Many SMEs in French-speaking Switzerland invest several thousand francs in marketing every month without knowing exactly what that money brings back. A website, a few Google Ads campaigns, some social media posts… and at the end of the quarter, one question with no clear answer: is it working? The solution is not a CHF 500-per-month software licence or a 40-page report. It is a minimal dashboard: 8 indicators, one page, 15 minutes of reading per week. Here is how to build it in 2026, step by step.
Why a Minimal Dashboard, Not a Monster
The classic reporting trap is accumulation. Teams pile up every available metric — impressions, reach, followers, bounce rate, likes — until they end up with a document nobody reads. Yet a metric only has value if it triggers a decision. If a number goes up or down and you change nothing about the way you work, that number does not belong on your dashboard.
For an SME with 5 to 50 employees and a marketing budget between CHF 1,000 and CHF 10,000 per month, eight indicators are more than enough. They cover the entire chain: attracting visitors, turning them into leads, then into customers, and making sure every franc invested returns more than it costs.
The 8 Essential KPIs
1. Qualified Website Traffic
Not total traffic: qualified traffic. In GA4, that means filtering out your own team, bots and visits shorter than 10 seconds, and tracking only engaged sessions. A Geneva-based fiduciary that grows from 800 to 1,200 engaged sessions per month knows its visibility is genuinely improving, not just its raw numbers.
2. Visitor-to-Lead Conversion Rate
How many visitors fill in your form, book a call or message you on WhatsApp? For a B2B services website in French-speaking Switzerland, a healthy range sits between 2% and 5%. Below 1%, the problem is not your advertising budget: it is your website.
3. Cost per Lead (CPL)
Monthly marketing spend divided by the number of leads generated. If you spend CHF 3,000 and receive 20 enquiries, your CPL is CHF 150. On its own, this number says little: it is the month-over-month trend and the comparison across channels (Google Ads vs LinkedIn vs SEO) that reveal where to invest.
4. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
CPL measures prospects; CAC measures signed customers. If your 20 leads at CHF 150 each turn into 4 customers, your CAC is CHF 750. This is the indicator your banker would understand: how much does a new customer cost?
5. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
How much does a customer bring in, on average, over the entire relationship? A cleaning SME whose average contract is worth CHF 800 per month over 3 years has an LTV of CHF 28,800. The golden rule: your LTV should be worth at least 3 times your CAC. With a CAC of CHF 750 and an LTV of CHF 28,800, that SME can afford to invest far more aggressively in acquisition.
6. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
Revenue attributed to campaigns divided by campaign budget. A ROAS of 4 means every franc invested in advertising generates CHF 4 in revenue. Below 2, you should fix the targeting, the ads or the landing page before increasing the budget.
7. Sales Conversion Rate (Lead to Customer)
This indicator connects marketing and sales. If your team converts 20% of leads into customers, every marketing improvement flows straight through. If it drops to 5%, either the leads are poorly qualified (a marketing problem) or the sales follow-up is too slow (a process problem). A lead called back within the hour is far more likely to sign than one called back three days later.
8. Revenue Share by Channel
What percentage of your revenue comes from organic search, paid advertising, referrals, social media? This indicator protects you from dependency: if 80% of your new customers come from Google Ads, a bidding war in your industry can put your entire acquisition at risk. The goal: no single channel above 50% in the medium term.
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Where the Data Lives: Sources to Connect
The good news: all of this data already exists in tools that are free or that you already pay for.
- Google Analytics 4: qualified traffic, conversion rate, visitor sources. Set up your key events (form submissions, WhatsApp clicks, phone clicks) — this is the foundation for everything else.
- Google Ads and Meta Ads: spend, clicks, conversions and cost per lead for each campaign, straight from their interfaces.
- Google Search Console: organic rankings and clicks, to measure your SEO channel.
- Your CRM (free HubSpot, Pipedrive, or even a well-maintained Google Sheets file): lead status, conversion rate, origin of signed customers. This is the source for CAC and revenue by channel.
- Your invoicing tool (Bexio, Abacus, or your accounting software): actual revenue per customer, so you can calculate LTV without guesswork.
The weak link, in 9 out of 10 SMEs, is the connection between the lead and the signed customer. The simplest fix: in your CRM or spreadsheet, add a "Source" column and fill it in systematically for every new enquiry. Without that discipline, a reliable CAC is impossible to calculate.
Building the Dashboard in Looker Studio in One Hour
Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) is free, connects natively to GA4, Google Ads and Google Sheets, and produces reports you can share with a simple link. Here is the method:
- Create a blank report on lookerstudio.google.com and name it "Marketing Dashboard — [your company]".
- Connect three sources: GA4, Google Ads, and a Google Sheets file containing your CRM data (leads, customers, source channel, deal value). The native connectors take two clicks to set up.
- First row: four scorecards — engaged sessions, leads this month, CPL, CAC. Each card shows the current month with a comparison to the previous one (the green or red arrow does 80% of the reading work for you).
- Second row: two charts — lead evolution over 12 months (line chart) and revenue split by channel (bar chart). That is all.
- Third row: one table per channel — spend, leads, CPL, customers, CAC for each channel. Five columns, no more.
- Enable the automatic email delivery every Monday morning to yourself and anyone who needs it.
Resist the temptation to add a second page. A dashboard that fits on one screen is a dashboard that actually gets read. Expect one hour of setup the first time, then around 30 minutes per month to update the Google Sheets file if your CRM does not sync automatically.
The Review Rhythm: 15 Minutes a Week, 1 Hour a Month
A dashboard without a reading ritual is a dead dashboard. The rhythm that works for an SME:
- Every Monday, 15 minutes: a quick read of the four scorecards. One single question: is there an anomaly? A CPL that doubles in a week often signals a technical issue (broken form, misconfigured campaign) that needs fixing immediately, not at the end of the month.
- Every first Tuesday of the month, 1 hour: a full review with a mandatory decision. Every meeting must end with at least one concrete action: reallocate CHF 500 from the most expensive channel to the most profitable one, test a new landing page, follow up on dormant leads.
- Every quarter: recalculate CAC and LTV, and challenge your targets. This is the moment to decide whether to increase the overall budget or change the mix.
The Three Mistakes That Kill a Dashboard
First mistake: tracking vanity metrics. Instagram followers and impressions flatter the ego but do not pay salaries. If an indicator cannot be tied to a franc of revenue, it does not belong on the main page.
Second mistake: changing indicators every month. A dashboard's value comes from comparison over time. Keep the same 8 KPIs for at least a year before considering an adjustment.
Third mistake: waiting for perfect data. Attribution will never be 100% accurate — a customer may discover you on LinkedIn, come back via Google and sign after a referral. An approximate CAC tracked every month is worth infinitely more than a sophisticated attribution model that never gets built.
Where to Start This Week
Check that GA4 is properly recording your conversions, create the "Source" column in your lead tracking, and build the first Looker Studio page with the four scorecards. With one hour of work, you will have more visibility over your marketing than most SMEs in your industry. And if you would rather delegate the dashboard build and the monthly steering, that is exactly what we do at Digital Swiss Agency: we set up the tool, the data connections and the review ritual, so that all you keep are the decisions.