What gets measured gets managed, the old saying says. But in marketing, it can get pretty confusing. There are so many channels and potential KPIs and metrics to follow. Even if you’re an experienced marketer, determining what to measure can be extremely difficult.
Dec 22 2021 ● 8 min read
And once you do choose your marketing metrics, how do you put them in one place for your clients to see?
Today, we’ll show you how to create the perfect marketing KPI dashboard, as well as which metrics to choose. Let’s get to it.
A marketing KPI dashboard is a document that shows key marketing metrics from the campaigns a marketing team or agency performs. In other words, this type of dashboard shows the results of your marketing work in one place so that a client or manager can quickly make important decisions and decide what should be stopped and what needs to be done more for better marketing results.
You may be thinking that you don’t need a marketing KPI dashboard. After all, you can see the results of your marketing campaigns just by logging into Google Analytics or a Facebook dashboard. While this is true, marketing performance dashboards offer much more value than just showing key performance indicators. Here are some of their main benefits.
If you run an agency or work in a marketing team, showing your marketing efforts and results is rarely a 5-minute job. You need to show the performance of your website, various social media channels, paid platforms like Google ads… And a marketing dashboard lets you do just that.
You can show real-time performance of as many channels as you want. In fact, you can more than 40 different data sources in a Whatagraph dashboard.
Sending monthly reports is great, but you know what’s even better? When a client can click a link and open a dashboard to see real-time results of their campaigns. Even if it’s 4AM on a Thursday, they can check their performance without calling or emailing your marketing team.
A dashboard is an overview of your (hopefully amazing) performance and overall marketing strategy. Once you create it, you can highlight your results, such as an incredible conversion rate or overall marketing ROI.
With all the results in one place, a marketing dashboard is a superb way to convince clients to increase your budgets or try out more services from your offering, whether you’re selling to SaaS clients or ecommerce business owners.
Creating marketing reports and dashboards takes time. With a marketing dashboard, you can set it up once and it is automatically updated with real-time data. That means you can save hours every month on reporting. The more clients and dashboards you have, the bigger the time savings.
Just like we say all the time - it depends. The marketing performance metrics you will use in your dashboards depend heavily on the type of client you’re working for and the platforms you’re employing to do the work. However, here are some of the most important marketing metrics that should find a place in any marketing KPI dashboard:
These are just starting points that you can go from. Once again, the key metrics you choose for a marketing dashboard will heavily depend on the type of work you do for a client.
Once you know which metrics you want in your dashboard, it’s time to choose a reporting tool. Creating a dashboard becomes a lot easier once you have a single tool where you can connect and visualize all of your marketing data. Here are the top choices for tools you can use.
Whatagraph: the best all-around KPI dashboard software. With 40+ integrations with the most popular marketing platforms, you can cover any type of marketing work for your client or business.
If you’re wondering where to get started, Whatagraph has over 100 different report and dashboard templates for different uses. Whether you need a social media dashboard or a web analytics dashboard, you can get started in minutes. Whatagraph pricing starts at $223 per month.
Supermetrics: good for data transfers, not so great for visualizations. This tool has been around for a while and it is a solid option if you’re looking to transfer data from marketing sources to a marketing data warehouse. For visualization, reports and dashboards, you have to rely on an external connection to Looked Studio or Tableau.
Klipfolio: good for beautiful visualizations. If you’re looking to build dashboards that look pretty, look no further. Klipfolio has a good range of options but its pricing plans are more suited towards in-house use rather than marketing agencies. And at $299 per month for unlimited dashboards, you can get better deals.
Let’s go through some practical steps for building a KPI dashboard. Provided that you’ve chosen a good reporting tool, building a dashboard should be a piece of cake.
Not everyone needs an in-depth KPI dashboard outlining the metrics per one LinkedIn post, for example. The dashboard you create should be valuable to the person reading it, which means you cannot and should not cram in all the possible metrics in the world.
Instead, ask the client what they need from a dashboard. A C-level executive will only be interested in the return on investment from different marketing channels, so keep their dashboard short and to the point.
Now is the time to connect the data sources (i.e. the accounts that you manage for a client) with your reporting tool of choice. In Whatagraph, you can connect any marketing channel to our tool in a few minutes. Some of the data sources we support include:
You only need to connect your clients’ accounts once and create a dashboard. Each next time, your dashboard is ready and will be updated with real-time data.
Once your sources are set up, you can get started with building your dashboard. At Whatagraph, we provide plenty of dashboard templates you can use, but these are just starting points for you to build on.
In the Whatagraph, editor, you can customize these dashboards and add and remove widgets and different types of visualizations. That means changing the colors of the report, the elements such as tables and bar charts, the client logos, the date ranges, the custom text and image fields, and much more.
Remember, the dashboard should be unique and tailored to the client’s needs. The great news is, you can create your ideal dashboard once and save it and then reuse it as much as you need to highlight the most important metrics and initiatives, every time.
The beauty of marketing dashboards is that, unlike reports, you can send clients a link to the dashboard and they can open it at any time. So, all you need to do is create the dashboard, set up intervals for when the data is refreshed and the client can click on the link on a random Thursday at 4AM to check up on their Facebook ad performance, for example.
Of course, you can also schedule emails to go out to your clients in Whatagraph. Once per week, once per month, or any other custom time interval - whatever works the best for you and your clients so they can see the channel performance in real time and guide their decision making process.
Now that you know the value of a KPI dashboard, the metrics to include and the best tools you can use to create one, it’s time for the practical part. Here are some examples of marketing dashboards with different use cases that should get you inspired.
Our SEO dashboard template has all the metrics you need to successfully track your clients’ on-page and off-page SEO and content marketing progress. With metrics such as new organic traffic, keyword movements, the conversion rate from organic traffic, new and lost backlinks and many others, this is a comprehensive dashboard that any SEO can use in their work without many changes.
For clients that need a broader scope of services, a digital marketing dashboard covers a wide range of metrics to track their campaign performance. It includes metrics such as bounce rate, conversion rate, organic search traffic, return on ad spend, overall marketing ROI and others.
No matter which email marketing service provider you use, the email marketing dashboard is a great addition to your toolset. It has all the right widgets to show email campaign performance, along with the most important email marketing metrics that clients can understand and act on.
Get a full overview of a client’s social media marketing performance with this social media dashboard. It covers all the aspects you need for relevant and accurate reporting, including organic and paid social media efforts. With a little bit of tweaking, you can create a social media dashboard your clients will love checking out on their own, without digging into complex Excel spreadsheets.
Businesses need a reliable tool to track their most important metrics and KPIs and report the status to management or stakeholders. This metrics dashboard visualizes your cross-channel marketing efforts in a way your colleagues understand. You can use it to increase accountability, prove ROI, and keep everyone in the loop with your department's results.
There are so many metrics you can show in a marketing KPI dashboard: from the success of your email campaigns, the cost of your social media ads, all the way to the ROI of all of your lead generation and marketing activities. As such, these dashboards are valuable tools not just for clients, but also for any marketer, whether they’re in-house or in an agency.
If you’re ready to start reporting on your marketing analytics and need a reliable tool for the job, why not try Whatagraph? You can give it a free spin for 7 days to see if it’s the right fit for you and your clients.
Published on Dec 22 2021
WRITTEN BY
Mile ZivkovicMile is the head of content at Whatagraph in charge of all content and communications for Whatagraph’s marketing data platform. A marketing heavy with almost a decade of SaaS industry experience, Mile has managed multiple content marketing teams without losing an ounce of his writing passion. The author behind some of the most-read pieces on our blog.
By submitting this form, you agree to our privacy policy