Tools

Choosing Marketing Dashboards for Performance Tracking

CopyPress

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

To make the most of all the juicy data available for marketers in the business world, teams rely on marketing dashboards for performance tracking. After all, anything you measure, you can improve. Marketing dashboards summarize all the data your company collects and filters it all into one place. With a centralized data network, you can customize your dashboards to track different areas of your business more effectively. In this article, we dive into using marketing dashboards for performance tracking by looking at:

• What Types of Performance Do Marketing Dashboards Track?
• Advantages of Marketing Dashboards for Performance Tracking
• 4 Digital Marketing Dashboards To Streamline Performance Tracking

What Types of Performance Do Marketing Dashboards Track?

Marketing dashboards track any metrics your team identifies as central to your strategy. For example, if you’re looking to monitor an SEO campaign, you could use your dashboard to watch the total number of backlinks earned, the content’s current ranking position, and the number of clicks you receive to the content across any period. No matter what aspect of your marketing campaigns you want to track, a customized dashboard allows you to do so.

But if you want the most accurate data for a variety of marketing needs, one dashboard may not be enough. You can have distinct dashboards for different campaigns, besides an overall one that outlines key performance indicators (KPIs) from across the department. As you can see in the below image from DataBox, marketing teams use, on average, between two and 10 marketing dashboards every day to get a clearer picture of how all their campaigns are running.

Image via DataBox

No matter how many dashboards you use, use them to track performance metrics like:

• Bounce rate
• Page views
• Website visitors
• New and unique visitors
• Referral traffic
• Backlinks
• Engagement

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

Advantages of Marketing Dashboards for Performance Tracking

Marketing dashboards allow teams to get clear summaries of all of their campaign data in one place. Once you integrate checking a marketing dashboard into your daily routine, it provides an invaluable array of benefits, like:

Tracing Developments Over Time

Marketing dashboards update automatically. Instead of providing fixed reports, dashboards shift and change as new information comes in from all your channels and sources. Real-time dashboards paint a live picture of the current state of your marketing campaigns. Most dashboards have filter options that let you compare how this real-time data changed over a period. These features let you generate fixed marketing reports to use during strategy and audit meetings.

Improving Data Visibility

Did you know, across the marketing industry, around 20% of every team’s total budget goes directly toward understanding data? While raw data might have lots to tell us, it doesn’t help if we can’t make sense of it meaningfully. A marketing dashboard allows businesses to visualize data in a way that makes it useful.

Increasing Automation and Efficiency

When you configure your marketing dashboards correctly, you get a view that shows a natural flow of data across all channels and platforms. Instead of inputting figures manually, your metrics appear in the right sections of your dashboards, in real-time. From there, the dashboard produces neat visualizations you can use to better understand your campaigns.

Automation is one of the biggest advantages that marketing dashboards bring to the table. They reduce your employees’ workload, which increases team efficiency. Beyond that, automatic updates provide real-time insight. If there is a sudden change, your marketing team will know about it immediately and be able to respond accordingly.

Improving Decision Making

Image via DataBox

Out of all the benefits of using a marketing dashboard, 75% of small businesses state that decision-making is one of their central advantages. With data comes clarity. That clarity provides a much-needed level of objectivity to decision-making in marketing. By relying on accurate, up-to-date data from marketing dashboards, your team can make educated decisions about how to move forward with each campaign and plan strategy for the next.

4 Digital Marketing Dashboards To Streamline Performance Tracking

Depending on how you plan to use your marketing dashboards, there are several types available. We’ve compiled a short list of potential candidates to add to your marketing stack, specifically for performance tracking. These tools cover different styles of dashboards in terms of purpose and the metrics that they offer:

1. Looker Studio (Formerly Google Data Studio)

The Looker Studio dashboard allows you to pull information from many digital sources at the same time. As a part of the Google ecosystem, you’re able to integrate data from Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Ads, and a range of other tools. Beyond Google, you can also use Data Studio to pull from platforms like Facebook Ads, Amazon, Mailchimp, and a range of other common marketing channels.

Depending on what marketing actions you want to track, you can customize which data points take center stage and how your team views it. Google Data Studio is the best choice for marketing teams that are just diving into data analytics and want a structured experience to get started.

Related: Everything You Need To Know About Google Data

2. SEMRush

SEMrush is an SEO tool that tells you more about how your website performs on search engine results pages (SERPs) and with search engine bots and crawlers. It can tell you more information about things that fall under the SEO umbrella, like:

• SERP content positioning
• Keyword strength
• Competitor ranking statistics
• Backlinks

SEMRush pulls data from leading search engines, like Google and Bing, in order to deliver up-to-date information. If you’re looking to analyze your site’s performance over time and push toward that number one spot on Google, this is an excellent tool for you.

3. Whatagraph

Whatagraph is an all-in-one marketing analytics dashboard that brings together social media, paid ads, and SEO information. Beyond its function as a real-time digital marketing dashboard, Whatagraph shines when creating static marketing reports. This dashboard solution has customizable views and a range of tools to help with automation and live reporting. It’s a wonderful all-in-one dashboard tool. Whatagraph is great for marketing teams that want a convenient performance-tracking solution and will pay for that convenience.

4. Cyfe

For marketing teams on a tight budget, Cyfe is one of the more affordable paid dashboard solutions. But just because it comes with a lower price tag doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice outstanding features. This cost-effective tool allows marketing teams to access web analytics, SEO features, email marketing updates, and paid ad information all at once.

The dashboard’s data visualization tools are one of the primary draws to the platform. They include sleek and easy-to-understand tables that are easy for your team to navigate and understand. Keep in mind, Cyfe has some downsides. The program isn’t available on mobile devices. Cyfe is also numbers intensive. If you want to track qualitative metrics with your dashboard, you’ll need another program.

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Lauren Oliver

Digital Marketing Manager at CopyPress

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