Most hospitality marketing dashboards are vanity displays. They show sessions, impressions, and follower counts — metrics that look impressive in a monthly report but do not tell you whether to increase your Google Ads budget, fix your booking engine, or send another email campaign. A useful dashboard does one thing: it answers the question “what should I do next?”
This guide covers the structure of a hospitality marketing dashboard that actually drives decisions, the metrics that belong in it, and how to build it in Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) — free.
A hospitality marketing dashboard should have three distinct layers, each answering a different question:
Layer 1 — Revenue and Bookings: Did we hit our direct booking targets? This layer shows direct booking revenue, booking count, average booking value, and RevPAR from direct channels. It answers the board-level question.
Layer 2 — Channel Performance: Which channels are driving those bookings and at what cost? This layer shows sessions, conversions, and cost per booking by channel (organic search, paid search, email, social, direct). It answers the marketing management question.
Layer 3 — On-Site Behaviour: How are guests interacting with the website and where are they dropping off? This layer shows booking engine start rate, completion rate by device, top-converting landing pages, and funnel drop-off points. It answers the optimisation question.
→ Example: A 40-room independent hotel uses this three-layer structure to run their weekly 20-minute marketing review. Layer 1 tells them if they are on target. Layer 2 tells them which channel to focus on. Layer 3 tells them what to fix on the website. Three layers, one dashboard, one clear weekly action.
Data source: your PMS or booking engine. Most systems can export this data in CSV for manual Looker Studio upload, or connect via API for live data.
Data sources: GA4 (sessions, conversions), Google Ads (spend), Google Search Console (rankings), email platform (MailChimp, Klaviyo, etc.).
Create a new page titled “Revenue Overview”. Add scorecard charts for direct booking revenue, booking count, and average booking value. Add a time series chart showing weekly direct booking revenue vs. the same period last year. Add a pie chart showing direct vs. OTA booking split.
Create a new page titled “Channel Performance”. Add a bar chart of sessions by channel. Add a table showing channel, sessions, booking_engine_starts, booking_complete conversions, conversion rate, and cost per booking (where applicable). Add a line chart showing the trend of bookings by top 3 channels over 13 weeks.
Create a new page titled “Website Performance”. Add scorecards for booking engine start rate and completion rate. Add a funnel chart showing the booking engine steps with drop-off percentages. Add a table of top landing pages with sessions and booking conversion rates. Add a mobile vs. desktop comparison scorecard.
→ Example: A resort property built this Looker Studio dashboard and shared it with their general manager, revenue manager, and marketing agency via a view-only link. The weekly 20-minute review replaced a 2-hour monthly report meeting — and the team started making data-driven decisions every week instead of every month.
The Lobby builds custom Looker Studio dashboards for independent hotels and restaurants.
