Reporting dashboards

Reporting dashboards are screens that show how your ads are doing, with figures such as spend, clicks, leads and cost per result. You can usually filter by date, campaign or platform, and some let you build your own views. Meta Ads and LinkedIn Ads include reporting in their own managers, while tools such as Madgicx, Optmyzr and Revealbot add dashboards that bring several sources together.

Numbers only help if you can find and understand them quickly. A good dashboard answers the questions you ask each week, such as which campaign is working and how much it costs to win a customer. It saves the manual work of exporting data and building charts. You need a stronger dashboard when you run ads on several platforms, report to other people or need to match ad spend to sales. If you run a single small campaign, the platform's standard report may be enough.

Be careful about the figures. Each platform counts conversions in its own way, so numbers from two sources often do not match.

• Can you build and save views for the metrics you care about, such as cost per lead?
• Does it combine several platforms and show them side by side?
• Can you connect results from your own sales or CRM data, not only clicks and platform conversions?
• Can dashboards be shared or sent on a schedule to people without a login?