Choose ecommerce metrics for a dashboard in Tableau

Business Benefits

Consolidate your analytics and visualize your website performance.


Highlight the main metrics: total visitors, orders or transactions, revenue, and products purchased.

There are different techniques to visually highlight the numbers:

  • Include them at the top of the dashboard
  • Use a bigger and bold font
  • Generate a contrast between the background of the table and the number.

It is important to be consistent with the look and feel of the overall dashboard and your brand guidelines too.

Combine the total number of conversions with the total number of visitors to get the conversion rate and define the efficiency of your ecommerce efforts.

If 1 in 10 visitors purchases something on your website, your conversion rate is 10%.

Add average order value to understand your user’s purchase behavior.

Average order value is total revenue divided by the number of transactions.

Add goals related metrics to the highlighted section if you have set them.

The metrics are the total number of goals accomplished, value, and conversion rate. Setting goals is important to measure how often users complete specific actions, and you can set complementary goals to the ecommerce activity. For example, complete a form to obtain a discount coupon or download a brochure.

To set goals in Google Analytics:

  1. Click on Admin, select the view where you want to apply this setting, and click on + New Goal.
  2. You can set a URL (like a thank-you page), session duration, pages per session, and events.

Include a percentage of variation on the main metrics to show their evolution.

Click on the metric and select Quick table calculation to convert the number to year over year growth rate or year to date growth.

Create date parameters to customize the time series visualizations and set the values as Date, Month, Year.

Create a date calculated field depending on the date parameter created before.

Use a case statement and if the value is Date, then apply the date() formula to the original date field you will use on the time series chart axis. Also apply month(), and year() functions.

Create a category parameter to customize how to split the main KPIs on composition charts.

You can set traffic source dimensions as:

  • Channel
  • Source
  • Medium
  • Source & Medium
  • Ecommerce specific dimensions such as product and product category.
  • Geo dimensions as a country, region, or even by the user device.

Create a category calculated field using a case statement and add it as a dimension to be displayed on the chart.

This is dependent on the previous selected parameter. If the user selects Channel, the calculated field will show the dimension [channel]. This will show the result broken down by the value selected.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T11:15:28Z