All marketing efforts depend on data these days and marketing analytics has become as important as marketing initiatives themselves. Marketers maintain various marketing analytics dashboards to analyze numerous metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to demonstrate the efficacy of their marketing campaigns.
Every organization, brand, and team has defined goals they are working to achieve. They can be anything from increasing presence on social media to tracking website traffic and generating leads. Your focus might vary, but a real-time marketing analytics dashboard comes in handy when you want to track the success or failure of various marketing activities.
What is a Marketing Analytics Dashboard?
A marketing dashboard Well, it is a reporting tool that displays marketing analytics, KPIs, and metrics using data visualizations.These dashboards are designed to provide teams with real-time and continuous visibility into the performance metrics of different marketing activities.
Marketing is both a science and an art, and marketers need to constantly balance the two approaches. On the one hand, marketing dashboards are used to track key metrics and KPIs. On the other hand, they also need to be visually appealing and both easy to read and understand. Let’s face it, making sense of analytics isn’t every marketer’s cup of tea, but the sooner we all develop a taste for it the better it is.
There is no doubt that a marketing report template or marketing dashboard is no longer a good-to-have. a must-have for all marketing teams.
However, not all marketing analytics dashboards are built the same. Here are some tips for building a rock-solid dashboard that your entire team will find useful.
Tips for Creating a Solid Marketing Analytics Dashboard
While every marketing team’s needs are different when it comes to a marketing analytics dashboard, the basics remain the same.
Every marketing dashboard should fulfill the following purposes:
- Show important KPIs
- Present a consolidated view of the data integrated from various sources
- Provide a way to measure the overall results and investments of your marketing programs
- Provide decision making ability based on these metrics
When building your dashboard keep the following tips in mind:
Identify Your Audience
All marketing dashboards are designed to tell a story. So it is important to identify who is going to hear that story and what they are looking for.
For example, performance marketers will need performance metrics to make informed decisions about their paid marketing campaigns. A social media professional will need to look at the company’s social media account metrics.
Set Objectives and KPIs for Your Dashboards
As we mentioned earlier, different types of marketing analytics dashboards tell different stories so it is important to know the marketing objectives of your stakeholders. You should know your stakeholders’ long and short-term goals.
For example, a senior marketing professional might soley look at high-level metrics related to marketing budget ROI. But an analyst would want to know the granular details of a campaign’s performance.
Similarly, it is also important to know what KPIs matter to your stakeholders. Different people might need different metrics like website traffic, clicks, bounce rates, engagement rates, etc. A successful marketing dashboard provides the right information to the right person.
Identify Your Data Sources
Marketers gather data from various sources including websites, emails, social media, blogs etc. Before creating a marketing dashboard, you must understand which sources should be prioritized.
The job of a dashboard is to provide a unified view of data from different sources. With that in mind, your next step is to find the best way to visualize the data. It can get overwhelming and look tempting to include everything that is available to you.
Your job is to find the metrics and the data sources that are most important to your stakeholders.
Visualize the Data to Convey a Message
The final step is to visualize the data and ensure that it conveys the right message. Remember the first point? Your marketing dashboard has to tell a story! So conveying the right message is as important as visualizing the consolidated data.
You should ensure that the data is both easy to read and understand by your marketing team.
Gain Foundational Data Skills Applicable to Marketing Today!
If you think a marketing analyst’s job ends at data visualization, then let us correct you — it’s just the beginning. As a marketing analyst, you enable the marketing team to learn from available data while you focus on finding additional insights and tools.
If this interests you, enroll now in our Marketing Analytics Nanodegree program and learn to collect and analyze data, model marketing scenarios, and communicate your findings with Excel, Tableau, Google Analytics, and Data Studio.
