How to Build a Cross-channel Marketing Dashboard

In these situations, your typical report won’t cut it. This is why you need a cross-channel marketing reporting tool that covers all the platforms you need - in one report.

Cross-channel marketing dashboards help you better assess the performance of ALL of your clients’ marketing channels. As a marketer, these dashboards make your job easier as everything is in one place. For clients, it means getting a birds’ eye view of their entire marketing campaign efforts.

If we have your interest, here is how you can create a cross-channel marketing dashboard with ease.

What Is a Cross-Channel Marketing Dashboard?

A cross-channel marketing dashboard is an especially beneficial document for marketing agencies and in-house marketers. 

By using a proper tool that connects multiple channels and pulls data into one place, marketers can clearly see their strategy’s performance patterns and progress.

These valuable insights create space for optimization, growth and revenue increase.

Why? 

Because the cross-channel marketing dashboard provides enough data to understand what is working and what is not. 

Why Do You Need a Reporting Tool in the First Place?

A reporting tool is a solution for marketing agencies and in-house marketers to aggregate digital marketing data and present it in a visually appealing way. It usually works with popular digital marketing tools, including Google Analytics, Instagram, Facebook, SEMRush, Ahrefs and others.

So why exactly do you need a reporting tool? 

Well, because spending time managing multiple digital marketing platforms AND presenting performance data to clients or executives isn't exactly a walk in the park. Building just one cross-channel dashboard can take hours per client - depending on the marketing mix and the number of marketing tools used.

Moreover, if you have multiple clients under your belt that you report to, you probably would spend more time creating dashboards than actually maintaining and overseeing campaigns. 

Important: A personalised dashboard to effectively communicate current achievements and future priorities should be simple and time-efficient. On the one hand, it should be easy to create. On the other, it should be easy for clients to look over and make important decisions fast.

What Does a Marketing Dashboard Do?

An outstanding cross-channel analytics dashboard provides insight and effectively connects multiple marketing platform metrics, all in one place.

Dashboards have zero value if they give no insights to the people you're reporting to, be it a client or a manager. In other words, you need something that transforms plain data into information your clients understand. It also has to provide a seamless transition between the different marketing platforms you're reporting on. 

• A great dashboard facilitates effective decision-making – it improves collaboration and relays information well to your client or manager;
• Dashboards need to guide your client's attention to vital metrics and activity;
• Add context and clarity if the person you're reporting to isn't present during your day-to-day meetings and activities. 

Take note that this is an example of formulating a comprehensive cross-channel dashboard. We use Google Analytics, Instagram, and Facebook platforms for this example. However, it doesn't mean that you're limited to just these platforms! For example, Whatagraph has more than 40 different data sources to choose from.

Choose Your Data Source

Building a dashboard composed of data from different sources can be difficult. 

However, the beautiful thing about cross-channel dashboards is that you can usually start from any platform. Just make sure to avoid including vanity metrics within the dashboard - use only those KPIs that make a difference for your clients. 

You already have a ton of data to showcase. So, you should focus on metrics that translate to cash flow, one of them being conversions. 

In the example, we begin with website content metrics from Google Analytics. Of course, we didn't forget the conversion metrics for the reporting period.

Having data presented in a line graph helps you quickly deduce any correlation between session numbers and possible conversions for a specific date.

Here, you can also include an average bounce rate of your website content. It's a great way to see how your audience perceives your content. Take note that a high bounce rate is not always an indication of poor page performance. Some other things that could cause it include:

• A poor page loading speed
• Broken page elements
• The page is not mobile friendly and optimized
• The page throws a 404 error
• The link leading to the page was misleading - it promised one thing while the page has different content
• And others.

Consider Facebook Insights

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

Within this portion of the dashboard, we're also using graphs. It's an easy yet effective way to show how a particular metric developed over time. 

The graph here is interactive, and you can select the time of impressions you want to compare:

Selecting which metrics to look at makes the client's or manager’s lives easier. It eliminates the data clutter and helps focus on the right numbers, one at a time.

Back to the main Facebook insights overview now! 

In the example above, we've included the general page insights and two-week performance data. It gives a clear overview of Facebook engagement metrics and how they compare to previous months or years. 

Examine Your Instagram Performance

Let's take a look at a general performance 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 a marketing platform. And how the user base is responding to the content there. 

We're going to dive deeper into individual post-performance in only a moment. To have an amazing dashboard like the one above, you’ll want to use an Instagram dashboard template in Whatagraph.

Include Demographics

Looking at your audience's demographic data must be done by every marketer. Are you reaching the right people with the digital content you produce? Well, that will be answered in this portion of your cross-channel dashboard.

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

Of course, you have the option of different types of visuals to show demographic data:

• Bar graphs
• Line graphs
• Pie charts
• Maps

Select the data presentation method yourself and see just how effective your content is in reaching your desired audience.

So as the dashboard grows, the data you include within gets more detailed. 

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

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? We're about to find out.

With a comprehensive dashboard that includes multiple platforms, we can easily analyse individual, best-performing content pieces in-depth. And some that have not performed well at all.

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

Include Your Metrics 

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. 

Visuals are there to help translate data into something easier to digest. The simple reporting process you've come to dread is turned into extensive storytelling, engaging your clients and executives. 

Consider Using a Cross-Channel Dashboard Template

To consider using a dashboard template, you’d need to purchase multi-channel marketing software that provides insightful data performance reports.  

Great internal dashboards help your team monitor the current marketing performance status and quickly find any shortcomings within your processes. 

You are welcome to try out our pre-built cross-channel dashboard template for free. The dashboard already has all the widgets you may need. You just need to connect your media channels, and your data will be extracted automatically and ready for your clients to view. 

Use a Cross-Channel Reporting Tool - Whatagraph

If you don’t have marketing analytics too, we suggest you test out Whatagraph because of a couple of reasons:

• Its automation feature will allow you to conveniently and regularly send marketing strategy performance reports;
• It provides insightful touchpoints allowing marketers to optimize their messaging at every step of the customer journey;
• It easily and quickly connects 40+ media platforms such as social media (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook ads) and Google Analytics; 
• It clearly and visually presents email marketing, SEO, and your other marketing activities in real-time KPIs. Including attribution, conversion rate, top landing pages, CTR, etc. 
• It offers enough cross-channel marketing campaign performance data for you to learn about your client’s target audience and improve customer experience and buyer’s journey.
• It has a white-label feature that allows altering marketing reports and dashboards to match your client’s branding. 

Bottom Line

Hopefully, this blog gave you a little perspective on how to approach building a cross-channel marketing dashboard. 

Your next step is getting a proper and powerful cross-channel data reporting tool. 

We believe that our tool got what it takes to simplify the marketing agency’s work with an extensive list of beneficial features. To learn more about them or to test it out yourself, get a 30-minute personalized product tour or try it out for 7 days free of charge.