Marketing Dashboards: Guide and Examples

A marketing dashboard is a reporting tool that aggregates key marketing metrics and performance indicators. It presents these data in a clear, single-page view, enabling marketers to monitor progress and adjust strategies efficiently.

To view or create a marketing dashboard of your own, you need to have the right tool in your martech stack. Many comprehensive marketing management software platforms offer dashboard options, as do many free marketing analytics options, like Google Analytics. 

In this guide, we will cover what a marketing dashboard is, what benefits it has, how it is used, different types of marketing dashboards, and how to create one using Wrike.Try Wrike for free

Marketing dashboard examples

Marketing dashboards can be difficult to envision without examples. The selection of marketing dashboard examples below should give you a sense of what you can include in your dashboard and how they can help you visualize your marketing projects and hit your goals. 

• Campaign management dashboard: Marketing campaign dashboards will track metrics related to a particular marketing campaign. For instance, a product launch campaign dashboard would include analytics from organic and earned media channels, social media ads, website conversion rates, and other marketing-attributed ROI. 
• Digital marketing dashboard: Digital marketing dashboards include website performance, social media analytics, email marketing, ad performance, and revenue.
• SEO dashboard: An SEO dashboard is essential for tracking your website’s search engine performance. It includes metrics such as keyword rankings, organic traffic, and backlink analysis.
• Marketing KPI dashboard: A marketing KPI dashboard tracks key metrics like customer growth, revenue growth, and marketing-attributed ROI.
• Marketing analytics dashboard: This dashboard broadly analyzes your overall marketing efforts. It differs from a marketing metrics dashboard that tracks specific KPIs like conversion rates.
• CMO dashboard: A CMO marketing dashboard gives a visual overview of the key metrics across the company’s marketing activities. This should include lead generation, website performance, social media, and email marketing.

• Email marketing dashboard: Track open rates, click-through rates, and other key email marketing data to gauge the success of your email campaigns.
• Lead generation dashboard: This dashboard tracks the effectiveness of lead generation efforts, providing marketing insights into which channels generate the most leads and how well those leads convert.

What are the benefits of a marketing dashboard? 

Why would a marketer create a data dashboard? A marketing dashboard allows marketers of any level to quickly, easily, and succinctly view the metrics and analytics that matter to them. Marketing dashboards save considerable time that marketers would lose if they were switching apps and platforms to view social media analytics, website analytics, or campaign metrics separately. 

Marketing dashboards also allow members of a marketing team to view key performance metrics (KPIs) and campaign data in real time. This is especially important for managers, who need to track the marketing campaign’s success and make quick decisions to adjust marketing tactics or reallocate resources depending on the relative success of one metric or channel over another. 

These tools are easily customizable, allowing marketers to monitor unique metrics on different campaigns without hassle. Managers can personalize their dashboards, reporting functionality, and regularity, allowing them to tailor the data to specific needs and communicate with stakeholders as quickly as needed. 

Marketing dashboards typically use data visualization tools, such as charts and graphs, which make it easier to understand complex data and identify patterns.

What problems can a marketing dashboard alleviate? 

When used correctly, marketing dashboards can alleviate a range of problems your marketing team might face, from siloed communication to misunderstanding customer behavior. Here are a few ways a marketing dashboard can supercharge your marketing department: 

• Enhanced visibility: Marketing dashboards greatly enhance a marketer’s ability to see the status of their team’s and their own activities without having to spend time checking in with individual team members.  
• Increased efficiency: Generating reports and viewing metrics in different platforms sucks up time from any marketer’s busy schedule. A marketing dashboard cuts out that inefficiency, displaying metrics from different channels in the same place for easy viewing. 
• Real-time customer data: Marketing dashboards update constantly, giving marketers a real-time view of customer behavior, website traffic, and even lead generation status. 
• Better decision making and forecasting: Having swathes of data at hand and easy to view makes decision making and forecasting faster and simpler. Managers or CMOs are able to drill down into finer details or get a broad sense of various metrics, informing decisions that can move the team toward achieving department-wide goals. 
• Enhanced KPI monitoring: Keeping KPIs front and center can greatly improve how well they’re met across the entire marketing team. Additionally, marketing dashboards can help marketers get a better understanding of bottlenecks or problems that could be preventing them from reaching KPIs.

How is a marketing dashboard used?

Members of the marketing team will use marketing dashboards in different ways. How each member uses a marketing dashboard varies depending on the metrics they track. Some team members need to keep a near-constant eye on the metrics they’re following, while others use a marketing dashboard to get a weekly or monthly sense of campaign or project success. 

Marketers can set up bespoke and customized dashboards that incorporate the data they need to see on a regular basis. For instance, a social media specialist would set up a marketing dashboard that could provide analytics produced from an ongoing social media campaign. 

Viewing engagement and click-through rates and sharing the data with team members can help a social media marketer realistically assess the success of a particular campaign performance and adjust strategy preemptively if the campaign is heading for a stumbling block.

Who typically uses a marketing dashboard? 

As seen in the examples at the start of this guide, many different members of the marketing department can and should use marketing dashboards.

• Chief marketing officer (CMO): A CMO would use a marketing dashboard to pull in various forms of data to get a clear picture of the success of the organization’s entire marketing operation. These insights would help them lead the overall strategic direction of the organization’s marketing efforts. They would benefit from a marketing dashboard tool that provides a high-level overview of key metrics across marketing channels and helps identify anomalies, outliers, or areas for improvement to optimize the company’s marketing efforts.

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• Marketing project manager: A marketing project manager would benefit from a marketing dashboard tool that provides detailed metrics on project progress. This would help them identify any upcoming risks, schedule conflicts, or resource scarcity and plan proactively to mitigate them. A marketing dashboard empowers marketing project managers to identify star players in their teams, note each member’s strengths, and work with them in the best ways to get the best results and deliver successful marketing projects.

• Marketing analyst: A marketing analyst is responsible for analyzing marketing performance data and providing insights to inform and improve the current marketing strategies. Analysts would benefit from using unified marketing dashboard tools that provide relevant, curated metrics aligned with the organization’s goals.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) manager: An SEO manager is responsible for improving a company’s search engine rankings and online visibility. These marketing professionals would benefit from a dashboard tool that provides drilled-down metrics on website traffic, search engine rankings, and backlink analysis. This would help them identify opportunities for improvement and optimize their SEO efforts to achieve set goals. 
• Digital marketing manager: Digital marketers use marketing dashboards to track metrics and measure their performance against the assigned goals and metrics they are responsible for. This may include website management, social media, email marketing, and PPC or online advertising. 

What should a marketing dashboard include?

A marketing dashboard should include any and all metrics a marketer needs to view to better understand and reach their own KPIs, or to track the work within their remit. A marketing dashboard would typically include a selection of the following: 

• Website performance: From bounce rates to time on site, a digital marketing dashboard usually includes website performance analytics. 
• Traffic sources: You’ll especially want to track the traffic sources driving visitors to your website, including social media, organic search, and paid advertising. 
• Social media metrics: Instead of focusing solely on social media follower numbers, make sure you have a dashboard widget for tracking the effectiveness of calls to action (CTAs).
• Conversion funnel: Most dashboards, including Wrike, include a conversion funnel with data pulled from a platform like Salesforce that can track leads, opportunities, and wins. 
• Digital ad information: Digital marketers can track paid search engine advertising campaigns, and view the data in real time. This allows marketers to pick up on trends or successful ads in order to optimize them. 
• Email marketing information: Marketing dashboards can also include email marketing information, including open, click, and unsubscribe rates. 

This article was originally published at Wrike.com, by author Christine Royston.
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