Marketing Dashboards: Consolidating Your Metrics

As a marketer or a business owner, you are tracking data from a lot of different places. You have your website traffic in Google Analytics, your search performance in Google Search Console, your ad performance in Google Ads, and your engagement metrics on your social media platforms.

Jumping between all of these different platforms every day to check your performance can be time-consuming and inefficient. A marketing dashboard is the solution to this problem.

A marketing dashboard is a reporting tool that connects to all of your different data sources and consolidates your most important Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) into a single, easy-to-read, and often interactive visual display.

Why is a Marketing Dashboard So Valuable?

• It Saves a Huge Amount of Time: A dashboard automates the reporting process. Instead of manually pulling data from five different platforms every month, you can have all of your key metrics automatically updated in one place.
• It Provides a Holistic, At-a-Glance View: It allows you to see the big picture of your marketing performance in a single view, which makes it much easier to spot trends and to see how your different channels are working together.
• It Improves Decision-Making: By making your most important data easily accessible, a dashboard helps you and your team to make faster and more informed, data-driven decisions.
• It Simplifies Reporting: A well-designed dashboard is the perfect tool for sharing your results with your team, your boss, or your clients in a way that is clear, concise, and easy to understand.

The Best Tool for the Job: Google Looker Studio

For most small and medium-sized businesses, the best tool for creating a marketing dashboard is Google Looker Studio (formerly known as Google Data Studio).

• Why it's great:
  • It's completely free.
  • It has native connectors that allow it to seamlessly pull in data from all of your other Google products, including Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Ads, and even Google Sheets.
  • It has a user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface for building your reports.
  • Your dashboards are interactive and can be easily shared with a link.

What to Include in Your Marketing Dashboard

Your dashboard should not be a data dump. The goal is to create a high-level overview of your most important metrics.

A good marketing dashboard might be broken down into a few key sections:

1. The High-Level Overview

This section should be at the very top and should show your main business-level KPIs for the last 30 days (compared to the previous 30 days).

• Total Website Traffic
• Total Leads / Conversions
• Total Ad Spend
• Cost Per Lead / Acquisition (CPA)

2. Website Traffic Breakdown

This section should show where your traffic is coming from.

• A pie chart showing the breakdown of your traffic by channel (Organic Search, Direct, Social, etc.).
• A line chart showing the trend of your organic search traffic over time.

3. SEO Performance

This section should pull in data from Google Search Console.

• Total Clicks and Impressions from organic search.
• A table showing your top 10 organic search queries.

4. Paid Ad Performance

This section should pull in data from Google Ads.

• Total Clicks, Impressions, and Click-Through Rate (CTR).
• Total Conversions from your ad campaigns.
• Your Cost Per Conversion.

Best Practices for Dashboard Design

• Keep it to a Single Page: The goal is an "at-a-glance" view. Try to fit all of your most important information onto a single page.
• Use Data Visualizations: Use charts and graphs to make your data easy to interpret.
• Label Everything Clearly: Give each chart and metric a clear title.
• Think About Your Audience: Who is this dashboard for? A dashboard for a CEO should be very high-level. A dashboard for a marketing manager might be more detailed.

Conclusion

A marketing dashboard is an essential tool for any data-driven marketer. It transforms your disparate data sources into a single, cohesive, and actionable report. By taking the time to build a simple dashboard in a tool like Google Looker Studio, you can save yourself countless hours of manual reporting and empower your team to make smarter, faster decisions that will drive your business forward.