Track ad spend and paid performance in one dashboard using Dreamdata

Dreamdata Account Executive Samuel walks you through building a consolidated dashboard that brings all your paid activity into one place, tracking spend across channels and connecting it directly to the pipeline and revenue it generates.

Supplementary Guide

If you work in B2B paid marketing, you already know the drill. Multiple ad platforms, manual data downloads, spreadsheets, CRM cross-referencing. By the time you have a clear picture of what your spend is producing, the numbers are already stale.

This guide shows you how to fix that by combining all your reporting into a single dashboard that answers the two questions every paid marketer needs to answer: where is our budget going, and what is it producing in pipeline and revenue?

These steps allow you to replicate the recipe. For context, we recommend you watch the video above.

Step 1: Build an Ad Spend Report

For our first report, we will build a report on our paid spending to see where our money is going across every paid channel.

Head to the Analytics Hub, create a new report, and start with the Ad Spend Summary template.

• Set your time period to Last 6 Months and aggregate the data by Month. 

• Keep all the preloaded metrics: impressions, clicks, cost, CTR, CPC, and CPM.

• Under Segmentation, group by Paid Source and add a second segmentation layer by Channel so you see how your paid budget has been distributed across paid search, paid social, and more. 

• Save the report and give it a clear name like “Ad Spend - Last 6 Months”.

Once you hit apply, the report displays your selected metrics at the top, with tables and graphs below. 

The graphs are fully configurable, so you can switch between any of the metrics you have selected, such as click-through rate or cost per mille, and toggle between grouped bar charts and line charts, which give you the flexibility to choose visualizations that best suit the data you are showing. 

Step 2: Build a Paid Ads Performance Report

Knowing what you spent is only useful if you can connect it to outcomes, and that's exactly what the Paid Ads Performance & ROAS template is designed to do.

• Set the same time period as your first report so the two can be compared side by side, i.e., the last 6 months.

• Select MQLs, SQLs, and closed-wons (NewBiz) as your KPIs at both the influenced and attributed levels. This will help provide you with a full picture of where paid activity is contributing across the funnel.

• Group by paid source and then by campaign to see not just which platforms are performing, but also which specific campaigns are generating the most pipeline.

• Set the attribution model to Dreamdata's AI-driven data-driven model.

• Hit apply and save the report as something like “ROAS - Last 6 Months”.

All pipeline metrics in the report are clickable and show the actual list of accounts or leads behind that figure and link to their individual customer journey.

The data-driven model is the recommended one because it uses an AI algorithm that draws on all your customer journey data to determine which touchpoints drove each pipeline stage, getting more accurate over time.

You can also switch to other models, like first-touch, if you want to run a different type of analysis.

Step 3: Bringing the Reports together in a Paid Performance Dashboard

With both reports built, head to the Analytics Hub and create a new dashboard. Give it a precise name like “Paid Performance Overview — Last 6 Months”, then build it out in two sections.

Start by adding a text widget at the top to label the dashboard and keep things organized. Then click Add Widget to start pulling in content from your reports.

For the ad cost section, select the “Ad Spend” report you just created and add the following:

• The key metric tiles showing cost, impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, and CPM, giving you an instant snapshot of how your budget is being spent.

• A chart showing cost by source over time, making it easy to spot where spend is concentrated.

• Duplicate that chart and switch the metric to cost-per-click over time, so you can keep a close eye on efficiency across channels as spend fluctuates.

For the pipeline contribution section, add from the ROAS report:

• The influenced and attributed metric tiles for MQLs, SQLs, and NewBiz, so you can see marketing's full contribution across every stage of the funnel in one place.

• A grouped bar chart for each funnel stage showing which channels are driving pipeline, giving you the channel-level clarity you need to double down on what's working and cut what isn't.

Any changes to an underlying report will flow through directly to dashboards automatically.

Wrap up

Instead of rebuilding different reports from scratch every reporting cycle, you now have a single view you can return to as often as you need, with numbers that are always traceable back to the accounts and journeys behind them. 

One dashboard. Every paid channel. Full pipeline visibility. And the confidence to prove marketing's impact with numbers you'd stake your reputation on.