Marketing teams track dozens of metrics, but most leadership teams only care about a handful when reviewing whether marketing is working. The challenge is getting those key numbers out of scattered spreadsheets and ad platform exports and into a clear, comparable view. Here are five metrics that belong in every marketing dashboard — and how to make them easy to track.

1. Cost per acquisition (CPA)

CPA is the amount you spend to acquire one customer, lead, or signup — depending on your business model and how you define "acquisition." It is calculated as total spend divided by total conversions in a period.

To track CPA in a spreadsheet, you need a Spend column and a Conversions column at the same granularity — usually by campaign, channel, and date. Add a calculated CPA column (Spend / Conversions) and your dashboard will surface it as a KPI card and as a trend chart automatically.

CPA by channel is one of the most useful views: it tells you whether Google, Meta, email, or organic is the most efficient acquisition path — information that directly shapes budget decisions.

2. Return on ad spend (ROAS)

ROAS measures how much revenue you generated for every pound or dollar spent on advertising. A ROAS of 3 means you generated £3 in revenue for every £1 in ad spend. Unlike CPA, which focuses on acquisition efficiency, ROAS focuses on revenue efficiency — making it a better metric for e-commerce and product businesses where average order values vary significantly.

For ROAS in a spreadsheet, you need a Revenue column alongside your Spend column. Add ROAS = Revenue / Spend as a calculated column. When you build a marketing dashboard, ROAS by channel becomes a ranking chart that immediately shows which channels are earning their budget.

3. Lead-to-customer conversion rate

This metric measures how efficiently your marketing pipeline converts leads into paying customers. If you generate 500 leads and 25 become customers, your lead-to-customer rate is 5%. Tracking this over time shows whether your qualification process, sales handoff, or nurture sequences are improving or deteriorating.

To track this in a spreadsheet, you need a row per lead or per cohort (by month), with columns for total leads and leads converted. Most CRMs export this data as a CSV. Import it into a dashboard and you get a conversion rate trend chart automatically.

4. Spend by channel with trend

Channel attribution — knowing which marketing channels drive which results — is one of the most important (and most contested) questions in marketing. A simple first step is tracking spend by channel over time and correlating it with conversion or revenue trends.

In your spreadsheet, a Channel column (Google, Meta, Email, SEO, Events) combined with a Date column gives you the raw material for a stacked bar or line chart showing how budget allocation has shifted over time and what happened to results when it did.

5. Monthly new signups or trials (pipeline health)

For SaaS, subscription, and product-led businesses, the number of new signups, trial starts, or free-to-paid conversions per month is the leading indicator of future revenue. This is distinct from CPA or ROAS — it is the headline volume metric that shows whether top-of-funnel demand is growing.

Export this from your product analytics tool or CRM as a monthly CSV and build a trend chart. Combined with CPA, you get both the volume signal and the efficiency signal in one marketing dashboard view.

Putting it all together

The best marketing dashboards combine these five metrics in one view so leadership can ask "is marketing working?" and get a clear yes or no — with the data to explain the answer. Export your ad platforms and CRM data as CSVs, combine them with consistent column names, and upload them to a dashboard tool. With a spreadsheet-to-dashboard workflow, the entire setup takes less time than building the next monthly slide deck.