How to Build a Free Marketing Dashboard With GA4 and Search Console

You can build a useful marketing dashboard for free in under an hour. The hard part isn't the software. It's making sure the numbers going into it are right, choosing the few charts that actually help you decide something, and resisting the urge to add thirty more. Most dashboards that get abandoned weren't too simple. They were too busy, or built on tracking nobody had checked.

This guide is written for business owners and marketers who aren't analysts. It covers the three checks to do before you build, two free ways to get a working dashboard (one with no building at all), the six charts that matter most, and the mistakes that quietly make dashboard numbers wrong. Every setting mentioned is documented by Google, and we link to the official page for each one.

Before you build: three checks

1. Key events track real enquiries. If your key events are wrong, the dashboard will look impressive but tell you nothing. Try every form, call button and booking yourself, and check that each key event fires a single time and only when it should. You can see how in our GA4 key events guide.
2. Search Console is linked to GA4. With this connected, landing pages and queries from Search Console appear inside GA4. Our guide to linking Search Console and GA4 walks you through it.
3. GA4 data retention is set to 14 months. On standard properties, Google gives you 2 or 14 months. The setting affects explorations and funnel reports, and standard aggregated reports stay out of its reach, but with 14 months you can compare against last year in an exploration.

Together the three checks take about twenty minutes, and they clear up the reasons a dashboard most often "doesn't make sense".

Option 1: the ONE Dashboard (no building)

The GreatInflux ONE Dashboard costs nothing. You sign in with Google, and the read-only permission it asks for covers GA4 and Search Console, so both appear together and your accounts can't be edited through it. If you'd rather get answers than run a design project, this is the quickest route.

You can also use the ONE Dashboard with AI assistants and ask things like "which pages lost clicks this month?", and the reply comes with the figures it's based on. The setup is explained in connecting Claude to GA4 and Search Console.

Option 2: Data Studio, formerly Looker Studio (build your own)

Data Studio, Google's free reporting tool, connects directly to Search Console and Google Analytics. Start a new report, attach both as data sources, add a date control that includes a comparison period, build six charts, and share the result with view-only access.

You'll find Data Studio documented on Google Cloud. The steps:

1. Create a blank report, then connect Google Analytics as a source and select your GA4 property.
2. Add Search Console as a second data source. Choose your site. If you want landing-page detail, use the URL impression table; for site-wide totals, the site impression table.
3. Add a date range control defaulting to the last 28 days and comparing against the same period a year earlier.
4. Build the six charts below. Keep them on one page.
5. Share the report with view-only access for your team or agency.

The six charts to start with

One screen holds all six charts, and if you catch yourself wanting a seventh, decide which of the six it would push out.

How to read each chart

Search clicks over time. Watch the overall trend instead of day-to-day noise. A climb that lasts for months is genuine progress, while a sharp drop on a single day usually traces back to something specific, like a site change or a Google update. Setting it against the same period last year helps you tell seasonal dips from actual problems.

Visits by channel. Social, paid, referral, direct and organic search each behave differently. If one channel suddenly grows, it could be a real success or spam referrals padding your numbers.

Enquiries by channel. This is the chart that matters most. A channel that sends plenty of visits but few enquiries is reaching the wrong audience or sending them to the wrong landing page.

Top landing pages. Rank pages by key events rather than sessions, because the ones that bring in enquiries deserve your best effort, quickest loading and clearest calls to action.

Top search queries. This table is incomplete, so keep that in mind. For privacy reasons Google leaves rare queries out of query reports, and in our own Search Console data study about 72% of clicks were from queries missing from the list.

Year-on-year scorecards. These give the fastest reply to "are we doing better than last year?", so put them at the top.

Five mistakes that make a dashboard lie

• Adding GA4 sessions to Search Console clicks. The two overlap yet count different events, and GA4 vs Search Console explains why.
• Reading yesterday as final. Google says GA4 data processing can take 24-48 hours.
• Trusting the query table as complete. It isn't, and exports from the interface stop at 1,000 rows as well. You'll find the limits explained in Google's performance data deep dive.
• Ignoring thresholds. When data thresholds apply, GA4 leaves out some rows, demographic data being one example.
• Too many charts. If nobody reads it weekly, it's decoration.

You'll find more depth on these in our guide to GA4 data delays.

Adding Business Profile and ad data

GA4 and Search Console only see your website, and two other sources sit outside them. Google Business Profile logs calls and direction requests that may never touch your site, while your ad platforms log what you spent.

The easiest free way to bring them in is a small monthly spreadsheet table that you connect to your Data Studio dashboard as an extra data source. Add one row per month with profile calls, direction requests, website clicks from the profile and ad spend by platform. Filling it in takes five minutes a month, and it turns a website report into a business report. Our Business Profile dashboard guide explains which profile numbers to copy.

Google Ads data can go into Data Studio directly through Google's own connector. For other ad platforms you'll usually pay for a connector or type in a monthly row by hand, which is perfectly adequate on a small budget.

Sharing the dashboard with your team or agency

Give people view-only access to your dashboards, each through their own Google account instead of a shared login, so you can cleanly remove access when someone leaves or you switch agency. Your GA4 property, Search Console property and the dashboard itself should stay owned by an account your business controls. If an agency builds the dashboard, ask them to create it in your account, or to transfer ownership once it's finished. The data is yours, and a contract ending shouldn't cost you access to it.

What a weekly note looks like

A dashboard pays off once someone writes down what it's telling them. Three sample weekly notes follow, using made-up numbers, to show the format:

• "Search clicks up 12% against this week last year, driven mostly by the boiler service page. Enquiries flat, so check that page's form on mobile."
• "Paid search cost per enquiry went from $38 up to $61 once the location radius was widened, so narrow it again next week."
• "Profile calls fell on Sunday, and our hours on Google still show us closed on Sundays, so update the profile today."

Every note states what changed, a probable cause and one action, and a weekly review doesn't need more than that.

Turning the dashboard into decisions

Each week, go through the six charts and write a single sentence on what changed and what you'll do about it. Each month, set enquiries by channel beside your spend and shift money toward the channels that bring enquiries at a cost you can accept.

The habit matters more than the tool, since a simple dashboard checked weekly does better than a polished one opened twice a year. You'll find a template for the weekly note in our weekly website report, and the KPI dashboard guide names twelve metrics worth tracking in addition to the six charts.

When a free dashboard isn't enough

For most small businesses, free tools are enough. You'll want something more once you need to combine many data sources, such as a CRM, several ad platforms and offline sales, or when you need data older than GA4's retention allows, or when several people each need their own views and permissions. Then it can make sense to export data to a warehouse or use a paid business intelligence tool. Before that point, you can get a long way with a free dashboard plus a weekly habit.

Sources

The settings and definitions here come from Google Analytics Help (for thresholds, data freshness and data retention), Search Console Help, the Search Central blog from Google, and the Data Studio documentation from Google Cloud. Each is linked above.