Tools

Digital Marketing Dashboards: What They Are and How To Use Them

CopyPress

November 21, 2022 (Updated: March 8, 2023)

Whether you love or hate dashboard tools, in the digital age, they’re here to stay. Digital marketing dashboards are a group of central tools that marketing teams use in their day-to-day operations. In this article, we dive into the features of these vital data processing and visualization tools, explain exactly how to use them, and touch on some great examples you can use for inspiration:

• What Are Digital Marketing Dashboards?
• Marketing Dashboards vs. Marketing Reports
• Types of Digital Marketing Dashboards for Your Business
• What To Look for in a Digital Marketing Dashboard

What Are Digital Marketing Dashboards?

Digital marketing dashboards are data visualization tools that allow you to pull together all of your company data into one convenient location. Within each dashboard, you have an overview of your marketing analytics, performance, and live-data streams. Depending on your specific goals or targets, you can often customize your digital marketing dashboard to make sure it displays the exact information you’re looking for. For example, if there are specific marketing KPIs that are integral to your current strategy, then you can feature them within your dashboard.

Digital marketing dashboards can take many forms. Most businesses have custom-built platforms which allow them greater control over the content. Other businesses use third-party tools like Google Search Console. As digital marketing has become more complicated, the amount of data we need to deal with has increased equally. That’s why it’s important to account for specific data factors within your digital marketing dashboard, like:

• Web traffic sources: This metric displays data about which digital channels or campaigns drive traffic to your website.
• Funnel conversion rates: The metric displays data about how many conversions you get throughout the marketing funnel, at each stage.
• Goal completion rate: This metric shows which of your marketing goals you achieve and how fast you get there.
• Cost per action: This metric shows how much of your budget you spend on each area of your marketing plan.

Marketing Dashboards vs. Marketing Reports

Although marketing dashboards and marketing reports serve a similar function, don’t confuse the two. These two tools differ regarding the specificity of the data. Marketing dashboards serve a specific function, such as tracking a grouped set of data. Marketing reports show the information drawn from a marketing dashboard for a specific period.

Beyond that, reports are closed documents. You create them once and they don’t update or change unless you create another. Marketing dashboards integrate directly with data sources and provide live, up-to-date information. A report is what you would give to a C-suite executive every few months; a dashboard is what you would use every day.

Types of Digital Marketing Dashboards for Your Business

Marketing is a vast field with many niche areas. Not all dashboards cover the same information. There is a range of marketing dashboards available for you to explore, depending on what data you want to inspect further:

Performance Tracking Dashboards

A marketing performance dashboard is one of the most common types you encounter. Performance tracking dashboards give an overall view of all the distinct elements of your business at that moment. Think of the performance tracking dashboard as your home base. Instead of hyper-specific information, this dashboard gives you everything you need to know at a glance. Most of the time, the main metrics shown on this dashboard reflect the KPIs for your current campaigns. You might find data such as:

• Conversion rates
• Sales funnel leakage
• Total transactions
• Total revenue
• Cost per click
• Campaign ROI

Website Performance Dashboards

A website performance dashboard contains all the website-specific data that you need to track your brand’s digital performance. Depending on your business, you can customize the key information on this page. For example, a news outlet’s website would have different metric widgets on its web performance dashboard than an eCommerce store. Beyond the industry-specifics, most web dashboards include information about:

• Page views
• Pages per session
• Unique visitors
• Returning visitors
• Total clicks
• Bounce rate

Aside from pulling data directly from your domain, website dashboards can also lift data from third-party programs like Google Analytics.

Search Engine Optimization Analytics Dashboards

Marketing teams live and breathe SEO, and, as an extension, SEO analytics. Your content’s search engine results page (SERP) ranking can be a make-or-break aspect of your business. According to WordStream, the first page of Google receives around 71% of all web traffic. If your content isn’t on there, you won’t be getting much business.

One of the largest hurdles new businesses face is creating a strategy to push their content up the rankings. An SEO analytics dashboard includes everything your team needs to track keyword rankings, search engine positioning, and related metrics. While not quite as in-depth as a website dashboard, SEO dashboards also include information like the total clicks on your site, unique visitors, bounce rate, and other website-specific information.

You may also track SEO data about your competitors that you want to appear in your dashboard. These elements may show how your SEO strategies compare to those publishers trying to rank for the same keywords. To get a head start on your competitors’ SEO analysis, request your free content marketing analysis report from CopyPress. The report provides insight into the main keywords your competitors are targeting. From there, you can formulate your own SEO strategy plan, align it with your dashboard, and work to move up the rankings.

Social Media Dashboards

Your social media dashboard reflects your brand’s current performance across all online profiles. On this dashboard, you find metrics like:

• Follower counts
• Engagement rates
• Click-through rates
• Social interactions
• Channel traffic

Most social media dashboards have both a general view and a platform-specific overview. These features let you look at your social media success as a whole, or narrow in on specific channels to track their effectiveness.

Email Marketing Dashboards

Email marketing dashboards help your team keep track of its email campaigns and further streamline this valuable marketing technique. The Hubspot State of Inbound Marketing 2022 report detailed the main email metrics companies track:

Image via HubSpot

These are likely the same email metrics you’ll find and be able to track in your email marketing dashboard.

Ad Campaign Dashboards

Besides organic marketing campaigns, most companies also run a range of paid campaigns in order to boost traffic to their channels and content. That’s why marketing teams often use ad campaign dashboards to collect all the relevant advertising data in one place. Ad campaign dashboards contain information about:

• ROI per ad
• Cost per click (CPC)
• Topic distribution
• Ad demographic data

Depending on which PPC platform you use, like Facebook, Google Ads, or a social-platform-specific strategy, your exact metrics will probably vary. With a rise in influencer marketing, you may choose to use a “paid campaign” dashboard instead of an ad campaign dashboard to account for various types of paid promotion metrics.

What To Look for in a Digital Marketing Dashboard

When measuring the success of a digital campaign, the core goals vary by brand, niche, and strategy. For example, if you’re running a social media campaign, then engagement metrics may be a priority. Alternatively, if you’re tracking email marketing, then open and engagement rates take point. In order to flit between different metrics and campaigns, here are the features you should look for in your dashboards:

Flexibility

As previously mentioned, depending on your campaign goals, the information you need to monitor shifts. A great marketing dashboard has the flexibility to display a variety of metrics for any kind of analysis. The dashboard should let you mix and match different data sets, exchange figures, or change its focus as your brand grows and priorities change.

Data Sources

The ability to pull data from multiple sources and compare that data is a key hallmark of a digital marketing dashboard. Without the ability to move through distinct sets of data and compare them, your team risks creating data silos. Data silos obstruct the flow of information from one department or group to another. Silos typically happen when certain teams forget to share their data or they share it in a location that isn’t universally accessible.

By using a digital marketing dashboard, you’re able to defeat data silos by pulling all your information to one central location. Instead of having to search for specific facts, your marketing team can access any information it needs from the dashboard.

Ease of Use

Everyone on your team isn’t a data analytics whiz. While most of your team can likely read, extrapolate, and interpret data, help them out wherever you can. Look for dashboards with a large amount of automation. If a digital marketing dashboard forces your team to do manual work, then you’re slowing down the productivity of your department. Even if it only takes a few moments to do some math to figure out a final number, that takes away from the efficiency of the tool.

Be sure to look for dashboards that are easy to use, clearly present their findings, and automate as much of the process as possible. Believe us, your team will thank you.

Pair Your Digital Marketing Dashboard with Human Expertise

As long as your marketing dashboard is flexible, can integrate with all of your other marketing tools, and is easy for your team to use and manipulate, you’re on to a winner. But the best marketing still has the human touch. If you want content that delivers the best metrics to your dashboard, contact CopyPress.

With years of experience, we help you build an effective marketing ecosystem. From content creation to pinpointing the best tools for you to use to the most efficient ways of tracking, campaign data, we can do it all. Reach out today to schedule a 1:1 marketing strategy call.

Lauren Oliver

Digital Marketing Manager at CopyPress

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