Marketing teams today are faced with more data and more tools than ever before. As a result of this, they often feel that their data is out of control and disconnected, making it hard to see the whole picture.
A marketing dashboard can provide your department with an at-a-glance understanding of your progress toward achieving predefined goals by pulling your disconnected data together from multiple MarTech applications. Dashboards can provide a snapshot of fast and reliable information - without which, hours may be spent manually collecting and combining data to retrieve the same insight.
Marketers can understand the main concepts involved in marketing dashboards by breaking them down into three core concepts:
1) Data Integration
The data integration process for marketing dashboards connects tools that previously have worked independently, allowing the data within these tools to come together in one visual dashboard. The process is otherwise known as application integration. It uses APIs (application program interfaces) to provide seamless information sharing, automate the data transferring processes, and improve the visibility of business activity.
2) Data Analytics
Data analysis is the scientific process of taking raw data, analysing it, and producing conclusions about the information. When using a marketing dashboard, the analysis process is automated and run within software programs using complex algorithms. The use of automated, machine-led data analytics vastly decreases the time it takes to gather insights and optimise business decisions.
3) Data Visualisation
Data visualisation is the practice of creating highly visual, graphical representations of collected or stored data. Visual information has been proven to improve the human brain’s ability to understand and interpret data faster. There are five main classifications of data visualisation to be aware of: time change (line, graph, bar, etc.), comparison (bubble chart, parallel coordinates, grouped bars, etc.), classification (ordered bars, ordered columns, etc.), distribution (histograms, boxes, density, etc.), and correlation (scatter plots, bubble diagrams, heat maps, etc.)
Why do you need a marketing dashboard?
Throughout the history of marketing, there has never been a time when marketers have had more direct communication with their audience than right now. Email, SMS, social media, apps, website chatbots and more - there are a lot of ways for marketers and customers to interact.
All of these new touchpoints are great - however, they have brought with them many new challenges, such as fragmenting and complicating the customer journey.
Source: Localogy
A marketing dashboard can help you keep track of your customers across all of the touchpoints and channels where they interact with your brand. The benefits of marketing dashboards include the ability to:
- Track all your KPIs in one place
- Remove the need for manual report generation
- Democratise data visibility and access across all team members
- Spot successes and/or problem areas in real-time
- Identify trends in historical data
What is included in a marketing dashboard?
Your marketing dashboard will be made up of KPIs (key performance indicators); these are metrics that you as a department and a company have decided are vital in understanding whether or not you are hitting your targets.
KPIs are measurable values and are often calculated on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis. These metrics act as progress indicators, however, you must ensure that the goals and targets you are setting are achievable and based on previous data.
Important KPIs to include in your marketing dashboard
Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)
Customer acquisition measures how much money it takes for your strategy to convert a customer.
If customer acquisition costs are too high, it can be a silent killer for your business. When measuring your CAC, you will need to consider your total revenue for a specific period (monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc.) and the total marketing spend for that period. In these terms, marketing spending must include all technology such as your CRM, email tool, dashboard tool, advertising spend and staff costs such as wages, freelancer rates, etc.
Revenue Generated
How much revenue has been generated during the period that can be attributed to your marketing efforts? Having eyes on this metric is essential to see how effectively your campaigns are performing. Having a monthly revenue goal to work toward and then tracking this metric on a real-time basis will ensure that you can identify quickly when issues within your campaigns are causing a barrier to revenue generation.
Revenue Growth
Revenue growth measures the increase or decrease in revenue over a period of time. It’s recommended that you track this monthly. This metric can be particularly useful when you want to identify whether a new strategy or tactic has been effective in increasing revenue and, thus, worth the extra resource in time or budget.
Hurree Dashboard Example
Customer Retention Rate
It’s a universal truth in marketing that not all customers will be with you forever, and, as such, the length of time that they stay with your business is referred to and measured as retention. Including this metric in a marketing dashboard is highly valuable as any sharp decline in retention can be a sign of serious problems.
There are many reasons your customer retention rates might be low, for example, if you sell a product that is hard to understand and have not invested enough into your onboarding process. Understanding what constitutes a healthy retention rate for your business and what is a sign of trouble will be a lot easier with a high-level marketing dashboard overview.
Website Traffic
The number of web users who ‘visit’ your website; each time a user visits your website, it is measured as a ‘session’.
It’s important to visualise your traffic in real-time and on a month-on-month basis as this is the number of opportunities your business has to convert into customers. If your real-time traffic rate is very low, you will be able to act to improve this rate before the long-term monthly traffic is impacted.
Traffic to MQL Rate
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is an acronym used to describe how many new leads have been generated from gated content. Tracking the amount of MQLs you convert during a time period can help you to understand how effective your content marketing strategy is. Additionally, monitoring this metric can help you to understand the quality of the website traffic that is being drawn to your website.
Summing Up
Having a high-level marketing performance dashboard will enable your marketing team to visualise their progress toward a particular set of goals.
With your newly built marketing dashboard, optimisations can be made quickly and accurately as you remove the need for manual reporting and by-hand analysis. Furthermore, marketing dashboards open this data up to the entire team; galvanising members around a particular metric or goal is far easier when they can see their progress toward it. Dashboard reports can be easily shared between team members both publicly and privately so everyone can remain on the same page at all times.
Get started with your free trial of Hurree today and discover how to truly harness the power of analytics and transform your company reporting using cross-platform dashboards. If you have any questions then feel free to reach out to contact@hurree.co, we'd be happy to answer them!
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