How to Create, Manage, and Customize Your HubSpot Dashboard

HubSpot is one of the most popular inbound marketing and sales platforms out there. This tool generates a great amount of data, and it’s critical to be able to read and analyze it. This can be achieved through reports and dashboards. Creating a report can help you see the data you need in an organized format for a specific purpose. A HubSpot dashboard is a set of reports combined in a single view so that you can have a more holistic view of the performance.

In this article, we will show you how to create and manage HubSpot dashboards and what you can do in terms of customization so you can build exactly what you need to stay organized across all of its functionalities. 

How to create a HubSpot dashboard

Creating a new dashboard is a pretty straightforward process, and you can create a different one for different reporting purposes, for example, a HubSpot marketing dashboard or a HubSpot sales dashboard. All you need to do is:

1. Log in to your HubSpot account.
2. Navigate to Reports > Dashboards.

3. In the upper right corner, click Create dashboard.

4. This will lead you to the dashboard library.

In the dashboard library, you will have to decide what you want to build. You can choose to create a Blank dashboard that doesn’t contain any reports. To do that, you can select Blank dashboard from the main panel, provide a name (e.g., Test) and sharing settings, and click Create a dashboard:

You can fill up your blank dashboard with your own reports, pre-made reports from the report library, and/or create new reports. Just click Add reports to this dashboard in the center of the screen:

If you don’t want to mess with all of this and reinvent the wheel, the other option is to select one of the premade dashboard templates. HubSpot has already created several premade templates to cover all your needs, split into different types such as: 

• CMS
• Marketing
• Sales
• Service
• Target accounts

You can filter the templates based on type by selecting one of the types you need:

If you found a premade template you like, you can click on it, and a menu will appear where you can select which reports you’d like included:

Then you click Next, give a name to the dashboard, select your Sharing settings, and click Create dashboard.

Voila! Your new dashboard is created and ready to show your data.

How to add a new HubSpot dashboard

To add a new dashboard, you can do this all over again using the same process.

To find your new dashboard, you can go to Reports > Dashboard, as you did in step 2, and usually, the last opened dashboard will pop up.

If you want to find any previously created dashboards, you can click on the little arrow right next to the dashboard name, and a list of all your dashboards will appear.

How to customize a dashboard in HubSpot

Great, you learned how to create your dashboard and add additional dashboards to your library, but what if you want to customize or enhance one of your existing dashboards? Well, that couldn’t be any easier.

How to add a report to your dashboard

First of all, the most common way to customize your dashboard is to add a new report to it. To add a new report to your dashboard:

1. In your HubSpot account, navigate to Reports > Dashboards.
2. Open the dashboard you want to add the report to.
3. Click Add report to access the report library.

4. Select if you want to add a new report from your library, HubSpot library, or build a new report.

Congratulations! Your new report now is added to your dashboard right on the bottom.

How to apply filters in a HubSpot dashboard 

Filters are one of the most useful tools when it comes to analysis. By using filters, you can adjust your view to show data for a specific date range, specific owners or teams, or specific pipelines. You can filter all reports on a dashboard or filter individual reports.

To filter your entire dashboard (all the reports within the dashboard), you can:

1. Open the dashboard that you want to filter.
2. In the upper left, click Filter dashboard.

3. Select a filter you want to apply to your dashboard.
4. Configure the filter and click Apply.

To filter a specific report of your dashboard, you can:

1. Open your dashboard and go over the report that you want to filter.
2. In the upper right, click the little Filter icon.

3. This will open a new modal where you can configure your filter for this report.
4. You can select to either update the existing report or create a new report with this filter applied.

How to move and resize a report in your HubSpot dashboard

Last but not least, a great way to customize your HubSpot dashboard is by resizing and moving your reports so that the alignment and setup suit your needs.

To resize a report, go to your dashboard and hover your mouse right on top of the report until this little icon shows in the bottom left of the report:

If you click on that icon and drag your mouse, you can resize the report to your desired size. 

Moreover, if you want to move the report within your dashboard when this icon is shown, you can click anywhere on the report and drag and drop it to the desired location.

What to do if my Hubspot dashboard is not updating

HubSpot analytics updates all dashboard data usually every 40 minutes to two hours. This includes metrics such as page views, sessions, form views, form submissions, etc.

There are some cases where you might notice that your dashboard is not updated or you need your data sooner than the above threshold. HubSpot allows you to manually refresh a report or a dashboard once every 15 minutes to retrieve new data. To do that, you can:

1. Visit the dashboard you want to refresh.
2. On the top right corner, click Actions > Refresh all reports.

If the above option does not do the work for you or you find HubSpot dashboards not rich or consistent enough, maybe you should consider building your dashboards outside of HubSpot. This can be done with dedicated HubSpot integrations.

Integration to build dashboards outside of Hubspot

There are many tools out there (and many of them are free) that allow you to build exactly what you need. Such tools can be Google Sheets, Excel, Google Data Studio, etc. But in this case, you might worry about how you can move your data from HubSpot. Don’t worry, as we have you covered!

Coupler.io allows you to automate data transfers from HubSpot to Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, and Google BigQuery. You can also use Coupler.io to connect HubSpot to Looker Studio.

For this, you’ll need to sign up to Coupler.io and complete the following steps:

Set up a source

Choose HubSpot as a source, connect your HubSpot account, and select the data entity to export. 

Set up a destination

Choose the destination app, connect to it, and specify where to load your HubSpot data. Currently, Coupler.io supports the following integrations:

• HubSpot to Google Sheets
• HubSpot to Excel
• HubSpot to BigQuery
• HubSpot to Looker Studio
• HubSpot to Power BI

Set up a schedule

This step will let you make your HubSpot dashboard self-updating. Enable the automatic data refresh and configure the schedule.

Here is what the setup may look like:

With the data exported to Google Sheets on a schedule, you can create a custom dashboard for the metrics you want to track.

Alternatively, you can use this free template to build a HubSpot dashboard in Looker Studio in just a few minutes. To do so, to the HubSpot CRM Dashboard template and click on the Readme tab. 

HubSpot dashboard examples built outside of HubSpot

In our Pipedrive dashboard article, we’ve built a monitor to track deal performance. We could have just tuned it for the deals exported from HubSpot, but decided to make a separate one like this:

If you like this dashboard, feel free to make a copy and use it or update it for your project.

In columns A and B, we placed metrics and their calculated values. To the right of this section, there are a few charts to make the dashboard visually appealing. 

The dashboard displays the following metrics that are easily calculated based on the data exported from HubSpot:

• Total deals including the number of open/closed and won/lost deals
• Average and minimum deal lifetime
• Conversion and value metrics 

All the formulas are quite simple and do not require advanced skills in Google Sheets. However, you can always browse our blog if you need any assistance with this 🙂

In the case of a dashboard outside of HubSpot, managing and customization depend totally on the tool you use. If you’re still in HubSpot, here is what is needed to manage your dashboard.

You can also explore this HubSpot CRM Dashboard, which is also offered as a free ready-to use template. This dashboard is self-updating and is built in Looker Studio with the help of Coupler.io.

How to manage a dashboard in HubSpot

After you create and customize your dashboard, you are ready to use it. You can view, filter, and analyze your data as per your requirements. At any time, you can manage your dashboard and perform certain configuration actions such as:

1. Change owner
2. Delete the dashboard
3. Adjust the accessibility of the dashboard
4. View activity

Change HubSpot dashboard owner

To change the owner of the dashboard, you can:

1. Open your dashboard that you want to change the owner for.
2. On the top right corner, click Actions > Dashboard details.

3. From the dropdown menu, select the new name of the new owner and click Save.

Delete a HubSpot dashboard

To delete a HubSpot dashboard, you need to do the following:

1. Open your dashboard that you want to delete.
2. On the top right corner, click Actions > Delete.

3. Select if you want to delete all the reports of the dashboard and click Delete dashboard.

Please be careful as this is not reversible! If you choose to delete the reports as well, these reports will be deleted from all the dashboards that they are included in.

Adjust the accessibility of a HubSpot dashboard

There are times when you might want to change who can see the dashboard. To adjust the accessibility rights of a dashboard, you can:

1. Open the dashboard that you want to change the access rights for.
2. On the top right corner, click Assigned > Edit access.

3. Select the new configuration.

4. Click Save.

View the activity of a HubSpot dashboard

When multiple people have edit access to a dashboard, something might change without notice. In such cases, it’s important to be able to review the changes and the person behind them so you can coordinate better. This is why the Activity log exists.

To see the activity in a dashboard, you can:

1. Open the dashboard that you want to see the activity for.
2. On the top right corner, click Actions > Activity log.

3. The activity log is there showing which actions were performed by who and at what exact time.

Please note that the activity log does not list all the users who can currently view the dashboard, only the changes that users have made.

HubSpot dashboard limits

Like every other software tool, HubSpot dashboards have a set of limitations that it’s important to be aware of.

In the Free version of the tool, you are able to create up to 3 dashboards, each with 10 reports per dashboard. In the paid plans, this limit increases to up to 10 dashboards for the Starter plan, up to 25 dashboards (with up to 30 reports per dashboard) for the Professional plan, and up to 50 dashboards (with up to 30 reports per dashboard) for the Enterprise plan.

Based on your needs, you can select the appropriate plan and start building your dashboards right away. If you are close to the limit, you can prioritize which dashboards serve you best and what reports should each dashboard hold.

Is the native HubSpot dashboard feature enough for your project?

This article went through all the different capabilities you have in HubSpot dashboards. We’ve seen how to create a dashboard or add a new one in your already built dashboard library. We’ve added a report, applied filters, and customized the dashboard to fit our needs.

Having said that, there are a lot of cases where even these functionalities are not enough. Maybe you want to have more reports in a dashboard, and you are limited by the plan limits. Maybe you want to combine multiple sources to have more context on your performance, and HubSpot data are not enough. 

In this case, a dashboard outside of HubSpot might be the ideal option. Our suggestion is to never lock into a specific tool or platform, and it’s important to combine everything to meet your needs.

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