3 Dashboards You Must Show Your CEO to Secure Budget for the Rest of the Year

Why do CMOs experience marketing budget cuts? The reason is often miscommunication between the CMO and the CEO/CFO. The latter speaks the language of profit and loss, focusing on the EBITDA indicator and closely monitoring the company’s cash flow. Meanwhile, the Marketing Manager comes to them with a report on organic traffic sessions, CPC, or rankings for selected keywords.

The result?

To a CEO, a 20% increase in traffic says little about return on investment, while for a Marketing Manager, it’s an obvious success. The problem lies in the CEO’s or CFO’s lack of understanding of what specific profit this growth can bring. It is exactly this lack of understanding and the so-called translation gap that can lead to blocked marketing budgets. If the CFO doesn’t see a concrete return on investment, they won’t be keen to continue the activities.

Understanding the psychology of report perception is useful for structuring them in a way that is clear to the other party.

The first crucial theory is cognitive fluency. It states that people more easily trust information that is simpler to digest. Complicated tables with tiny fonts and 50 columns in Excel cause cognitive strain, and the brain’s natural reaction is to reject them. If you overwhelm your CEO with 30 metrics and an unreadable table, they won’t dedicate their valuable time to understanding the data or extracting what is actually important to them.

Another concept is loss aversion, coined by psychologists Kahneman and Tversky. The theory holds that the pain of losing something, e.g., $100, is felt more strongly than the joy of gaining the same amount.

Each of the dashboards presented below answers different business questions that might arise on the CEOs’ and CFOs’ sides. Use them to report your activities and their results effectively.

DASHBOARD #1: Efficiency Indicator (Are we burning through the budget?)

This report will answer a simple question: “Are the marketing activities we are conducting even profitable?” A common trap is relying solely on the ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) metric. This metric ignores margin and fixed costs, which is why it’s better to show the LTV:CAC ratio:

• Metrics: Show LTV (the value a customer will bring to the company over the period of cooperation) paired with CAC (the cost incurred to acquire the customer).
• Benchmark: If the ratio is, for example, 3:1, it will be favorable for the company. If it’s 1:1, it’s worth considering reducing the customer acquisition cost or analyzing why the customer brings in so little value.
• Solutions: When lowering CAC, SEO works perfectly in the long term. Unlike SEM, where CAC grows linearly as more budget is spent, with SEO, CAC decreases over time because well-optimized content works for free for years. This way, the company cuts acquisition costs, making EBITDA independent of rising CPC rates in paid channels.

DASHBOARD #2: Revenue Generation Mechanism (Where is the money coming from?)

This dashboard will answer the question: “What percentage of revenue can be directly attributed to marketing?” It would be a mistake to present the report from a Last-Click Attribution perspective. This way, you only show a slice of the data, attributing success solely to what closed the sale (e.g., a brand search) while ignoring what was at the foundation of the customer journey. The proposed solution is to show marketing’s percentage share in the sales funnel.

• Metrics: Show what percentage of new transactions started with an interaction with marketing activities, e.g., the customer’s first contact with the site via a blog article.
• Context: In the era of AISO (AI Search Optimization), the customer journey is hard to track and doesn’t rely solely on clicks. In your dashboard, you must show correlation—for example, between an increase in visibility for problem-solving queries in AI overviews and an increase in inbound leads in that area.
• Chart: Present overlaid charts of visibility in AI tools (citations, mentions) and new leads – if the lines run parallel, you can demonstrate causality.

DASHBOARD #3: Performance Forecast (Will we beat the competition?)

The company’s CEO will also be interested in the answer to the question: “Where do we stand against the competition?” Seeking the answer in a report that shows a 1-3 ranking for selected keywords is a mistake. Above all, this is a technical metric tied to SEO, and it is currently volatile. The solution is to use the Share of Search metric, which is the percentage share of searches in a given industry.

• Metrics: Share of Search is often pointed to as a leading indicator, a metric that helps predict future trends and the outcome (e.g., revenue growth). It is calculated by dividing your brand search volume by the sum of brand searches for competitors in your industry, then multiplying by 100 to get a percentage.
• Benchmark: If your Share of Search is growing over time today, your market share in terms of profits will grow in 6 months.

Start with an audit of the data at your disposal. Before showing it to the CEO and CFO, you must be certain of its accuracy in collections and overall reliability. For a start, check Server-Side Tracking and your analytics’ compliance with Consent Mode v2. If you come across errors in these areas, it’s likely that you aren’t collecting a complete data set.

Next, integrate GA4 with your CRM. This way, you’ll show the full customer acquisition process and focus not just on submitted forms, but on fully closed deals.

One of the most important stages will be planning data visualization. Simply put – make sure the report is as simple as possible. As mentioned earlier, the more readable and less complicated the report, the easier it will be for the recipient to digest. You can use Looker Studio for this, but aim for a single-page report visible on the screen without scrolling, rather than a complicated, multi-page document.