How to Create the Optimal Marketing Analytics Dashboard

These days, all marketing efforts rely on data, and marketing analytics has become as crucial as marketing initiatives themselves. Marketers use marketing analytics dashboards to analyze various metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to demonstrate the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.

Every organization, brand, and the team has specific objectives that they strive to achieve. They can range from increasing social media presence to tracking website traffic and generating leads. Your priorities may change, but a real-time marketing analytics dashboard can help you track the success or failure of various marketing activities.

What is a Marketing Analytics Dashboard?

A dashboard for marketing is a reporting tool that uses data visualization to display marketing analytics, KPIs, and metrics. These dashboards are intended to give teams real-time and ongoing visibility into the performance metrics of various marketing activities.

Marketing is both a science and an art, and marketers must constantly strike a balance between the two approaches. On the other hand, marketing dashboards are used to track key metrics and KPIs. They must, however, be visually appealing as well as easy to read and understand. Let's face it: understanding analytics isn't everyone's cup of tea, but the sooner we all get a taste for it, the better.

Without a doubt, a marketing report template or marketing dashboard is no longer a must-have. All marketing teams should have this.

But not all marketing analytics dashboards are created equal. Here are some pointers for building a solid dashboard that your entire team will appreciate.

Tips To Create a Marketing Dashboard

Every month, new tools emerge, posing challenges in integrating that tool and its performance metrics with the rest of your marketing tools. Keeping this in mind, here are a few steps to creating a successful marketing dashboard:

1) Research Metrics to Include

Before you start building the dashboard, you must decide which metrics to include. The metrics you track will be determined by your industry and business goals.

Spend some time brainstorming everything you want to include off the top of your head. Make a list of all the metrics you intend to track.

Take some time to consider what are the most important items for you to include. It is not necessary to track a large number of different data points just because you can. Determine which KPIs you want to monitor, and each section can receive its report.

2) Research Audience

The most important step in creating an effective dashboard is defining your audience. Data dashboards and data visualization in general are intended to tell a story, so you must know who is listening. A well-designed dashboard tells a compelling story while linking to actionable KPIs that are beneficial to the viewer. Dashboards will be required for various audiences. A dashboard for an executive must summarize performance metrics so that they can make informed business decisions; a dashboard for a social media marketer must consolidate all metrics from sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn so that they can obtain detailed data on key social metrics. You can even create a social media infographic to assist social media marketers in developing and visualizing key metrics. To summarize, depending on your position within a marketing agency, you may be tracking entirely different KPIs.

3) Set Key Objectives

Determine long-term and short-term goals so that you can create different sets of data at different levels of granularity.

Again, using a senior executive as an example, they would require a high-level dashboard that provides an overall return on investment and budget. This allows them to see exactly where their money is being spent and how much value they are receiving.

However, to make tactical decisions, an analyst will require a detailed view of the figures.

As a result, it is critical that people understand the data and can make decisions about various aspects of the marketing strategy. The goal is to help your audience better understand the data so that they can decide how to proceed.

While a visually appealing marketing dashboard is important, it is even more important that your audience can draw accurate conclusions and understand how to apply this knowledge in future campaigns.

4) Determine Marketing KPIs

It is critical to determine which metrics are critical for your specific marketing strategy (and it's even more important as an agency to understand what strategy to use). These KPIs may include marketing performance metrics specific to each program or campaign, such as likes, clicks, dwell time, traffic, click-through rate, and so on. A KPI can also include marketing impact metrics that link performance to business goals such as conversions, brand value increase, or sales increase. Once identified, these KPIs can be analyzed across multiple dimensions such as data and data sources to provide insights to your team and marketing heads. Determining your marketing KPI is critical because it allows you to track and communicate your value as well as the value of your team's efforts in areas that matter. You may receive a large number of clicks but click a key performance indicator. It all depends on your specific role within the company and your specific goal in a marketing campaign. Don't use the same KPIs for every marketing campaign. Customize your analytics dashboard to the unique KPIs of each marketing campaign (campaigns can often have the same KPIs but not always).

5) Visualize Your Data

Marketing analytics tools can provide you with a plethora of data, and you must convey the right message with your marketing analytics dashboard (because your visuals can easily convey a message you didn't intend to convey). Make it simple for everyone on your marketing team to generate and consume data, which promotes data discovery and analysis. The true value of visualizing all of your marketing data is that you've given your marketing team the tools they need to understand all of this data while also allowing you to discover additional insights that you might not have discovered if the data was kept in its original CSV format.

6) Choose Data Sources

Nowadays, marketing platforms enable you to track a large amount of data. Typically, you can include everything from your email marketing channel to your website and social media platforms.

Bringing all of these disparate data sources together in one dashboard will provide you with a unified view of all of your marketing channels. Whenever possible, try to use native integrations supported by your marketing dashboard.

Native integrations will make connecting easier and require less manual maintenance on your part. However, because this is not always possible, you can connect your data using an API.

7) Data Integration

A marketing team today employs hundreds of tools that contain a plethora of metrics. A key goal of any analytics dashboard is to consolidate and integrate data into a consistent view using a visualization tool. A consolidated marketing dashboard should integrate these various data sources into a single source that is also linked to outcomes and ROI. Utilize a tool that can integrate all of your data. If you don't have reporting tools capable of weaving together the right story, you're missing chapters in your book, and you're missing chapters in your book if you leave out when you've not incorporated all of your records.

Final Thoughts

It will take some time to set up your B2B marketing analytics dashboard, and you may not get it exactly right the first time. However, the time and effort required are well worth it.

An analytics dashboard will help you track and analyze multiple data sets in one simple platform. Having access to the right data will also help your entire company run more efficiently and make faster, more effective decisions.