What is a Marketing Dashboard? (With Examples)

Marketing dashboards use data visualisation to help marketers track, monitor and share performance against their marketing KPIs. Let’s take a closer look at what marketing dashboards are, the important metrics to include and more…

What is a marketing dashboard?

A marketing dashboard provides a visual overview of key marketing metrics, which indicate the current performance of marketing efforts. To put it simply, a marketing dashboard asks the question, “what does our marketing performance currently look like?”.

There are a number of tools out there that can be used to create automated, interactive dashboards. Here at Semetrical, we favour Looker Studio (previously Data Studio).

Important metrics to track on your marketing dashboards

Generally, marketing dashboards showcase various metrics that allow key stakeholders to easily interpret their data and extract valuable insights regarding marketing performance. At a basic level, these include:

These metrics can be combined with a number of different dimensions to provide different perspectives on the data. Key dimensions include:

• Channel Groupings
• Custom Page Groupings (Blog, Product Page etc.)
• Landing Pages
• Devices

Digital marketing reports

Different areas of digital marketing have varying reporting requirements. Whilst these should be tailored for each client, there are a selection of core reports we like to include for all. Here are a few examples of key areas of focus for your dashboards:

Top-level site performance

A general overview of key metrics is useful for getting a top level understanding of performance. This may be sufficient for many stakeholders, however, if a specific focus is required, the following examples may be more appropriate.

SEO performance

Understanding SEO performance is vital within digital marketing. Knowing how your website content is performing will help inform what changes need to be made in order to optimise the set up.

Paid media performance

For our paid media performance dashboards, we provide combined metrics across different platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn etc. to get an overall picture of paid media efforts. For greater granularity, and a more precise understanding how each platform is contributing to performance, we have implemented functionality that allows us to filter to each.

Blog performance

Hosting a blog on your website can be an effective content marketing strategy. Therefore, it is key to understand how it performs in order to determine how successful the strategy is. The example blog performance dashboard below allows us to understand key engagement metrics for our blogs.

How to create a marketing dashboard

With all of these metrics and dimensions at your disposal, the next step is to determine which ones are key for your specific use case.

Prior to creating a marketing dashboard, it is vital to understand what questions you are trying to answer. Key considerations include:

Who is the target audience?

For many stakeholders, simplicity is key. Rather than providing a deep dive into the analysis conducted on the data, it may be more appropriate to showcase a summary of key findings.

However, in some instances, stakeholders may require additional granularity. In this case, a deeper dive into the data may be appropriate.

In cases such as these, it may prove useful to provide descriptions of dashboard functionalities. On top of this, with the transition to GA4, and the introduction of metrics which previously did not exist in Universal Analytics, descriptions of these new metrics may be useful.

Date range considerations

A key element of answering the question “how are our marketing efforts currently performing?” is having a point of comparison. The goal of marketing efforts tend to be centred around increasing performance over time. Therefore, displaying real time metrics in comparison to last month’s performance, or perhaps last year, allows you to visualise the improvements that have occurred as a result of recent marketing efforts. This can also indicate interventions, which have not been a success, allowing for better planning of future strategies.

Creating a dashboard in Looker Studio

Whilst this blog focuses on what a marketing dashboard is and things to consider when creating one, it does not provide much detail on the design and construction of the dashboard itself. Thankfully, our Digital Analytics Manager Alex Pereira has previously written his top tips for dashboards and revealed 3 advanced data studio tricks to help you get creative with your data.

Interested in building bespoke marketing dashboards to track your performance? Check out our data visualisation services to see how we can help.