Guide to choose the best marketing dashboard template

Marketing Dashboard Template

Metrics, KPI’s and analytics are just so important that having successful brand marketing may be impossible without them.

Many brands have failed to push their businesses to the next level because they have only concerned themselves with crafting brand marketing strategies but never worry about gathering information to determine if they deliver.

These analytics often get too ambiguous to gather and organize, which is why every brand willing to get the best out of their marketing campaigns should think of a marketing dashboard.

What is a Digital Marketing Dashboard?

A digital marketing dashboard is a metric visualization method that modern marketing experts use to organize, analyze and visualize all of the marketing data that a brand collects for its marketing efforts.

When your brand puts out marketing campaigns, there are quite a couple of questions your team of marketing experts must be able to answer, the most important question being “How are we performing right now?”

The only practical way any marketing expert can accurately measure their marketing campaigns’ present and overall performance are through a detailed marketing dashboard.

Decades ago, marketing data and values were treated with a scientific approach, but today metrics can be processed in a more artistically pleasing fashion with marketing templates.

Marketing dashboards have brought a lot of ease to measuring a brand’s marketing progress. Now, you only need to send a visual image to your team of marketers or send visual data to your client if you are a marketing agency.

By gathering metrics through a visual-oriented method, marketers can explore daily, weekly, and monthly data to improve performance immediately.

The beauty of using an analytics dashboard for your data analysis is that it lets you gather all of your metrics in one place and through an easy-to-read visual interface.

How Do I Create a Marketing Dashboard?

To create a useful marketing dashboard and add value to your organization, you need to decide the purpose you are creating in the first place. Amongst every other purpose unique to individual brands. Your web analytics dashboard should:

• Show KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
• Combine metrics from various sources and present an integrated view
• Identify a means to measure the overall feedbacks and investments of your marketing campaign.
• Come up with a system to quantify these data and make decisions based on this information.

To create a web analytics dashboard that can help you achieve these fundamental purposes. The following steps should be considered:

1. Know What You Want to Measure

Not knowing what you want to measure is like wandering in the wilderness without a compass. Aside from being stressed, you may not get to your desired destination as easily as it was supposed to be if you had a functioning compass in hand.

Not knowing what you want to measure will only make you stare at series of data and get lost without really gathering any information that can help your brand’s marketing success.

Every brand is unique in its different ways, especially regarding the kind of product and services they offer and the type of audience these services target. This uniqueness has made it quite impossible to have a universal data set to solve every brand’s needs.

You must understand what data you will need to measure before designing and developing your marketing dashboards.

To get detailed data from key social media metrics, a social media marketer’s dashboard template would include an integrated metrics from sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin.

Other examples of data you might want to gather may include; unique google search terms that lead to massive website traffic and lead generation, cost per lead per source, website visits and email campaign open rates, and much more.

The major point is that you must determine the marketing KPI’s that you want to measure before developing and utilizing a marketing dashboard.

Once you have been able to determine the data you wish to measure, finding the right dashboard template that can help you measure your data in one place will be a lot easier. Check out Whatagraph's template library and pick the one that fits your needs the best. 

2. Ensure You Are Collecting the Right Data

To ensure that your marketing dashboard is set up to collect the right data, you or your team of marketing experts need to answer these two questions with confidence.

1. What can you identify as the most important decision you or your CXO makes regularly?
2. What sources of data might be used to reach that decision?

Once these questions are adequately answered, it becomes easy to create a marketing dashboard that answers your brand’s most crucial areas of concern.

Deploying a marketing dashboard is not for having a fancy set of graphical information to stare at all day. It’s about having the right set of information required to help your marketing decisions.

3. Chose The Right Dashboard Template

Integrating and measuring marketing data can be a hassle-free process if you decide on choosing the right dashboard template for your campaigns.

On the other hand, creating an effective dashboard for your marketing needs may seem impossible if you choose marketing dashboard templates that do not solve your brand’s marketing needs.

How do you choose a marketing dashboard template that will suit your marketing campaign?

1. Choose a digital marketing dashboard that lets you integrate all your existing data sources. You need to understand that every data is important to making a profitable marketing decision, and not all dashboard templates offer these metrics in one place.
   
   If you chose a dashboard template that only captures data from a fixed or finite number of sources, how will you determine how your social media sentiment impacts your web traffic?
2. Choose an analytic dashboard template that lets you add new data sources swiftly in the future without having to change your existing platform or incur additional costs. You need to note this point and take it seriously before choosing an analytic dashboard template for your brand.
   
   As your business thrives daily, you may need to expand by reaching new prospective customers, increasing your campaign budget, and many more.
   
   All these growths will require you also to expand your data measurement procedures. Thus, the need to add new data sources to your analytics dashboard.
   
   It is crucial to start with a marketing dashboard template that gives enough flexibility to connect your data sources on the fly without coding or making any huge adjustments.
3. Choose an analytic dashboard that lets you integrate data from different sources into a single visual chart or graph. This makes measuring metrics look more enjoyable, easy, and swift. Analyzing metrics without having to switch different interfaces to read or view data is borderline magical.
   
   Being able to view disparate CRM and Marketing Automation data in the same marketing dashboard is great. What is even more amazing is seeing disparate CRM and Marketing Automation data in the same graph. Below you can see our software screenshot how you can integrate different sources.

Start Free Trial

4. Chose a Dashboard Template that Lets You Share Data Seamlessly

It is impossible to create a marketing dashboard that does the work if the data gathered cannot be shared with those who need it to help your brand make the right decision.

As a marketing agency, if your marketing template does not allow you to share well-detailed analytics with your client, then it is never worth it in the first place.

Metrics from different marketing sources are not just for the mere pleasure to the eyes, they need to be acted on, and you don’t need everyone staring at one computer in your office to achieve this.

There are great marketing dashboard technologies out there that make it easy to share your data throughout the company, have role-based permissions, and provide one single version of the truth for all interested groups.

Not all marketing dashboards can put all these in check. Therefore, when choosing your brand’s analytic dashboard, be sure to select one with favorable attributes.

What Should a Marketing Dashboard Include?

As discussed earlier in this article, a marketing dashboard contains information that can help a brand or business make better marketing decisions.

The goals for individual brands are different, so what brand A wants to measure may differ from brand B’s needs. To give you an insight into what information an analytic dashboard can contain, here is a list of metrics that brands are measuring daily.

1. General Marketing Analytics

This is a basic and less sophisticated form of information that a marketing dashboard can contain. There are loads of amazing marketing analytics template out there that can quickly show you an overview of all your business marketing strategies in one place.

General marketing analytics is the kind of metrics you gather if you don’t have a particular data you want to track, and you want a quick summary of all your marketing efforts.

As basic as the general marketing dashboard is, this information can be enough to quickly give you a direction to where your marketing efforts are heading.

The general analytic dashboard will hold information such as your SEO, emails, web analytics, PPC, social media, and a host of other marketing information vital to your campaigns.

2. SEO Analytics Dashboard Metrics

The amount of organic traffic that various search engines bring to your website is a piece of useful information to have in your SEO analytics dashboard.

SEO, an abbreviation for search engine optimization, is a crucial part of a successful long-term brand marketing strategy. Not only are paid campaigns needed to grow your brand’s image. SEO, when done well, are equally as important.

Whatagraph, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Semrush, Moz, and Ahrefs are a few of the reputable SEO marketing dashboard templates out there that get the work done. The information you should look out for in your SEO marketing dashboard template includes; organic landing pages, organic keywords, organic sessions, and organic conversions.

3. PPC Marketing Analytics

If your business marketing strategy includes paid per click advertising, you will want to have PPC marketing analytics data in your marketing dashboard.

Big and small brands use this marketing strategy a lot, so there could be a lot of competition. Not including such information in your marketing dashboard will result in a loss of data that could have helped your marketing decision.

A marketing analytics dashboard will help you track, analyze and discover short-term results on pay-per-click marketing campaigns.

A good PPC marketing dashboard campaign will include; revenues, conversions, performance, and cost per click.

4. Social Media Marketing Analytics

Having a social media presence on social platforms has been an effective way for brands to boost their reach and engagement with both paid and organic methods. Analytics from your social media networks are important and should be integrated into your marketing dashboard.

Data from sites like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, and many more but a few, are crucial to understanding how your followers, loyal customers, prospective buyers, and the general public are reacting to your products or services.

To create a successful social media marketing dashboard, you should ensure that your template measures; engagement, Impressions, reach, likes, followers, and top-performing posts.

5. Email Marketing Analytics

It is no longer news that many brands are now employing email marketing strategies to target their audience consistently and automatically and communicate with them directly.

Email marketing, through the years, has become one of the most effective means of brand marketing strategy lately, and you wouldn’t want to trade gathering vital information about this strategy for anything else.

You should ensure that your email marketing dashboard template captures everything on; Click rate, unique open rate, number of emails sent, and overall performance of campaigns.