Whether you have an eCommerce, a physical store, or just starting your business, you need a single dashboard that helps you have a better insight into your activities. That's precisely what a marketing dashboard does.

An easily customizable page on a platform that lets you see campaign spend and other metrics is crucial for steady business growth.

This article will approach everything you need to know related to marketing dashboards and marketing automation using different marketing channels. Don't miss out.

The marketing dashboard is an online or offline document that allows you to see all – or most – of your marketing metrics to know exactly the results of the strategies you're using in your business.

They give you key information for further analysis and future changes you may have to make. It's also essential for stakeholders when they ask for marketing insights.

Whenever you create marketing dashboards, you get reports from multiple sources. This includes:

• Google Analytics.
• CRM software.
• Accounting programs.
• Social media and other marketing channels.
• Google ads.

You can create a different marketing approach with this information if you are a small business owner. But, if you have a big company with marketing teams, your staff will use the gathered data to evaluate, understand and bring you solutions to your marketing problems.

Your digital marketing efforts are expressed in this dashboard. You – or the person in charge – must update it frequently based on the key marketing metrics.

The main reason you would need a marketing dashboard is to control your business's overall marketing performance.

And, of course, you can get a lot more than just marketing reports from these dashboards. For example, based on what KPIs you're tracking, you could get the following:

• Web analytics dashboard report.
• Google Analytics dashboard report.
• Email marketing dashboard report.
• Social media dashboard report.

All of the above – and more – are involved when you build marketing dashboards.

After you get their reports, you can work on your business goals with valuable and customized data to measure ROI and campaign performance. All the data is stored on the cloud – if you're using a cloud-based service – or on your local drive.

But if it still isn't clear, here you can see the benefits of controlling your marketing campaigns with a marketing dashboard.

Prioritization

A successful marketing dashboard will show your business priorities and which department is working on them – for example, the marketing team. 

Based on the information you get, you can prioritize the most important and practical projects for your company.

Let's say that the new followers dropped 11% over the last 30 days in your Instagram account. With the dashboard's help, you can see how many posts you made in the past 30 days, impressions, reach and more. This way you can modify what’s not working and optimize your posts for better performance.

Customization

The idea of a marketing dashboard is that you can modify it based on what you want to track.

You can add key metrics (KPIs) for Social Media, organic traffic, lead generation, web analytics, and other marketing activities that align with your marketing objectives.

This way, you can see exactly what you need to achieve performance improvement—for example, a campaign's click-through rate. 

User-friendly

Each of your marketing tools must be user-friendly. But when it comes to the marketing dashboard, each person involved in decision-making processes must understand them.

So, make sure you use common language and data points.

Marketing dashboards are also available for mobile, which will make it easier for marketing executives to track performance and marketing KPIs when they are out of the office.

Store Important Data

Thanks to the customization feature, you can store your marketing initiatives in interactive dashboards.

That said, you can save important information like:

• Marketing budget.
• Email campaigns
• Copies.
• Conversion rates comparison.
• Daily new customers rate.

Marketers can use this dashboard as their blackboard to take notes and modify their current strategy.

Before you create a marketing dashboard with your own data, you need to filter what you want to track. Here you can add key metrics that include:

• PPC performance.
• Conversion rates.
• Traffic sources.
• SEO performance.
• Website traffic.
• Bounce rate.
• Landing pages conversion.
• Website's performance.
• Organic search.
• Google and Bing ads.
• The number of qualified leads.
• Open rate.
• Video watch time.
• Engagement.
• Real-time visitors.
• Visualizations.
• Impressions.

And so much more.

While performing a marketing dashboard, a marketer can combine the Google Search Console, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and other SEO tools to strengthen the online marketing report.

When you create marketing dashboards, you must consider these key metrics:

Traffic Sources To Provide Value

This metric – and other related metrics – will help you determine where the traffic is coming from. You will also identify the type of reader or buyer your website receives.

To gather reliable marketing data, you can obtain information from the following:

• Organic search.
• Different marketing channels.
• Digital advertising – paid search in all social media.
• Referral traffic.
• Website visitors.

You can see working keywords, those that need improvement, and others that you should avoid based on your search intent. This way, you can work on increasing customer acquisition and website performance – if that is one of your objectives.

Social Media Networks Traffic

When working on a social media network, your main goal is getting traffic and followers. 

Why would you want that?

To turn those potential customers into loyal, interactive people who see your brand as an opportunity to get their products/services.

And the only way to do that is to create engaging and recognizable CTAs to send prospects into a sales funnel.

Pay attention to the ads, sales copy, and graphics you use in your marketing strategy. Digital marketers know these factors are key to improving advertising and website performance.

CTA

Having the CTA metric in your campaign dashboard is one of the best ways to know which content is working and which isn't.

The CTR – AKA Click Through Rate – tells you the percentage of people that take action after reading or seeing your content.

You could set a Call To Action (CTA) to buy a product, sign-up for a newsletter, and complete an online form. It can potentially be anything you want your audience to do after engaging with your content.

When you have this relevant data, you must understand what's happening. Is the format working? Maybe placements are wrong?

Discover what you can improve and apply it.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is a dangerous metric that you must control. It covers the percentage of people that leave your website after visiting one page. A high bounce rate could happen due to poor website performance, thin content, plagiarism, etc.

As a business owner, your interest should be improving your site's performance using a conversion funnel that transforms into a sale or direct action. 

To do that, you must improve social media reach, CTA messages, and the overall website content that your audience is exposed to.

Give your customers a reason to stay. This way, you'll improve the average time of website-visit.

Tip: Check Goal Progress

This is not a metric you should add to your marketing dashboard but a recommendation from people that have already worked with one.

Ensure you check your daily and monthly goals. You could use marketing analytics for this purpose or a reporting tool to get actionable insights.

Either way, when you control how you are progressing in your marketing strategy, you can measure performance from multiple channels and use it to create more compelling content for your sales target.

We have prepared a high-level overview to help you understand how managers use a marketing dashboard for a business.

Let's say your company prepared a marketing campaign to increase the website's conversions.

As such, you will need to use different metrics like:

1. CTR.

2. CTAs

3. Conversions rate

4. Number of qualified leads.

5. Use of different marketing channels

6. Revenue

With these top metrics to monitor, you must analyze them on the board. Once you add them to your marketing dashboard, you can prepare reports.

Gather each social channel performance, conversions, useful platforms, and overall impact of your CTAs to get a complete picture of your business.

You then can use Excel spreadsheets to take all the information and give them to the teams in charge of the strategy. You can add charts or create a single-page sheet to provide them with easy-customizable documents.

To create a digital marketing dashboard, you need specific productivity software.

Microsoft Excel

Among productivity tools, Excel is one of the best to make your marketing efforts worthwhile. You can set up a useful spreadsheet for both offline and online purposes.

Here you can use:

• Multiple data sources.
• Pie charts.
• Line charts.
• Graphs.

And much more.

You can visualize data and focus on the aspects you need to measure the campaign's impact. Each spreadsheet is designed to organize data and gather data from multiple sources.

Excel is essential for any business trying to run a successful marketing dashboard. Not only because of all the automation formulas but because you can use other productivity tools from the MS suite and optimize your reports.

How To Get Microsoft Excel 2021 For Cheap

If you're not a large business or someone with a big budget, getting a $250 license could be more complicated than expected.

That's why you can use RoyalCDKeys. You can get a Microsoft Office 2021 CD Key for less than $13.

This way, you can create effective marketing dashboards in an online and offline environment. You can also save files on the cloud using OneDrive storage, so you have access and read, edit or create documents.

Other Productivity Software For Marketing Dashboards

Among other tools you can use to create a marketing dashboard, there are:

• Cyfe.
• GoodData.
• Sisense.
• Tableau.
• Grow.com.
• Marketo.

You can use dashboard templates if you don't want to create a marketing dashboard. The best ones you can use are:

Template #1 - SEO

Download link: SEO Template

Template #2 - PPC

Download Link: PPC Template

Template #3 - Social Media

Download Link: Social Media Template

Template #4 - Content Marketing

Download Link: Content Marketing Template

Template #5 - Marketing Automation

Download Link: Marketing Automation Template

Template #6 - Email Marketing

Download Link: Email Marketing Template

Having a marketing dashboard ensures that your marketing efforts are considered. This element will help you deliver your key performance indicators on time and correctly when developing marketing campaigns.

Take action with this marketing dashboard tool and apply all necessary changes when you deliver top-notch strategies that reach your target audience.

Of course, creating a good dashboard that everyone understands is the tricky part. Fortunately, you now have all the information needed to boost your business and marketing strategy.