Today, marketing analytics dashboards exist in every business environment to translate and display data in a particular way that is readily available and manageable for the audience.

For instance, a marketing dashboard, in general, will report user behaviour on a company website, followed by measuring the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns. Lastly, track progress on every internal company conversion goal. Marketing analytics dashboards are built to explore one-off data analysis and recurring monthly reports, or sometimes does both.

Here the more significant consideration is your stakeholders. The question is, do they care about the metrics? And even if they do, which ones are the concerning aspects. Are there any relevant trends to look for? The objective is to custom made the dashboard as per requirements; it should be relatable in length and content to the ones who are going to use it most.

Here is the process of creating a marketing dashboard that is both useful and adds value to an enterprise. In general, a marketing dashboard should serve the following purpose:

• Firstly, show KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
• Secondly, present a consolidated by integrating data from various sources
• Thirdly, introducing a way to measure the effectiveness, investments and overall results of the marketing programs
• Last but not least, estimate these metrics and make needful decisions accordingly based on this information

All-new tools are coming up now and then, and with this comes never-ending challenges of integrating the marketing analytics tool and its performance numbers with the rest of the marketing tools.

The following are the six steps to create an effective marketing analytics dashboard:

1. Determine the potential audience

The first and foremost essential step is defining the target or set of audience. Data Visualization and data dashboards, in general, are designed to depict or tell a story, so one needs to know who all are exactly listening to an account. Needless to say, but a well-designed dashboard always tells a compelling story that is followed by linking to actionable KPIs, which will always benefit the viewer.

Different sets of audiences will require different types of dashboards. For instance, an executive will need a dashboard that will help to summarize performance metrics to make informed business decisions; simultaneously, a social media marketer will need a social media dashboard that is capable of consolidating all metrics from various sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to get detailed data on the key social metrics.

2. Set the objectives of the stakeholders

Every dashboard tells a different story, and the need of the hour is to establish both the long and short term objectives of each dashboards. It was determining the stakeholders’ short and long term goals and building different views of data at various levels of granularity.

An important aspect to keep in mind while working on marketing performance dashboards for stakeholders is to depict a powerful story that will eventually provide immediate action with results. The plan is not to visualize data just because it looks fantastic.

Providing connections and insights between the various elements of a marketing strategy to demonstrate the ultimate opportunities for improvement and ROI is the objective.

3. Determine Marketing KPIs

It is essential to determine the vital core metrics for a specific marketing strategy. It is even more crucial as an agency to figure out about the usage of methods to continue with.

Here KPIs include marketing performance metrics for each campaign or program, such as click-through rate, likes, dwell time, clicks, traffic and etc. A KPI can always include the marketing impact metrics to tie performance to business goals like increased brand value or sales and conversions. These KPIs, once identified, can be further analyzed across various dimensions.

Determining your marketing KPI is vital as it allows you to track and convey your value and the value of your team’s efforts in the areas that matter.

4. Provide a unified view by determining Data Sources

Today, the emergence of new marketing platforms has made it much easier for business owners and marketing teams to manage everything. Whether email marketing, website, social media strategy or call tracking, each of the mentioned data sources has its own set of data and metrics. Consolidating them to a single platform is essential to measure the efficiency and performance of every marketing program.

Sometimes it’s tempting to include all data and everything in one single dashboard. To add, don’t ever be guilty of overloaded information. The best possible thing is to determine the required data sources or metrics and defined them.

5. Visualizing the data

A marketing analytics tool is having the potential of providing vast data. One must convey the right message to get the expected result with the concerned marketing analytics dashboard. Ensure it’s easy for every individual in the marketing team to consume and create data that eventually encourages data analysis and discovery.

The real value in visualizing all marketing data is when the marketing team and the necessary tools for understanding enable finding additional insights that might not be seen if the data was kept in its nascent CSV format.

6. Data Integration

A crucial rather critical objective of any analytics dashboard is to integrate and consolidate data into a consistent view using visualization tools. Today for a day-to-day operation, every marketing team is using a plethora of tools that comprise a myriad of metrics. A consolidated marketing dashboard usually is the combination of these multiple data sources into a single source that will be eventually connected to the ultimate ROI and outcomes. Ensure the usage of a tool that can integrate all the data.

Another important aspect is one can miss out on the critical value of data visualization if the reporting tools are not capable of weaving together an excellent story, and of concluding you are missing out on a lot of chapters in the book if in case leaving out essential data sources as simply because you haven’t integrated all of the data on time.

Conclusion

Today, marketing data is simply waiting to make an impact. This piece of the small guide is all about marketing dashboards and the usage of marketing analytics software.

In short, a compilation of all pertinent data about a venue’s marketing efforts makes a marketing dashboard. These digital analytics dashboards give a glance view that quantifies the overall impact of marketing on a business and how marketing initiatives successfully manage to increase sales, customer acquisition, and retention. They are known to cause benefit both from the executive and marketing team.

Naturally, a marketing dashboard is an invaluable asset for adjustments to the sales funnel and making strategic decisions.