PPC dashboards are great for account managers, but they’re even better if they’re dynamic! What do I mean by dynamic, though?

A dashboard is dynamic when you can easily change inputs and review the corresponding output.

For example, in the dashboard below, I can select any of my campaign labels and the data in the dashboard will adjust according to which label I’ve chosen.

In this post, I’ll walk you through the necessary steps to create this kind of dynamic dashboard!

What is Data Validation?

First, we need to review data validation in Excel. Data validation only allows data inputs within a specified range in the chosen cells. In the example below, I’ve used data validation to limit this cell to only the list of months in the dropdown menu.

Data validation doesn’t have to be a list. It can be a number of different data types, including:

• Whole Number
• Decimal
• List
• Date
• Time
• Text Length
• Custom

The benefits of limiting a cell to a specific set of values include:

• It prevents data entry errors
• It’s less manual and thus more efficient

In this PPC use case, we’re making our dashboard more efficient by enabling the dashboard to change with the campaign label inputs, versus creating one separate dashboard for every campaign label in your paid search account. We’ll use data validation to create a dropdown list of all labels in our PPC account. Finally, we’ll set up the dashboard data so that it’s dynamically pulled…