7 Best Marketing Dashboard Software to Facilitate Data Analysis

If there’s one thing all marketers have in common, it’s a shared dread of reporting time. Whether you’re a marketing agency managing dozens of clients or a VP of Marketing, stitching together reports from multiple regional branches, building a dashboard and reporting on it can be stressful.

Marketing dashboard software makes things easier by automating the whole process and helping create visually pleasing reports.

This article offers a dashboard software comparison of the top seven marketing dashboard tools, helping you choose the best one for your needs.

• Improvado: An enterprise-grade solution, helping automate full-cycle analytics and reporting processes. Start improving your analytics today with full-fledged support from an Improvado expert.
• Klipfolio: A low-code dashboard tool for small and medium businesses.
• Tableau: A powerful business intelligence and analytics platform with broad use cases.
• Whatagraph: A simple marketing reporting platform tailored to the needs of small businesses. 
• Cyfe: A self-service dashboard app with over 100 data source connectors and over 250 pre-built metrics.
• Geckoboard: A KPI dashboarding platform that aggregates data from 80 data sources and comes with 90+ dashboard examples.
• GoodData: An embedded BI and analytics platform for companies with solid technical expertise.

What Is Marketing Dashboard Software?

Take a moment and think about how your marketing department currently executes its reports. Are you still using spreadsheets? Surprisingly, many organizations are. Spreadsheets are the default solution for a reason: they’ll get the job done.  However, the lack of visualization, tedious and error-prone process, and enormous resources expenditures make it a time consuming and unreliable reporting method.

That’s where a marketing dashboard comes in. A marketing dashboard automates data aggregation and displays the most important metrics you want to show your internal teams or your clients. You can send your clients and other stakeholders the dashboard instead of a confusing spreadsheet. The dashboard allows everyone to get on the same page, thoroughly understand your efforts, and internalize the data. 

Marketing dashboard software is the tool you’ll use to create your dashboard. This software will pull in data and metrics from multiple data sources and display these metrics in real time on a connected, unified dashboard. 

Why Do You Need Marketing Dashboard Software?

One of the main advantages of this approach is that dashboard software concentrates on visual aids. Instead of numbers on a spreadsheet, you’ll find charts, tables, timelines, graphs, heatmaps, and more data visualization elements. The goal is for these visual aids to display your marketing efforts effectively. 

The best marketing dashboards are home to an abundance of KPIs and metrics. The best dashboard software will make life at your marketing department more manageable and efficient. Choosing the correct software solution is a critical part of that equation. 

1. Improvado

If you aren't automating your marketing analytics, you're wasting valuable time and resources. Improvado is a robust solution designed to boost the marketing team's efforts to compile data in one location, build dashboards, and derive actionable insights. 

Improvado is one of the best dashboard software on the market. It's an advanced marketing analytics platform powered by an extract, transform, and load (ETL) solution. That means it supports the entire data pipeline. Why does this matter to your company or dashboard design process? 

It matters because you'll be stretched thin if you spend valuable time gathering data from every source you employ, bring this data to analysis-ready condition, and then try to build useful visual reports. Improvado restores time and resources to marketing departments by dealing with data extraction, storage, transformation, and visualization. 

• First, Improvado extracts your data from over 500 data sources, including ad platforms, SEO tools, CRMs, sales tools, email marketing apps, and more. Improvado pulls over 33,000 metrics and dimensions from the data sources, allowing companies to go beyond shallow processing and analyze the performance of a particular audience, geo, cohort, or creative.

• Improvado then applies sophisticated and automated transformations. These transformations allow users to achieve metrics unifications and scrub the data clean of errors and duplicates. 

• When the process finishes, Improvado can easily push this actionable data to Power BI, Redash, Tableau, or a data visualization and business intelligence (BI) tool. If it would benefit your workflow, you can use one of the Google Data Studio templates provided by Improvado.

With the Sync Now feature, you can refresh data anytime and access real-time analytics or adjust the frequency of data extraction and schedule reporting

Meanwhile, the Improvado Professional Services team can help you set up and customize your dashboard or resolve issues at other pipeline stages—connect custom data sources, design custom data transformations, and add new metrics and dimensions.

Improvado also builds highly customizable attribution models for your team to adjust and optimize new and existing campaigns and deliver high-impact touchpoints. With the Improvado-powered marketing attribution model, you gain deep insights into conversion details coming from different sources, the customer journey of your high-value clients, and how your product is perceived in the marketplace.

The software is a no-code solution, meaning you no longer need to wait for IT resources to handle the data management issues.

2. Klipfolio

Klipfolio is a low-code business intelligence (BI) tool that allows you to create custom dashboards and reports to fuel exploration and analysis.

The platform comes with 60 dashboard templates, and over 200 prebuilt visualizations. Customization is straightforward on Klipfolio’s platform. You can modify their pre-built templates with HTML, JavaScript, or CSS. However, this capability is a downside of the platform for many users because it requires a fair bit of coding knowledge. You don’t have to be a professional, but customization demands a technical background or a willingness to learn. Klipfolio also offers professional services, but it doesn’t specify what services fall under this category.   

The tool provides 100 native data source connectors. To source data from platforms not supported by Klipfolio, you can use spreadsheets, REST APIs, or FTP. 

In general, going beyond default settings and visualizations requires a developer or technical expertise. Less experienced dashboard builders or teams will struggle with putting it together and deriving maximum benefit from the software and dashboards they build.

Users also have complained that the software runs slow when executing complex actions or working with dashboards with custom filters, which can be frustrating.

3. Tableau

Tableau is a data visualization software and an analytics platform that creates business forecasts and assists in building data-driven strategies. The tool helps create sharable and interactive dashboards. 

While Tableau is a flexible platform and can benefit organizations of all sizes, it’s primarily useful for data scientists and marketing professionals experienced with handling lots of data. 

Tableau also features extensive data exploration capacities, which is helpful for data scientists or people who want to dive deeper into the patterns in the numbers. 

This efficient tool is easy to set up and use. It also provides apt use of machine learning and AI to nail granular insights, and for many organizations, this is a game changer. 

However, users report that the software will slow down slightly under heavy data analysis tasks. It also lacks data retrieval and processing features, so it may be best to integrate it with another primary tool for those purposes.  

4. Whatagraph

Whatagraph is a dashboard tool that helps you automate and visualize your data. The platform supports 40 native data source connectors. If the list doesn't feature a platform your marketing department employs, a client can push data to their account using the Whatagraph Public API. Whatagraph serves as the endpoint for your marketing data. The platform doesn't push data to a BI, analytics, or visualization tools and is only starting to support BigQuery integration. 

If the blank page daunts you, you can use one of their ready-made templates. Whatagraph offers 95 dashboard templates, including SEO, Adroll, marketing campaign dashboards, and others. Otherwise, a client can build a custom dashboard using drag-and-drop widgets, custom metrics and formulas.  

5. Cyfe

Cyfe is a straightforward and effective tool that allows companies to monitor, track, and visualize their essential metrics in one place. 

Featuring over 100 integrations, access to Zapier’s app ecosystem, and over 250 pre-built metrics, Cyfe provides a foundation for dashboard design and marketing reporting. The dashboards you create in Cyfe are easy to use and intuitive. But the simplicity of the dashboard software is compromised by the lack of flexibility and other limitations. 

Users have also complained that there is a limited quantity of widgets and relatively limited functionality, so you’ll have to dive in and decide if the straightforward nature of this tool is right for you.

6. Geckoboard

Geckoboard is an easy-to-use data visualization and dashboard software. The tool pulls data from 80 data sources, including marketing, sales, project management, finance, and other tools. Additionally, users can push data to their account using spreadsheets, databases, Zapier integrations, or Geckoboard's Datasets API. 

Users mention that some integrations are a bit limited and don't pull all metrics and dimensions required for thoughtful reporting, and, overall, the tool may not have the same versatility as other dashboard software.

To ease the dashboard-building process, Geckoboard features a library with 90+ dashboard examples and dashboard design best practices. The platform allows the ability to share dashboards with TVs or send reports to Slack. 

Geckoboard has a free-forever plan, though it's pretty limited. The plan means you can start with the process and decide whether it's a fit. If you choose to move forward, know that premium plans can be costly.

7. GoodData

GoodData is a BI and analytics platform that is designed to assist companies in crafting real-time interactive dashboards to make more informed data-driven decisions in their marketing efforts. 

GoodData requires more technical expertise than other solutions on the list. This dashboarding software pulls data from databases and warehouses, not data sources like Facebook or Shopify. This means the first data extraction and aggregation step should be handled by in-house data analysts and developers.

GoodData offers a variety of data modeling options, the ability to run multidimensional queries, create custom metrics, and more. The feature-rich, automated, and customizable options GoodData offers can make it an excellent choice for marketing departments. There can be a steep learning curve due to lots of technical jargon, and it isn’t an entirely self-service platform—two things to remember when making your decision. 

Use Improvado to Make Data-Driven Decisions

To maximize the efficiency of your marketing data analysis, choose a marketing dashboard software that integrates natively with your existing MarTech stack and all data sources and can automate the data aggregation and transformation to the greatest extent. Additionally, consider solutions that offer customizable templates and professional services to simplify the process of creating your dashboards. 

Improvado's software offers the guidance and strategy you need to pull in critical metrics, streamline data preparation, build insightful dashboards, and make data-driven decisions. Book a consultation with Improvado's expert team today to learn more about how the platform can improve your marketing reporting efforts.

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