How to Build a Cross-channel Marketing Dashboard

What is cross-channel marketing?

Cross-channel marketing is a type of marketing in which companies interact with customers across several channels to deliver a better customer experience. The channels work in unison with each other, which makes it easier to collect cross-channel data and identify the strengths and weaknesses of each touchpoint.

This cross-channel interaction creates added opportunities for marketers, who can use cross-channel marketing to:

• Attract more clients
• Scale their approach
• Add new touchpoints to the buyer journey

On the other hand, managing and analyzing such a vast amount of data requires a capable marketing data platform to connect, visualize, and share insights from multiple sources.

One channel is not enough

Social media, ad platforms, and other marketing analytics tools collect torrents of data from your customers. However, taking actionable insights from this data is more complicated than it sounds. This is especially true if the information comes from a dozen different channels.

Let’s take the example of Instagram.

Instagram provides metrics from organic ads, paid ads, and Reels — tens of metrics from a single channel.

But the problem is that customers don’t live on a single channel. A study of omnichannel retailing from HBR shows that 73% of customers use more than one channel during their buyer journey.

So where to find the complete picture of customers’ behavior?

What is a cross-channel marketing dashboard?

A cross-channel marketing dashboard is a dashboard that helps you monitor desired metrics from all of your client’s marketing channels.

• For marketers, a cross-channel dashboard makes it easier to track metrics from websites, social media, paid ads, CRMs, and other channels in one place.
• For clients, a cross-channel dashboard provides a bird’s eye view of their entire marketing effort.

By connecting multiple channels and pulling data into one place, marketers can spot performance patterns and opportunities for marketing strategy optimization, growth, and revenue increase.

How to build a cross-channel marketing dashboard?

An outstanding cross-channel analytics dashboard helps you connect multiple marketing platform metrics in one place for tracking and reporting. But before you share the live dashboard link with your client, first you need to...

1. Choose a marketing dashboard tool

A marketing dashboard tool helps agencies and in-house marketers aggregate digital marketing data and present it in a visually appealing way.

But why do you need a reporting tool in the first place?

Managing multiple digital marketing platforms and creating a presentation for clients and executives takes far more time and effort. Writing just one cross-channel report can take hours, depending on the metrics and the number of tools involved.

And then, guess what — an hour later, the numbers on your report are no longer valid.

But imagine having multiple clients you report to. You’d probably spend more time creating reports than managing and overseeing cross-channel marketing campaigns.

An all-in-one marketing data platform like Whatagraph automates the whole process and eliminates the possibility of error, while your cross-channel dashboards are always up to date.

With Whatagraph, cross-channel reporting is straightforward:

1. Connect the sources you want to report,
2. Visualize the desired metrics in a dynamic dashboard,
3. Share the dashboard via a live link for on-demand access.

And everything takes place in one environment, with no third-party data connectors or visualization tools.

2. Select your sources

For this example, we use Google Analytics 4, Instagram, and Facebook as sources. But this doesn’t mean you’re limited to just these platforms! For example, Whatagraph has more than 45 native integrations to choose from!

Choosing sources for your cross-channel dashboard can be challenging. However, the beauty of these dynamic reports is that you can start from any channel — just make sure to use only relevant KPIs that show real growth to your client.

Remember, you have a ton of data to visualize, so only focus on metrics that translate to revenue.

Example #1 Google Analytics 4

Let’s begin with website content metrics from Google Analytics 4. The line graph helps you quickly establish the correlation between sessions and possible conversion for a specific date.

Here, you can also include the engagement rate of your website content. It’s a great way to measure how your audience reacts to your content.

Still, keep in mind that a low engagement rate is not always an indication of poor page performance. Sometimes other things can cause it, like:

• Slow page loading speed,
• Broken page elements,
• The page is not mobile-friendly or optimized,
• The page shows a 404 error,
• The link leading to the page is misleading.

Example #2 Facebook Page

Let’s include Facebook as another platform of choice for our cross-channel dashboard. Facebook is an incredibly versatile tool as a standalone brand recognition builder or a formidable PPC platform.

Within this portion of the dashboard, we’re also using charts. It’s an easy yet effective way to show how particular metrics have developed.

Charts in Whatagraph are interactive so that you can select the time of impressions you want to compare:

By selecting which metrics to report, you eliminate the data clutter and help clients focus on the right numbers one at a time.

We included general page insights and a month’s performance data in the examples above. It gives a clear overview of Facebook engagement metrics and how they compare to previous months or years.

Example #3 Instagram Page

Let’s now look at a general page overview of Instagram.

Again, the main focus here is to showcase the aggregated engagement metrics of a particular platform. In this section, you should see the overall health of your marketing data platform and how users respond to your content there.

We're going to dive deeper into individual post-performance in just a moment. To create a fantastic dashboard like the one above, use the Instagram dashboard template from Whatagraph.

3. Include demographics

Monitoring your audience's demographic data can tell you whether you’re reaching the right people with the digital content you produce.

You're welcome to position demographic information next to each corresponding platform. We've lumped in demographic insights from different marketing platforms in this one section.

Of course, you should use different types of visuals to show target audience data:

• Bar charts
• Line graphs,
• Pie charts,
• Maps.

Select the data presentation method and see how effectively your content reaches your desired audience.

So as the dashboard grows, the data in it gets more detailed.

It brings us to a deeper dive into data: evaluating individual content pieces.

4. Provide in-depth content analysis and comparison

As we've previously mentioned, your content is hosted on various digital marketing platforms. Since we're looking at Instagram and Facebook in our example, we will likely use videos, images, and text content.

How can you be sure about what content your audience enjoys the most? Let’s find out.

A cross-channel dashboard with multiple platforms lets us analyze individual, best-performing content pieces in-depth. And some that could have performed better.

Having a clear view of your best-performing posts helps further develop future campaigns. You see exactly what keeps your audience interested, engaged, and active on your pages.

5. Add custom metrics and multi-source tables

Whether you're reporting to your clients or firm executives, your dashboard needs to tell a story. All of this rests on two things – data and visuals.

Data is used to showcase results and explain the reasoning for specific actions that you've taken. Most people – especially in marketing – aren't too keen on making changes if the data does not support the change. In other words, hard numbers are all that matters.

The only problem is that sometimes the numbers you want to present are unavailable.

Platforms like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and others provide fixed metrics, dimensions, filters, and report types, regardless of your reporting tool.

Whatagraph, however, allows you to combine and change metrics.

• Blend existing metrics from multiple sources
• Add agency markup
• Create custom metrics split
• Build new metrics that platforms don’t provide

You can edit any widget using an intuitive custom formula builder and multiply, divide, and combine metrics using simple mathematics.

The possibility of custom metrics you can create is endless.

Custom formulas add a lot of flexibility to your reporting and are a great asset when creating tailored cross-channel dashboards.

Another Whatagraph feature that helps you present cross-channel insights is the multi-source table.

A multi-source table is a pre-made widget you can add to any Whatagraph dashboard — multiple sources are presented as rows, while metrics are listed as columns.

As with all other widgets, you can use a custom formula to tweak each metric inside the table.

Use a cross-channel dashboard template

Starting a cross-channel dashboard is always easier when you have pre-built dashboard templates to choose from.

Try Whatagraph’s cross-channel report template for free. This template has all the widgets you need to monitor your online marketing performance and quickly identify the hotspots within your process.

Just connect your media channels, and your data will be pulled automatically.

Build a cross-channel dashboard in Whatagraph

If you’re still on the fence about which cross-channel dashboard tool to use, let’s make your choice easier by saying why Whatagraph is so awesome:

• We have over 45 native integrations, so you can easily connect popular marketing channels such as Google Analytics 4, social media platforms (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook Ads), SEO, e-commerce, email marketing, and CRM tools.
• Connect any data source you have via a Custom API, Google BigQuery, or Google Sheets.
• Your marketing activities are visually presented as real-time KPIs and metrics, including attribution, conversion rate, top landing pages, CTR, etc.
• Insightful touchpoints allow marketers to optimize their messaging at every step of the customer journey.
• Pre-made marketing dashboard templates to choose from.
• White-label feature that allows altering marketing reports and dashboards to match your client’s branding.
• Report sharing automation. Send your cross-channel dashboard via a live link for on-demand access.

Wrapping up

We hope this blog gives you more perspective on building a cross-channel marketing dashboard.

It looks complicated sometimes, but it’s not if you use the right tool.

Whatagraph has all the features of a prime dashboarding tool — native integrations, dashboard and report templates, a Custom API, custom metrics builder, etc.

However, there are things about Whatagraph that you discover only when you start using it.

• Connecting data from multiple sources is unbelievably easy,
• Creating any kind of dashboard takes less than 5 minutes,
• Sharing a dashboard is as simple as sending an Instagram reel.

But we like to put our money where our mouth is. So how about you test our dashboard builder for 7 days for free?

Request a free trial of Whatagraph and simplify your cross-channel reporting today.