You need a marketing dashboard. Developing a marketing strategy without data is like trying to fly a plane without navigational equipment – you might be able to go in vaguely the right direction but reaching your destination will be down to luck instead of planning.
With so much competition for your audience’s attention, you need to have a solid idea of what works online and what doesn’t. And that means keeping a careful watch on your marketing metrics, so you can measure the success of your campaigns.
This is where a marketing dashboard comes in. It is an easy and visual way to bring your key metrics together in one place, so you can quickly assess campaign performance and improve your return on investment (ROI).
Our guide to marketing dashboards will give you all you need to choose the right key performance indicators (KPIs), monitor your digital marketing, and save time reporting on marketing performance.
What Is a Marketing Dashboard?
A marketing dashboard pulls together all your vital marketing KPIs and uses graphs, charts, and tables to display them.
Many digital marketing platforms have their own analytics that you can use to monitor campaigns. But manually checking each one is time-consuming and means you don’t get a full 360 view of your efforts.
Marketing dashboards solve this issue by bringing data from different platforms together in one place. Although you can do this manually, the best marketing dashboards are those that integrate with social media, Google Ads, email providers, and your website, so they update automatically. This means you’ll always be working from the most up-to-date information.
By providing visualizations of your data, a marketing dashboard makes it quick and easy to spot key trends, analyze campaign performance, and catch potential issues.
Why Use Marketing Dashboards?
Modern marketing is fast-paced, especially for those of us who concentrate on digital. Manually compiling metrics from a bunch of different platforms takes time that most marketers don’t have to spare. Using a marketing dashboard can save you hours each month.
But dashboards don’t just save you time. Other advantages of using a marketing dashboard include:
Makes Analysis Easy
Raw data is rarely useful. But marketing dashboards take these figures and turn them into charts, graphs, or tables that help you visualize what is happening with your digital campaigns.
Keeps You Up to Date
Most dashboard tools refresh automatically, meaning you’ll be seeing your analytics in real-time (or close to it). That is simply not possible to achieve if you are compiling reports manually.
Brings All Your Data Together
It is important to put your KPIs in context when you are evaluating your marketing performance. That means you need to be able to combine analytics from social media, your website, your PPC advertising, and your SEO in one place. Marketing dashboards bring together all these metrics to give you the full picture of your digital marketing.
Makes Reporting Easy
If your marketing team needs to report back to other teams, senior management, or clients, marketing dashboards can make this process smooth and easy. Many let you schedule regular reports by email. Others you can download to share with colleagues or clients.
Types of Marketing Dashboards
Although the exact marketing KPIs you want to track may vary from company to company, there are some common threads. Here are some examples of marketing dashboards that you may want to set up for your brand and what KPIs to include:
1. Digital Marketing Dashboard
A digital marketing dashboard brings together essential analytics to give you an overview of your digital campaigns. This is a popular type of dashboard that will be useful to most companies.
KPIs to include on a digital marketing dashboard are:
- Social media analytics: follower growth rate, reach, engagement rate, click-through-rate
- Email stats: list growth rate, open rate, click-through-rate, unsubscribe rate
- PPC metrics: ad spend, reach, click-through-rate, top-performing ads, lowest-performing ads
- Website analytics: users and sessions, top referring platforms, bounce rate, goal conversion rate, most popular pages
- SEO monitoring: organic search traffic, most popular search terms by click-through-rate, most visited landing pages, most visited blog posts, conversions from organic searches
2. eCommerce Marketing Dashboard
If you have an eCommerce site, you’ll want a dashboard that shows which marketing channels bring you the most visitors and the most sales. You’ll also want to know how well your sale funnels are working and where you are losing people.
On an eCommerce marketing dashboard, some essential KPIs include:
- Total sales
- Sessions and users, including the proportion of new and returning users
- Top referring platforms and campaigns
- Most visited landing pages
- Bounce rate
- Average session time
- Goal conversion rate, including a breakdown by referring platform
- Most popular products
- Abandoned cart rate
- Exit rate by page
3. Web Analytics Dashboard
Your website is one of your most important digital marketing tools, so you need to know that it is performing as it should to attract relevant visitors and convert them into loyal customers. A web analytics dashboard helps you to track the success of your landing pages and content marketing.
Top KPIs to help you monitor your website performance are:
- Total users and sessions
- Breakdown of new versus returning users
- Traffic source by campaign and platform
- Bounce rate
- Session duration
- Goal conversion rate
- Most popular pages
- Exit rate by page
4. CMO Marketing Dashboard
Whether you are the CMO yourself or are part of a marketing team and need to report back to your CMO, a marketing dashboard that gives you a quick overview of your high-level KPIs is essential. This dashboard should include both budgetary and performance metrics.
KPIs you might include on the CMO marketing dashboard are:
- Total ad spend
- Total sales revenue
- Goal conversion rate
- Cost-per-conversion
- Total users and sessions
- New users
- Customer retention rate
- Revenue by source
5. AdWords Campaign Dashboard
Google Ads remains the most popular PPC channel. Tracking your AdWords campaign performance is essential to ensure you target the right audience and keywords.
Examples of KPIs to use on your AdWords campaign dashboard are:
- Ad spend to date
- Impressions
- Reach
- Click-through-rate
- Cost-per-click
- Cost-per-conversion
- Revenue from AdWords campaigns
Each of these should be broken down by keyword, so you can identify which keywords bring you the best traffic and which ones aren’t worth the investment.
6. Email Marketing Dashboard
Email is a vital part of any digital marketing strategy. If you get it right, the ROI can be fantastic. Keeping a careful eye on your email marketing KPIs is essential to getting the best from your mailing lists.
Track your performance by including the following KPIs on your email marketing dashboard:
- List growth rate
- Unsubscribe rate
- Open rate
- Click-through-rate
- Goal conversions from email referrals
- Revenue generated from email referrals
7. Social Media Dashboard
Most brands are active on multiple social media platforms, so the ability to compare analytics from each different profile on one marketing dashboard is a real bonus. You can track which channels drive the most traffic and tweak your content to match your audience’s preferences.
Useful KPIs to include on your social media dashboard are:
- Total followers
- Audience growth rate
- Impressions, including paid versus organic for Facebook
- Reach (Instagram and Facebook), unique impressions (LinkedIn), or views (TikTok and YouTube). Twitter doesn’t provide a reach metric, sadly, although it does give you impressions
- Engagement rate
- Click-through-rate
- Most popular posts
8. Web and Social Analytics Dashboard
Building your social media presence is a goal on its own, helping you increase your brand awareness and engage potential customers. But you’ll also want to see that the time and money you put into social marketing is rewarded with sales. So, a dashboard that combines your website and social media analytics is a handy tool for any marketer.
KPIs to include on your combined web and social analytics dashboard are:
- Users and sessions from social media click-throughs
- New users referred from social media
- Goal conversions from social media traffic
- Social posts with the highest click-through-rate
- Bounce rate for social media traffic
These should each be broken down by social media platform and paid versus organic traffic, so you can monitor your Facebook Ad campaigns and other paid social advertising.
How Is a Marketing Dashboard Useful to Marketers?
We’ve hopefully convinced you that a marketing dashboard is an invaluable tool for busy marketers.
It saves you time by replacing the tedious compiling of manual reports. And it will boost your ROI too. A great dashboard helps you optimize your digital marketing campaigns and spot areas where you are underperforming.
Having all your main KPIs at your fingertips means you can make decisions based on solid, up-to-date metrics. You’ll gain vital insights into how your target audience responds to your content, helping you shape your marketing campaigns and overall strategy. And you’ll easily be able to share reports with other teams, clients, or senior managers.
If you want to take your digital marketing to the next level, you need at least one marketing dashboard to inform your approach.
How DashboardFox Can Help in Your Marketing Dashboard
Harnessing the power of data to drive your marketing strategies is paramount in the digital age. Where better to turn than to the experts in dashboards? Their name says it all. DashboardFox is an ultimate tool for creating comprehensive dashboards that allow marketing teams to harness their data like never before.
DashboardFox makes the process of creating insightful, real-time, and dynamic marketing dashboards a breeze. Your marketing KPIs are displayed clearly and intuitively, giving you a bird's eye view of your strategy's performance. Whether you are tracking your ROI, assessing customer engagement, or evaluating the success of a digital campaign, DashboardFox gives you the ability to do it all in one place.
The power to transform raw data into valuable insights lies at the heart of effective marketing, and DashboardFox provides exactly that.
So, why not make the smart move today? Join the pack of businesses that are already optimizing their marketing strategies with the help of DashboardFox.
If you're ready to unlock the power of your marketing data, we invite you to book a meeting with our team or participate in our free live demo sessions. Experience for yourself how DashboardFox can transform your marketing efforts and help you reach your targets with precision and confidence.
Learn more about financial metrics and metrics of all types in our KPI Directory and if you’re not looking for a self-hosted dashboard software like DashboardFox, check out our cloud dashboard solution, InsightWorthy.