How to Build Marketing Reports You’ll Actually Use in 2026
The reality is, most marketing teams who’ve been around for at least a couple years have some kind of dashboard available. It’s just that they don’t actually use them. And they don’t actually use them because the dashboard doesn’t tell them what they need to know. Whether it’s a technical issue, too complicated to analyze, or too slow to load…the dashboard likely took a lot of time to set up and has been collecting dust since.
Fancy tools like Power BI, AirTable, Tableau, etc promise clarity and speed. And they really can do that.
The issue?
It’s actually not a skills gap.
It’s a marketing operations design problem.
Stop Settling for “Good Enough” Reporting.
There’s a lot we aren’t settling for in 2026, and a bullet item on that list is your marketing reports. The gap we often see is that teams design their reports to capture every possible metric when instead, they should be designing for decisions. When dashboards aren’t built for decision-making, what often happens is a trickling effect of:
Slower decisions (second guessing or literally just guessing for your decision)
Missing the key windows to optimize your marketing because you didn’t read the data in real time
Missing marketing opportunities because you fall to the limitations of your reporting
A dashboard is an integral tool in your marketing operations tool belt. Without it, you’re prone to making passive decisions and wasting time or money on marketing campaigns falling flat.
Who are marketing dashboards meant for, anyways?
Most dashboards are designed for the C-Suite. Because your CMO doesn’t have time to review every last metric. Your CMO just wants to understand monthly, quarterly, or annual performance trends and how those compare to target.
But marketers need something else. A marketing dashboard is inherently different from an executive’s dashboards. It should look at:
What has changed in our marketing and why did it change?
What needs to be done today, or this week, to optimize?
If you try to design your marketing dashboard to serve marketing and executives, it’s not going to be effective.
“Just Build a Better Dashboard”
We’ve all heard that line before. Before you put another 20 hours into building a complicated dashboard, consider these points where we often see teams misstep:
The attribution data doesn’t match the platform data they’re receiving
The dashboard is trying to answer every single question a marketer could have about a given period
Your data team, or whoever would analyze this data, doesn’t have context around what marketing is up to
This is how you end up with 25+ ad hoc marketing reporting requests and everything feels chaotic, unclear, and on fire constantly.
Let’s fix it :)
What is the job of a marketing dashboard?
In order to analyze anything, you need a signal. That is the purpose of a marketing dashboard. A marketing dashboard is intended to help marketers detect signals. Your marketing dashboard should be able to tell you:
The performance & general health of your campaigns
Trends over months, quarters, and years
Signal issues that should be prodded further (why did our cost per acquisition go up significantly in the last week for this campaign?)
We’ll be doing a live build on our YouTube channel this week.
How to Build a Marketing Dashboard That Works
Let’s take it step-by-step now and work on getting you ready to build a solid marketing dashboard.
Whiteboard your plan before bringing in data.
Start high-level: what decisions do you need to be able to make from this dashboard?
From there, map out some key sections of the dashboard. For each section, ask yourself: what question should people be asking for this section?
And from there, plan out your visualization. How will you organize the data? How will you visually represent the data? This will help you quickly identify if your dashboard is going to become bloated.
Key tip? Build with an inverted pyramid. Start broad, and then drill down. And if a certain widget raises a question, give users the ability to investigate further themselves. That is how you get into data storytelling, instead of data dumping.
Standardize your marketing reporting.
It’s highly likely you’ll end up needing more than one dashboard (especially once you get the hang of building an effective DB). These additional requests will always exceed your capacity. Having a consistent dashboard template helps this process.
Create checklists for your marketing reports such as:
How do you set filters correctly?
How do you ensure date ranges are correct for each widget?
How do you avoid silent attribution errors?
This keeps your data clean and avoids issues where one misstep forces you to allocate three resource hours to fixing.
Check your build for user needs vs user asks.
If you’re in marketing, you know you will always get dozens of requests for reporting on metrics, specific breakdowns, additional tabs, etc. It is quite literally, never ending. And it is quite literally, a waste of your time.
The actual job of the dashboard is to help make a decision or reduce uncertainty. Your job is when they’re asking for these things, to understand what decision they’re trying to make or what uncertainty they’re really facing, and adapt your dashboard sections to solve for that.
For example, if your firm wants to understand what channels perform best, they might ask for several specific metric breakdowns by channel with individual campaign breakouts, with metrics for every single campaign landing page. If you give them all of this, it will only lead to more questions because it doesn’t give them what they really need to know.
What they actually need to know is which channels bring in the most ROI, so they can decide how to allocate budget next quarter. Here’s what The 128 would do:
Section 1: answers “is marketing working…at all?” - it has a marketing sourced pipeline with a breakout for current quarter vs last quarter against the target
Section 2: answers “which marketing channel is driving this?” a breakdown of pipeline by channel and win and lose rate by channel
Section 3: answers “where should marketing dollars go next quarter?” and includes channels with rising spend but flat pipeline, anything driving highest intent conversions, and campaigns that are high performers but efficiency drainers
Ensure there is shared knowledge around the dashboard.
The worst thing you could do is assign one person to build this beautiful dashboard, and not share the knowledge anywhere. That is a major (and costly) business risk. The entire team, including some leaders, should be trained up on how to use this. We recommend developing SOPs (we use Scribe) and keeping them somewhere easy to access. This is the best way to ensure you can scale reporting needs in the future, protect continuity, and avoid getting stuck in dashboard execution hell.
Your Next Steps
Sit down with your marketing team (even if that’s just a meeting with yourself) and answer:
What marketing decisions are we faced with each week? How easy it is to find those answers?
Are there questions that always take us forever to answer?
Are dashboards helping us act or are we just stating some metrics and moving on with our lives?
Start by building the following dashboard (if you have low budget, use Google Looker Studio):
Fill in your marketing budget for 2026 and then budget pacing
Lead volume and efficiency trends
Sales or lead attribution by channel
And if you need help with this, drop us a line! (or follow along with our live build this week)
