Tactical Toolkits

I Got Sick of LinkedIn Ads Reporting. So I Built This Dashboard

2026-09-06

LinkedIn Ads reporting gives you data, not insights. Frustrated by it, I built a free dashboard anyone can use. Steal it.

SEO metadata

Meta title: LinkedIn Ads Dashboard for Solo Marketers, Built From Frustration

Meta description: LinkedIn Ads reporting gives you data, not insights. Frustrated by it, I built a free dashboard anyone can use. Steal it.

Slug: linkedin-ads-dashboard-for-solo-marketers

Full URL: https://www.siril.space/the-stuff/linkedin-ads-dashboard-for-solo-marketers

OG title: I Got Sick of LinkedIn Ads Reporting. So I Built This Dashboard

OG description: No analytics dashboard on LinkedIn Ads means hours lost to CSVs and pivot tables every month. Here's the free tool I built to fix that, and how to set it up.

Primary keyword: linkedin ads dashboard

Secondary keywords: linkedin ads analytics tool, linkedin campaign manager reporting, free linkedin ads reporting tool

Long-tail keywords: how to analyze linkedin ads performance without paid tools, linkedin ads dashboard for solo marketers, google sheets linkedin ads dashboard

Interlinking note: not yet checked against live published posts, waiting on confirmed slugs. Candidates once confirmed: another Tactical Toolkits piece, and the "why I built this" origin page.

I got sick of LinkedIn Ads reporting. So I built this dashboard.

Open LinkedIn Campaign Manager and try to answer one simple question: which ad set actually brought your cost per lead down last month.

You can't. Not from the UI. You export a CSV, open it in Excel, and build a pivot table from scratch. Then you do it again next month. And the month after that.

If you're the only person running ads for your company, this isn't a minor annoyance. It's hours you don't have, spent rebuilding the same report because LinkedIn never gave you one.

The real problem isn't LinkedIn, it's who gets left out

Bigger teams solve this by throwing a paid tool or a data analyst at it. Supermetrics, a BI dashboard, someone whose whole job is pulling numbers into Looker Studio.

Solo marketers don't have that budget or that headcount. You're the strategist, the media buyer, and the analyst, usually before 10am.

So I built the dashboard I needed. It's free, it's public, and it took me a weekend of frustration with my own export files to get right.

What it actually does

The LinkedIn Ads Dashboard takes the raw ad set performance export from Campaign Manager and turns it into something you'd actually want to look at:

Spend, CTR, CPC, leads, and conversions, broken out by campaign and ad set

Trend charts for impressions, clicks, spend, and cost efficiency

Sortable tables you can click into for ad set level detail

Date range filters, so you're not stuck looking at the whole account history every time

You can connect a Google Sheet for ongoing tracking, or just drag in a CSV if you want a quick look at one month's data.

How to actually set it up

Here's the short version. Full steps are on the dashboard page itself, but this is the shape of it:

In Campaign Manager, go to Advertise, then Export, and pull "Ad set performance (broken out by day)." This gives you one row per ad set per day, which is the exact format the dashboard reads.

Open the file in Google Sheets using File, then Import. LinkedIn's export is tab separated and oddly encoded, so importing it properly matters more than it sounds like it should.

Delete the first four rows of report metadata. Your sheet's row one needs to be the real header row, starting with "Start Date (in UTC)."

Copy the header and data rows into your working sheet. Keep LinkedIn's column names exactly as they are.

Set up the Apps Script code (linked on the dashboard page), deploy it as a web app, and paste the resulting URL into the dashboard's connect box.

One thing worth knowing before you start: LinkedIn only keeps daily breakdown data for six months. If you want to track performance over a longer stretch, you need to paste in each month's export as you go, building history over time. A single upload won't give you that.

Everything runs off your own Google Apps Script endpoint or directly in your browser for CSV uploads. Nothing passes through a third party server. Your ad data stays yours.

Who this is actually for

This is built for the person running ads alone, without an analyst checking the numbers behind them. If your team already has a BI stack and someone dedicated to reporting, you probably don't need this.

But if you're the one squinting at a CSV at 11pm before a monthly report is due, this is for you. It won't do your strategy for you. It'll just stop you from losing an evening to a spreadsheet every month.

Go connect your sheet, or drop in a CSV and see what your last quarter actually looked like. If you find a bug, I'd genuinely like to know. I'm still patching it as I run into my own reporting gaps.