The Complete Guide To Marketing Dashboards

Would you benefit from a tool that provided you with in-real-time data surrounding all of your marketing efforts? If you are looking to improve data-driven decisions, build transparency and accountability, take your marketing projects to the next level, and monitor progress all in one place then keep reading. What you are searching for is a Marketing Dashboard.

What Is A Marketing Dashboard

A marketing dashboard provides a quick data-focused overview of your marketing results as well as in-depth metrics. It is an easy to read, all-in-one-place, visual tool used to measure your marketing efforts and their impact on the bottom line. Having all of your information in one easily accessible location allows you to track goals and adjust decisions for the best results.

Dashboards are designed to answer specific questions. They visualize metrics for the user. A well-crafted dashboard will highlight what is important to your marketing campaign. It pulls together the metrics, media sources, KPIs, and data into an easy to decipher graph.

Why You Need A Marketing Dashboard

Optimizing your marketing dashboard to pull data in real-time from all of your marketing campaigns will put you a step ahead of the competition. The data will provide you with actionable insights. It allows you to decipher which campaigns are worth the investment, which ones need tweaking, and which ones should be scraped. Having an effective project dashboard essentially gives you more bang for your buck. It provides you with the knowledge necessary to create a revenue-driven marketing strategy.

So let’s get to what you’ve really come for, the nitty gritty instructions on how to build your very own marketing metrics dashboard.

DIY Guide To Building An Excel Dashboard

Step 1:

Before getting started, know what you want to measure. Collect your data. Determine what your Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and marketing metrics are. Your KPIs and metrics will be determined by your industry, the business (or businesses) you are tracking, as well as the type of campaigns you are using. You may want to track marketing performance of each project or of each campaign.

In the image below, I am tracking various campaigns and their results.

Step 2:

Know your objective. Define your why. Before you begin make sure you clearly understand the goals of each marketing campaign. This will help you determine what to include and what to edit out of your custom dashboard as well as help you identify where to pull data from. Be concise. Eliminate what is unnecessary.

Step 3:

Start collecting data. Go through each project or campaign, line by line, and enter the results. The Excel fx is your friend. Program functions to make your life easier. For example, the CAC (see image above) will equal your cost divided by your leads. The formula for the cell H16 above will be =I16/G16. The formula for H17 will be =I17/G17, and so forth.

Excel offers a variety of tools that allow you to customize the look and function of your dashboard.

Step 4:

Create a visualization of the metrics. This can be done in a summary tab and with the use of excel charts, tables,  pivot tables, and more. Excel formulas can be as simple or as complex as you need them to be.

Step 5:

Integrate the data.

There are hundreds of platforms and marketing tools at your disposal. For optimal results you will want to consistently pull metrics from each source to keep your dashboard up to date. Determine how often you need to collect and refresh the dashboard. Set a schedule. Same time every week, or month depending on your needs, to make sure you stay consistent. When it is time to make decisions, you will be thankful for up-to-date data that allows you to create a strong revenue-based marketing strategy.

The Problem

Did you get all of that?

GREAT!

How long did it take you? Not to read the above but to set it up and enter in the data from multiple media sources? Perhaps the first question I should have asked was how many sources you are pulling from, because there are a lot to monitor. And getting them to update in real-time, well that takes some serious man power.

I’m going to be honest. I do not enjoy the collection of metrics or the analytic data collection of marketing. I got into marketing because it fed my creative side, not for the love of math.

Three years ago, I moved to the San Francisco area and joined Realty Shares. They taught me EVERYTHING I know about marketing. My boss Mark pushed me to learn the how tos of data analysis. He pushed, I resisted, but I put in the work all the same. I did it but reluctantly for the simple reason I don’t like it.

After starting a new job, I put off creating a Marketing Dashboard as long as possible. Until one Sunday I sat down and powered my way through it. That same DIY Marketing Platform above took me 10 hours as I began pulling data from the one-trillion sources (slight exaggeration, but only slight).

The next day when I came into the office, proudly displaying my neatly detailed marketing campaign dashboard, my boss met me with a, “Looks great, but let me show you this.”

Anamika, the co-founder of Impravado.io, took all of 5 minutes to walk me through her tool that automated everything I had spent my entire Sunday dredging through.

Two options lay in front of me, and honestly in that moment I felt both. I was angry for the weekend I had wasted but the relief I felt far outweighed the anger. See creating the dashboard is only one minor, yes minor, step. To keep it up to date I’d have to re-pull the data consistently. This new tool literally saved my Sundays.

An Automated Marketing Dashboard Is The Better Way

The marketing automation provided by Impravado.io updates your dashboard in real-time. I know longer have to log into each and every ad platform to check on the campaign performance. The Impravado custom dashboard does it for me, sending alerts and optimization advice straight to my inbox. I’m able to measure and compare metrics in one simple interface, fine-tune campaigns and make decisions based on detailed statistics, and see how each individual campaign is contributing toward the budget and KPI.

Of course, you can keep using the DIY Excel Dashboard I’ve laid out above. I for one am reclaiming my Sundays.