Build Custom Reports and Dashboards with Dreamdata

Dreamdata’s Andrea (Director of Product Marketing) takes you through how you can build custom reports and dashboards that prove marketing's impact on every stage of the funnel stages.

Supplementary Guide

These steps allow you to replicate the analysis. For context and more examples, we recommend you watch the video above.

Step 1: Create a Report from a Template

The first thing you need to know is that in Dreamdata, reports are where you answer a specific question, and dashboards are where you bring all of those questions together in one view. 

To get started:

• Head to Analytics Hub and click on Create Report

Rather than starting from a blank canvas, report templates give you a foundation built around the questions B2B marketing teams need to answer most, such as the following:

• Which channels are driving pipeline?

• Is my paid spend converting?

• What content is influencing SQLs?

To show marketing’s impact for the different stages of the funnel, select the Stage Attribution template as your starting point.

Step 2: Customize Your Report

The templates give you a solid foundation, but you can also further customize the report to the specific question you want to answer.

Set the Date Range

Start by setting the date range. I want to understand how marketing has performed this year; select the current year and break it down month by month so you can see how things have trended over time.

• Select This year as your date range and break it down month by month.

Select Your Metrics

The template comes pre-populated with a set of default metrics, but you can always add to them. For the most comprehensive analysis, bring in both influenced and attributed metrics:

• Influenced MQL and Influenced MQL Value

• Attributed MQL and Attributed MQL Value

Having both side by side is important because “attributed” values show you which channels get the credit, while "influenced" values show you which channels were part of the journey. 

Together, they make sure you're not underselling or overselling any channel.

Apply Filters

Next, filter the report to include your marketing-owned channels. This keeps the focus on what marketing is directly responsible for, rather than surfacing every touchpoint across the business.

Set Segments

The template already segments your data by channel, which is a great starting point.

I’m also interested in how individual sources within each channel are performing, so I’ll add a second segment by Source to go one level deeper.

Choose an Attribution Model

The recommended starting point is the data-driven model, which uses Dreamdata's AI algorithm to look across all your customer journey data to determine which channels were most influential in driving results.

That said, if you want to run a different kind of analysis, you can switch to another model:

• First Touch to see which channel typically starts your customer journeys

• Last Touch to see which channel closes them out

• Linear to distribute credit equally across all touchpoints

Once you're happy with your configuration, click Apply, and your report will be generated.

Step 3: Break Down Your Report

At the top, you'll see a summary of your key metrics for the period. This is where you find your headline numbers, for example, how many MQLs were generated and what share of those can be attributed to marketing-owned channels.

Below that, a chart and table show channel performance over time. 

You can switch the metric being displayed using the selector above each visualization, e.g., toggling between influenced and attributed to see how the picture changes. 

It's worth paying attention to those shifts. A channel like email might rank highly for influence but drop when you switch to attributed, which tells you it's often part of the journey but rarely the deciding factor.

At the bottom of the report, you’ll find a table with all of your metrics shown side by side. A few things you can do here:

• Switch the metric on any chart or widget to compare influenced vs. attributed views.

• Drag and drop columns in the metrics table to arrange them in whatever order makes most sense.

• Click through any channel to dig deeper into its performance

Step 4: Build a report for every funnel stage

To get the complete picture, repeat the process above for each stage of the funnel you want to measure.

In the template, we’ve built the same report for Sales Qualified Leads and New Business Closed-Won.

Step 5: Bring Your Reports Together in One Dashboard

This is where everything comes together. Instead of pulling numbers from three different reports every time you need an overview, a dashboard puts it all in one place and keeps it permanently up to date.

Create a New Dashboard

Go to Dashboards and click Create Dashboard. 

Add a Text Widget to give your dashboard a title and any context so viewers can understand what they are looking at.

Add Report Data

Click Add Widget and select From Report. Choose the MQL attribution report we just created and pick the specific data widgets you want to bring in:

• All the standalone metrics

• Channel performance charts

• The full metrics table

Repeat this for your SQL and Closed Won reports. Each widget stays linked to its source report, so the data is always live.

Organize Your Dashboard and Drill Into the Details

With all your data in your dashboard, arrange them by funnel stage so the dashboard tells a clear story from top to bottom.

Resize and reposition until the layout feels right. Once it's set up:

• Hover over any widget title to see exactly which report it comes from, and click through to open it directly if you need more context.

• Click on any pipeline metric to pull up the full list of every deal behind that number.

• Click into any individual deal to view the complete customer journey, from first anonymous touch all the way through to closed.

So if someone in a leadership meeting asks where a particular SQL came from, you don't just have an answer; you can show them right then and there. 

Wrap up

By the end of this process, you'll have a marketing attribution dashboard that covers the full funnel, from first MQL through to NewBiz, built around how your team actually measures performance.

The reports answer the specific questions; the dashboard brings them together in one view where every single number is traceable back to the contacts, companies, and deals behind it.

No more waiting on someone else to pull the data, and no more having to defend your numbers without being able to back them up.