Marketing analytics & reporting

Mastering Marketing Dashboards: Top 11 Examples + Templates

You work for a client for a month only for them to ask... "So, what have you done this month for us? Can you show any results". You could send a bunch of marketing reports their way... and spend several hours in meetings explaining what each graph or table stands for. Or you could build a marketing dashboard that clearly communicates marketing objectives and allows anyone to easily understand progress towards goals. Here are some of the best marketing dashboard examples you can use for reporting.

Whatagraph marketing reporting tool
Dominyka Vaičiūnaitė

Mar 18 2020 10 min read

Mastering Marketing Dashboards: Top Examples + Templates

Table of Contents

    What is a marketing dashboard?

    A marketing dashboard is a short, typically one-page report focusing on the most relevant marketing results that align with your priorities. A marketing dashboard lets you quickly show someone what your marketing team has been working on. 

    Let’s take a look at one marketing dashboard example:

    Digital marketing dashboard from Whatagraph

    We see that this digital marketing dashboard has: 

    One-dimension widgets for 

    • impressions 
    • social media likes

    Simple graph relating 

    • Cost per reach
    • Cost per impression

    Simple table displaying

    • Website clicks
    • Profile visits
    • New posts
    • Email contacts

    Media widget for

    • The top-performing media with impressions, clicks, and likes

    The idea behind marketing dashboards — make them:

    1. Simple
    2. To the point
    3. Up to date

    Think of a marketing dashboard as a weather widget on your smartphone or browser: 

    Weather widget as example of a dashboard
    When you type “weather Miami”, you get a small dashboard with all the essential data you need that updates in near real-time or on-demand. 

    It’s the same with a marketing dashboard — your clients should be able to take a look and instantly get all the information they need.  

    Marketing dashboards vs. reports

    Unlike marketing reports, which are longer and can hold both current and historical data, dashboards usually contain only the most relevant KPIs and metrics and focus on the current data. Find out more about the differences between marketing dashboards and reports

    40+ data

    5 key benefits of using a marketing dashboard

    Marketing has always been a data-driven industry, and more than ever, success depends on tracking multiple channels, campaigns, and metrics. A marketing dashboard provides a unified view of all this data, which helps marketers make data-driven decisions. But before we show you the most useful dashboard examples, let’s talk about the benefits of a marketing dashboard.

    1. Essential marketing data in one place

    Marketing dashboards centralize data from all your platforms in one place. Instead of manually pulling data from all the accounts or platforms, you can quickly connect all the data you want. 

    This is especially true if the marketing dashboard has native integrations with the sources you need, as Whatagraph does.   

    2. Near real-time updates

    A marketing dashboard automatically refreshes data at a set frequency, giving marketers the most recent insights into the performance of different channels. This eliminates the need to manually refresh or update data in your dashboard every time you need to report changes. 

    At the same time, near real-time updates eliminate human error between departments and avoid awkward situations when teams report on different numbers.  

    This way, a marketing reporting dashboard not only saves time but increases the accuracy of collected data. 

    3. Transparency throughout the funnel   

    A cross-department marketing dashboard can show what happens when the lead goes to sales and helps improve the marketing/sales alignment. When marketing and sales departments are aligned with one another, you get additional benefits:

    • Consistent messaging: The marketing team is on the same page as the sales team — no promises that are impossible to close. 
    • Clear lead qualification: Marketers don’t attract leads that eventually get disqualified due to wrong intent, low paying capacity, and similar reasons. 
    • More context on the lead: The sales team knows which channel, campaign, or ad has brought the lead on a discovery call. This information allows the sales reps to adjust the sales deck and make a compelling pitch. 

    4. Standardized view of all data

    Standardizing dimensions and metrics can be a huge hurdle for marketers in large agencies and enterprise-level companies that operate in different global markets. Similar metrics that are called differently across platforms, data scattered across different ad accounts, and other factors limit the clear-cut and concise view of your marketing efforts. 

    A marketing campaign dashboard helps marketers standardize metrics and naming conventions through simple data transformation processes

    For example, you can unify the date formats, locations, languages, customer age, audience and campaign ID, etc. 

    5. Ease of reporting

    Clients and stakeholders love dashboards because they present the essential information in the most easy-to-digest format possible. Build a dashboard once, and you won’t need to prepare presentations every time. Just pull up your live dashboard and show where your marketing stands at that moment. In the meantime, share a live dashboard link so invested parties can check the vital KPIs whenever they want. It doesn’t get any easier than that. 

    Metrics to include in your marketing dashboard 

    The metrics that you include in your marketing dashboard depend on the marketing funnel stage you’re monitoring. As there are three funnel levels: awarenessconsideration, and decision, you need to keep track of all three groups of metrics:

    1. Awareness stage includes top-level metrics that measure your audience’s size and how your brand is seen, for example, in social media campaigns:

    • Reach
    • Engagement
    • Audience size
    • Impressions

    Aware stage metrics

    2. Consideration stage requires more granular data. This means focusing on conversions and search engine performance. Measurable indicators of prospects progressing to the decision stage would be: 

    • Inbound calls
    • User retention
    • Leads in nurture campaigns
    • Conversion rates 
    • Lead to opportunity conversion rate

    Consideration stage metrics

    3. Decision stage demands more specific metrics, including conversion data and insights into ad performance. Those metrics are:

    • Free trials
    • ROI
    • Win rate
    • Demo requests

    Aware stage metrics

    Top 11 marketing dashboard examples 

    From high-level executive KPIs to more granular team metrics, Whatagraph helps you create a dashboard for every role. 

    1. Digital marketing dashboard

    A digital marketing dashboard tracks the performance of your client’s online marketing activities. This type of dashboard cuts across different marketing channels, allowing you to monitor your campaigns and other digital marketing efforts in near real time. 

    Marketing directors may use this dashboard to track performance and different intervals, show progress towards the monthly target and goals, and make educated decisions on best allocating the marketing budget. 

    However, the metrics displayed on a digital marketing dashboard should be useful for a broad audience, from marketing executives to digital marketing professionals. 

    Our digital marketing dashboard allows you to easily add or remove data sources as you track the main KPIs. Whether you start from a blank page, use the smart builder, or pick a template, you can edit the dashboard by rearranging the elements. Change the sources and metrics for each widget, rename the widgets, or apply different data filters. 

    Finally, you can change the visual appearance of the dashboard by adding your cover image, changing the color scheme, and replacing Whatagraph branding with your own or that of your client.

    2. Marketing performance dashboard

    A marketing performance dashboard provides a high-level overview of key performance indicators, the overall conversion funnel, and other digital marketing metrics. This marketing dashboard helps marketers make informed decisions for executing their marketing strategy. 

    Each lead, website, visit, and win should be given a tangible value so marketers can correctly measure the impact of their campaigns.

    Perfromance marketing dashboard from Whatagraph

    KPIs and metrics you should include in the marketing performance dashboard include:

    • Return on marketing investment (ROMI)
    • Return on ad spend (ROAS)
    • Goal completion rate (GCR)
    • Channel effectiveness metrics (reach or conversions vs. cost

    And campaign performance indicators like:

    • CPC (cost per click)
    • CAC (customer acquisition cost)
    • SQL (sales qualified leads)
    • ROI (return on investment)

    With Whatagraph, you can create a highly customized marketing performance dashboard based on near real-time data, so you can easily identify the channels and campaigns that need more attention. 

    3. Google Ads dashboard

    A Google Ads marketing dashboard allows you to track the ROI of Google Ads (AdWords) campaigns and KPIs and metrics that impact their success. Tracking the ROMI is an essential part of any successful Google Ads campaign, as it ensures you are spending the appropriate amount to acquire leads. 

    By monitoring audience targeting and bidding strategies, as well as keyword ranking, CPC, click-through rate (CTR), and impressions, you can understand which topics and keywords you should focus on in your PPC strategy.  

    With the Google Ads dashboard from Whatagraph, you can put these metrics at the center of your report. Present accurate and live Google Ads data, so your clients can instantly know what’s working and what isn’t. 

    4. SEO dashboard

    An SEO dashboard should contain data on organic traffic, keyword ranking and movements, new and lost backlinks, sessions, average session duration, as well as different performance metrics by page. 

    Whatagraph’s SEO reporting dashboard is a one-stop destination that gives you a complete perspective of your SEO performance through various KPIs. An advanced SEO dashboard like ours should be able to integrate content marketing data from different SEO and marketing analytics tools such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4, Ahrefs, and Semrush. 

    Here’s an SEO dashboard example from Whatagraph:
    SEO marketing dashboard from Whatagraph

    5. YouTube live dashboard

    A YouTube live dashboard is a tool that allows video creators to better understand their viewers, plan their next moves, and react in line with the demands of YouTube users. In other words, this marketing dashboard helps determine which content to produce more and which is less interesting for the audience. The most important KPIs to include in a YouTube live dashboard:

    • Subscribers gained vs. lost
    • Comments
    • Shares
    • Total views
    • Video views vs. average duration
    • Likes vs. dislikes
    • Performance metrics by video (views, likes, dislikes, subscribers gained, and lost)

    Marketers can use the insights from this information for better targeting and creating a more effective video strategy for the business by analyzing how users react to different content.  

    The YouTube live dashboard by Whatagraph allows users to set it up how they need it. You can replace and re-arrange widgets, change metric types, and as well as choose whether a widget corresponds to the whole YouTube account or video performance. 

    6. Shopify dashboard

    Shopify is a popular e-commerce platform with more than 4.4 million live Shopify stores globally and a 52.33% increase over the past year. A proper Shopify dashboard should provide actionable insights into your online store performance and swift decision-making.

    So what are the benefits of an e-commerce marketing dashboard?

    1. Displays data from different sources in one place
    2. Streamlines decisions in an e-commerce company
    3. Improves collaboration between stakeholders and third parties

    Data must be presented clearly so that the users can read and analyze it quickly. For the executive summary, include the date period, transactions, all users, and the ordered items quantity. 

    Another useful widget you can use is a revenue funnel with sections for gross sales, net sales, and total sales, as well as the total conversion rate. 

    If you’re looking for a custom Shopify dashboard to highlight your latest e-store data and track all e-commerce KPIs in one place, you can create one easily in Whatagraph. 

    Shopify dashboard from Whatagraph

    Arrange your widgets so related metrics are grouped together and provide the full picture to draw insights. 

    By analyzing the insights from your Shopify dashboard, you can plan your sales and marketing campaigns, solve issues in your e-commerce website performance, manage your inventory, establish prices, etc. 

    7. CEO dashboard 

    A CEO dashboard provides a high-level overview of all your company’s services. Whether you’ve launched a new advertising campaign, updated the website UX, or completed a successful social media campaign, the guy upstairs needs to know “how marketing is doing”.

    This comprehensive tool aggregates data from various marketing channels such as social media, email, SEO, web analytics, paid ads, and lead generation into a single executive view. 

    By reporting on key metrics like

    • Users
    • Conversion rate
    • Cost per click
    • Clickthrough rate
    • Average order value
    • Reach

    As well as comparing sales vs. sessions and outlining the performance of individual campaigns and channels, a CEO dashboard lets executives see the whole picture of how marketing investment pays off. 

    CEO marketing dashboard from Whatagraph

    In Whatagraph, you can easily create a CEO dashboard by combining analytics from multiple data sources, visualizing the KPIs, and sharing them via a live link.  

    8. Email marketing dashboard

    An email marketing dashboard should include all performance metrics of your nurturing, drip, or regular email marketing campaigns. This dashboard helps marketers identify messages that resonate with the audience, discover the best time to send emails, and track performance across hundreds of email campaigns. The most important metrics to include in an email marketing dashboard are:

    • Total subscribers 
    • Unsubscribers
    • Open rate
    • Clickthrough rate
    • Conversion rate
    • URL sessions generated by emails
    • Campaign performance (impressions, sessions, revenue)

    An email marketing dashboard provides insights you can use to create highly targeted campaigns based on marketing, sales, and revenue data.  
    Email marketing dashboard from Whatagraph

    Whatagraph has native integration with ActiveCampaign, Campaign Monitor, Klaviyo, and Mailchimp, allowing you to create an email marketing dashboard with combined data from any of these tools with Google Analytics 4, a CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot, and an e-commerce solution like Shopify. This cross-channel capability lets you see the whole picture of your emailing campaigns. 

    9. Social media dashboard 

    A social media marketing dashboard provides a brief and to-the-point overview of all your social media efforts. You can use it to track the impact of different activities by ad spend and essential metrics such as:

    • Impressions
    • Clicks
    • CPM
    • CTR
    • CPC

    With Whatagraph, you can easily combine all your social media channels into one dashboard and present it in a way that is easy to understand. 

    Use the media widgets to showcase the top-performing media with their respective impressions, clicks, and likes. Try the location widget to see where your most devoted followers are coming from, while the likes vs. unlikes widget maps the popularity of your top post over months. 

    TIP: Start every social media dashboard with an executive summary where you’ll place the high-level metrics like goal completions, users, conversion rate, impressions vs. clicks, and a progress chart for overall performance. 

    Social media dashboard from Whatagraph
    As with every dashboard you create in Whatagraph, you can add or remove sources, as well as change the sources, metrics, and dimensions for individual widgets. 

    This is especially useful in agency reporting, where different clients have different social media stacks and different marketing goals.  

    10. KPI dashboard

    A marketing KPI dashboard is likely the most comprehensive dashboard for tracking and monitoring your business performance. A KPI dashboard software like Whatagraph lets you connect data from multiple sources and visualize it in a cross-channel dashboard according to your specific requirements. 

    This type of marketing dashboard presents the most important KPIs to your clients, managers, team members, and all interested parties to increase transparency and make it easier to make important decisions quickly. 

    So what essential marketing KPIs and metrics should you include?

    Primarily those related to campaign performance and business goals:

    • CPA (cost per acquisition)
    • CPL (cost per lead)
    • Purchases 
    • Average order value
    • Total refunds 
    • Sales target & growth

    TIP: Build your KPI dashboard with an executive summary at the top, with metrics like revenue, conversions, and conversion rate. 

    11. Content marketing dashboard

    A content marketing dashboard has a simple purpose — to display content marketing metrics and help marketers understand whether their content gets traction on Google and how it ultimately impacts the bottom line.

    A good content marketing dashboard should present this data in digestible form, relying on visualizations to monitor keyword position changes, impression trends, article CTR, etc. With all the related metrics grouped together, you’ll be able to compare:

    • Impressions
    • Referral 
    • Organic traffic
    • Revenue generated by content
    • Page views
    • Time on page
    • Pages per session
    • Virality
    • Bounce rates 

    By combining these metrics with SEO analytics, marketers can identify which blog or landing page content on your website is well-optimized and engaging and which content needs optimization. Content that is updated to rank higher on SERP ultimately brings more website traffic and, if the messaging is right, conversions. 

    cross-channel reports

    How to create a marketing dashboard?

    The most popular way to build a digital marketing dashboard is to use a data visualization tool. These tools allow you to connect different sources and build cross-channel dashboards

    However, not all data visualization tools are made the same. Some don’t have data connecting functionality, so you must use third-party data connectors or another tool to extract and prepare your data. 

    TIP: Always look for marketing dashboard software that lets you connect, visualize, and share data within the same tool. 

    So how do you build a marketing dashboard?

    Whatever reporting tool you use, the dashboard creation process goes like this:

    • Define your goals and KPIs: If you define your marketing goals and the KPIs you want to track, it will help you track progress towards those goals. 
    • Choose your data sources: Connect to the platforms you want to include in your dashboard. If the dashboard tool has native integrations, this step takes no longer than a click. 
    • Choose the visualization types: This choice depends on your KPIs and goals. For example, a line chart can track trends such as website traffic over time or likes vs. clicks relation. A pie chart can display the distribution of leads by channel, while a progress chart can show progress toward a goal. 

    However, since the whole point of a dashboard is to be brief and actionable, for most KPIs, you’ll be using one-dimension widgets like these:

    Single-value widgets on a dashboard from Whatagraph

    • Customize the dashboard: Depending on your tool, your marketing dashboard should be customizable with colors, fonts, and logos that align with your identity. If you’re using a dashboard for agency reporting, you can white-label your dashboard and use your client’s branding to show the extra level of attention. 
    • Share your dashboard: With your clients or stakeholders via a live link and set up automated email notifications to keep everyone informed on a regular basis. Share any dashboard you create with Whatagraph via a live link for on-demand access.

    Why create a marketing dashboard in Whatagraph?

    If you are looking for an all-in-one marketing data platform, and weighing your options, let’s make things easier by telling you what makes Whatagraph a great choice:

    One platform

    Whatagraph is an all-in-one marketing data platform for connecting, visualizing, and sharing marketing data. When you use one platform, you can report cross-channel data instead of reporting on data from separate sources.

    An all-inclusive solution also gives you better stability and speed, as your reports don’t depend on the performance of other tools. 

    Finally, Whatagraph has native integrations with the most popular marketing platforms, so there’s no possibility of third-party connectors breaking off. 

    Linked report templates

    Instead of editing reports one by one, make changes to multiple reports simultaneously with no hassle. This is a huge time-saving feature for agencies working in specific industries where most clients have the same needs.

    Report folders

    Another feature that means a lot to marketing agencies is the ability to organize your data and reports by client, region, account manager, etc.   

    Visually attractive dashboards

    There’s no way around it — reports and dashboards created in Whatagraph are good-looking and present marketing campaign ROI in an easy-to-read format. Aesthetics apart, beautifully displayed KPIs and metrics increase client engagement with the reports they get from you. 

    Whether you create a web analytics dashboard or general online marketing dashboard, you can prove your value to clients, retain clients and win budget increases, improve your agency’s brand image, and turn reports into a new revenue stream

    Easy to use

    We know everybody says this, but you have to try Whatagraph to tell the difference. Until you try our free trial, you’ll have to believe us when we say that creating detailed reports and dashboards is a breeze.  

    Fast problem-to-solution journey

    Connecting the sources and building a dashboard is super fast, which allows you to get actionable insights from your data quickly. Thanks to the recent update to the Google Kubernetes engine, the platform is faster than ever, loading even the heaviest widgets in a matter of seconds.   

    Create a marketing dashboard in Whatagraph

    Whatagraph gives you three ways to start a marketing dashboard — from a template, using a smart builder, or from a blank page. Each path is easy to follow and intuitive, whether you have previous experience or not.

    1. Pick a template from our library — Click on the Create new button in the upper right corner and then Create from template. Once in the template library, use the drop-down menus to filter the templates into categories to find the one you need more easily. 

    2. Use the smart builder — Click on Create newUse smart builder, and choose the channels for your dashboard. Depending on the channels you choose, in the next step, you can choose the kind of data for your dashboard. Click Create report, and your dashboard is ready for use. 

    3. Start from a blank page — Go to Create newBlank. Now you can choose the channels and drag and drop the widgets you need. 

    white-label customize

    FAQ

    Why do you need a marketing dashboard?

    You need a marketing dashboard to make more informed decisions about your marketing efforts, reduce costs, and improve your impact on your revenue cycle. 

    What is a good marketing dashboard?

    A good marketing dashboard is one that is user-friendly, allows you to easily connect cross-channel data, and has an intuitive way of creating custom visualizations. 

    How do you create a marketing dashboard?

    You create a marketing dashboard by consulting with your team first and deciding the key KPIs and metrics you want to track. Then you select your marketing reporting software. Connect the data sources you want to report and use available widgets to visualize data. Finally, create a live link and share the dashboard with the interested parties. 

    What is the difference between KPIs and metrics?

    KPIs measure the progress toward a business goal, while metrics measure the performance of specific marketing activities. For example, a conversion rate and customer lifetime value are KPIs, while clicks and keyword ranking position are metrics.  

    What integrations does Whatagraph have?

    Whatagraph has over 45 native integrations with a range of marketing platforms and apps. This includes social media like LinkedIn and Facebook, PPC tools like Google Ads and Facebook Ads, SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush, and CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce. You can connect any unsupported source via a Custom API, BigQuery, or Google Sheets.

    Can I use one marketing dashboard template for different purposes?

    No, you can’t use one dashboard template for different purposes because each is pre-built with a specific reporting function in mind. You can, however, edit any template, customize it to your reporting needs and save any dashboard you create for future use.

    Wrapping up

    We hope that through the story of the best marketing dashboard examples, you’ve learned what a marketing dashboard is and why it’s important to have one if you want to reach your goals. 

    Much like the dashboard of your car, a good marketing dashboard should give brief and accurate info on what’s going on under the hood.

    Apart from client reporting and campaign planning, a marketing dashboard brings about a level of transparency so everyone in your organization can be on the same page with the efforts that the marketing department makes. 

    This is why a marketing dashboard needs to be simple to build, share, and use. 

    And when it comes to the ease of building and sharing dashboards, we believe that Whatagraph is at the very top of the list. 

    Request a free Whatagraph trial and start reporting the results of your hard work easier than ever before. 

    40 data sources

    Published on Mar 18 2020

    Whatagraph marketing reporting tool

    WRITTEN BY

    Dominyka Vaičiūnaitė

    Dominyka is a copywriter at Whatagraph with a background in product marketing and customer success. Her degree in Mass Communications/Media Studies helps her to use simple words to explain complex ideas. In addition to adding value to our landing pages, you can find her name behind numerous product releases, in-app notifications, and guides in our help center.