroll.
Page 2: period analysis
For when you want to look at the month or the quarter, not the week.
- MTD (month to date). Net sales, ad spend, spend-to-sales, ROAS, GREEN/AMBER/RED day count.
- MTD vs LY. Same metrics, last year's same period.
- YTD (year to date). Same again, with cumulative trend chart.
- YTD vs LY. Same again.
- Linear projection to month-end. Where will the spend-to-sales ratio land if today's pace continues? GREEN, AMBER, or RED?
Page 2 is the page you open when you're presenting to the board, not for the weekly check-in.
The KPI bands trick (the thing that makes a dashboard actually useful)
This is the bit most dashboards get wrong. Numbers without context don't drive action.
We use three traffic-light bands on every key metric:
- GREEN: performing within target
- AMBER: drifting, needs attention
- RED: out of bounds, needs immediate action
For Nailberry's spend-to-sales ratio, the bands are:
- GREEN under 35%
- AMBER 35–45%
- RED over 45%
Set the bands once. Look at the number. Make a decision. Fast.
Without bands, "spend-to-sales is 38% this week" is just a number. With bands, it's "we're in AMBER, time to investigate". That difference is what makes the dashboard load-bearing in the business.
The trick to setting bands: GREEN is your target, AMBER is the warning zone (typically within 15% of target), RED is your trigger to step in. Don't set them based on what you want to see. Set them based on what triggers an action.
Critical setup rules (things that will trip you up)
A few hard-won lessons from building these for ecommerce brands.
1. Use net sales, not line items. Shopify's "orders" group includes refunds and discounts properly. The "line items" group doesn't. Always pull revenue from orders.
2. Don't put UTM parameters on internal links. GA4 treats them as new sessions and overwrites the original traffic source. Use custom query parameters instead (e.g. `?ref=homepage_banner`). GA4 shows them in the page path without breaking attribution.
3. Date range matters. Set it to "last week" starting Monday rather than "last 7 days". The latter is rolling, which means the weekly comparison table never lines up cleanly.
4. Comparison period: previous year. Not previous period. Year-on-year strips out seasonality and gives a clean read on whether the business is growing.
5. Currency is location-specific. If you sell in multiple markets (UK, US, EU), each gets its own scorecard with its own currency. Don't try to roll them up. Cross-currency comparisons are misleading.
6. Build it from the account that'll use it daily. Cached permissions and Google account states cause "no data" errors. Whoever's going to open it Monday morning should be the one logged in when it's set up.
Data sources you'll actually need
Looker Studio doesn't talk to Shopify directly. You need a connector.
The two reliable options:
- Power My Analytics (PMA). £30–£150/month depending on the data sources you connect. Works with Shopify, Amazon (UK and US), Meta, Google Ads, TikTok, Klaviyo. Reliable, well-supported, plays nicely with Looker.
- Supermetrics. £40–£200/month. Similar capabilities, more enterprise-leaning. If you need 100+ data sources, this is the one. Otherwise PMA is usually enough.
GA4 connects directly to Looker Studio without a paid connector.
Avoid the free Shopify connectors floating around the Looker community. They tend to break when Shopify updates their API. The £30/month for PMA is worth it.
Build it yourself or hire someone?
Honest answer: it depends on whether the dashboard is a one-off or load-bearing.
Build it yourself if:
- You enjoy this kind of work
- You're under £1m revenue and need to keep costs low
- Your reporting needs are simple
- You'll have time to maintain it (allow half a day a quarter)
Hire someone if:
- The dashboard is going to be referenced weekly by senior leadership
- You're rolling it out across multiple markets or brands
- You want it branded and presentable for board meetings
- The two days it would take you is worth more elsewhere
A reasonable budget for a built-and-branded Shopify Looker Studio dashboard from a senior consultant: £1,500–£4,000 depending on complexity, plus monthly connector costs.
How Sector 106 does it
Building Looker Studio dashboards is one of the things our Strategy & Operations service does week in, week out. The Nailberry dashboard is the most worked example we have:
- Page 1: Weekly overview with net sales scorecards (UK, US, Europe), YoY comparison, spend-to-sales ratio with GREEN/AMBER/RED bands, new vs returning customer metrics, channel breakdown.
- Page 2: Period analysis with MTD, MTD vs LY, YTD, YTD vs LY views.
- Brand theme: background `#F5F3EF`, text `#1A1A1A`, accent `#C4A882`, font Lato, border-radius 0. Matches the brand identity.
- Data sources: Power My Analytics Shopify connector + GA4 + Google Ads + Meta + Amazon (UK and US).
- Automation: a weekly KPI report generator that screenshots the dashboard, wraps it in a branded PDF, and emails it Monday morning.
The whole system runs itself. We update bands quarterly, refresh source connections monthly, and otherwise leave it to do its job.
For Nailberry specifically, the dashboard plus the weekly reporting flow contributed directly to cutting their spend-to-sales ratio from 40.8% down to 28% in 30 days. Not because the dashboard moved the numbers itself, but because it surfaced the campaigns burning budget (Generic 2024, PMax Treatments, US Shopping) inside a week of going live. We paused them. The numbers moved.
A quick checklist before you build one
If you're going to build a Shopify Looker Studio dashboard yourself, here's the shortlist:
1. Decide on the bands. Spend-to-sales targets, ROAS thresholds, conversion rate targets. Write them down before you open Looker Studio.
2. Connect the data. Power My Analytics or Supermetrics for Shopify, native connectors for GA4 and Google Ads.
3. Build Page 1 first. Weekly overview. Don't move to Page 2 until Page 1 is presentable.
4. Test on the screen size you'll actually use. Most dashboards are built on a 27-inch monitor and look terrible on a 15-inch laptop. Test on the smaller screen.
5. Set the date range and comparison correctly. Last week vs same week previous year.
6. Brand it. Sounds vain, but a dashboard that matches the company brand gets opened more than a generic one.
7. Schedule a weekly review. Monday 9am, 15 minutes, founder + key marketing person. The dashboard exists to drive that meeting, not to be opened occasionally.
The honest test: do you need one?
Two questions:
1. Could you describe last week's spend-to-sales ratio without checking?
2. Could you say what your AOV did versus last year, this week?
If the answer to either is no, a Looker Studio dashboard would change how your business operates. The work to build one is finite. The benefit is permanent.
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Want one built for your brand?
We build branded Looker Studio dashboards for ecommerce brands as part of our Strategy & Operations service. One to two weeks turnaround. Includes weekly automated reporting, KPI band setup, and quarterly review.
Or read more about how we work: Strategy & Operations →
