KPI Dashboard

What is a KPI dashboard?

KPI dashboard is a marketing reporting tool that displays KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), marketing metrics, and analytics in a visualised format. They include so many different metrics from the different tools and channels your business uses. From social media performance metrics, website analytics, SEO tools, CRM systems, and many more, making it easier to monitor the progress on the go.

Instead of having to waste a tremendous amount of time and resources dedicated to reporting, you can start using analytics KPI dashboard software that will do the boring job in the background. The KPI dashboards usually provide real-time automatic metrics from all the different platforms you’ve integrated it with. It visualises these numbers in a form of charts, graphs, and tables, making the process of reading the data extremely simplified. This type of reporting can be of a huge help not just when it comes to saving valuable time, but it also helps you understand how well your marketing strategy and tactics are working or where they

The Importance of Having Marketing KPI Dashboards to Support Your Campaigns

In today’s digital era we live in, everything moves so fast. The digital form of businesses and marketing requires the ability to bring decisions even more quickly in order to adapt to the frequent changes. But bringing decisions quickly should not mean drawing fast and uninformed conclusions. Essentially, it’s useful to have control over all the data that comes from your digital marketing activities. And with all the different channels available out there, we are aware of how much of a hustle it might be to keep track of every different piece of information that comes in.

On average, a common marketing team uses at least 8 different channels or tools in their everyday work. All of them provide different sets of information in a form of data. Having one centralised place for reporting will be of huge help to gain a detailed understanding of all these different sets of data and have a “bird’s eye” view of how things are progressing.

Every marketer needs to know where their marketing efforts are leading as this ensures them that what they do provides value. The best way to do this is by appropriate reporting that simplifies the process of reading the data. This kind of reporting that combines multiple data sources in one place is possible with a marketing KPI dashboard.

When should I use an Analytics KPI dashboard?

KPI dashboard is relevant for any business type or size and should be used by both small and large businesses. A big part of every day’s work in any marketing team involves reporting and reviewing the results from the ongoing campaigns. Nowadays, we are faced with mountains of metrics coming from the various channels and tools we use. And we are all well aware of how huge the value of these metrics is, but on the other hand, the amount of time that it consumes for tracking can be really annoying.

So in case you’re one of these businesses that use multiple channels to deliver your, or your client’s marketing campaigns, you should consider including a KPI dashboard within your day-to-day activities.

As has been noted that it provides a visualised overview of all these metrics in one place, you can imagine how much your decision-making process will be improved. With a glance look, you can see all the ups and downs in your campaign progression, what works well and where your attention should be focused. It cuts down the tremendous amount of time that you’re spending on analysing all the different data and as a matter of fact, you’ll bring a better-informed decision.

As we are all aware, one of the crucial factors for ensuring successful marketing strategies is data-driven optimisation. An automated KPI dashboard will help you and your team to stay on top of your metrics. You’ll be amazed at how much your reporting process will be streamlined, and you’ll have control over your data.

What are some common KPI metrics used in digital marketing dashboards?

Measuring the right marketing KPIs is fundamental in readjusting your digital marketing strategy. And measuring the right ones allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts meanwhile enforcing your strategy over the long term.

Since you’re tracking performance across different campaigns and platforms, you don’t want to get lost in the complicated, long reports. It’s equally important to choose effective marketing KPIs for tracking, which will provide the relevant information in accordance with your marketing or business goals. However, when it comes to digital marketing, there are some crucial metrics you should be following and pay very close attention to.

For a clearer overview, we will break down the KPIs in a few different areas: 

  • Social Media Marketing KPIs
  • Influencer Marketing KPIs
  • Content Marketing KPIs
  • Email Marketing KPIs
  • B2B Marketing KPIs
  • SEO KPIs
  • PPC KPIs

To dig deeper into each of these areas’ most common KPIs, we have the following:

Social Media Marketing KPIs

These days, businesses of all sizes and types use social media to spread the word about their brands, products, and services. Whether it’s Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, social media is one of the most effective and free channels for engaging with your audience. 

Setting smart social media KPIs will help you and your team focus on the metrics that really matter and provide valuable insights. Moreover, to effectively track how your social media strategy is meeting your business and marketing goals, you should be following the right KPIs. Here are the most important ones that matter the most:

  • Engagement
  • Likes
  • Reach
  • Impressions
  • Follower growth rate
  • Click-through-rate
  • Click-through volume
  • Demographics
  • Conversions
  • Leads
  • Interactions
  • Unique visitors
  • Sentiment
  • Mentions
  • Clicks
  • Click-Through-Rate (CTR) – Paid ads
  • Cost per Click (CPC) – Paid ads
  • Cost per Mile (CPM) – Paid ads
  • Cost per Conversion – Paid ads

Influencer Marketing KPIs

Influencer Marketing is constantly growing its popularity and becoming a more and more attractive form of promoting your brand, products, or services. People follow and trust influencers from specific niches and brands can partner with them to promote their products or services in an even more authentic way. There are a few different KPIs that can help you keep a track of the progress of your influencer marketing campaign. The essential ones to focus on are:

  • Conversion rates
  • Impressions and reach
  • Referral traffic
  • Audience growth
  • Engagement

Having an overview of these metrics helps you identify the success of your collaboration with the influencers, whether they provide the relevant results, and help you reach out to the right audiences.

Content Marketing KPIs

Content is the part of your overall marketing strategy that helps you share your voice in the right way with the desired audience. It is the main drive that supports all the rest of your marketing efforts. It’s a long-term play where you build a relationship with your audience and you may not see immediate results. However, you should continually check its results in order to identify some patterns and be able to maximise the outcome of your efforts.

Some of the most important KPIs when it comes to content marketing is the following:

  • Overall traffic
  • Time on page
  • Click-through-rate (CTR)
  • Scroll depth
  • Bounce rate
  • Comments
  • Social shares
  • Links
  • Organic rankings
  • Leads
  • Conversions

Email Marketing KPIs

Email marketing ranks as one of the most effective marketing channels. Through email marketing, you can communicate to your audience and customers in a direct way to promote new products or services, earn new leads, increase your sales, or simply maintain engagement with your current customers.

The success of your email marketing depends fully on you since there’s no algorithm that defines your reach. Depending on the goals you’ve set with your email marketing strategy, the importance of some metrics may vary. However, there are some most common ones that we recommend to be closely monitored:

  • Open rate
  • Total open rate vs. unique open rate
  • Open time
  • Bounce rate
  • Deliverability
  • Unsubscribers
  • Lead rate
  • Conversions

B2B Marketing KPIs

As a process of establishing collaboration with other businesses, B2B marketing is an essential part of expanding your business. It might be challenging for B2B marketing campaigns to define the right performance tracking strategy. However, it shouldn’t be complicated if you choose the right KPIs to measure.

The best b2b marketing strategies generate qualified leads which eventually get handed over to the sales team.

Here are some crucial KPIs to keep an eye on for your B2B marketing campaigns:

  • Leads
  • Lead rate
  • Conversions per activity
  • Conversion rate
  • MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads)
  • SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads)
  • Sales close rate
  • Sales cycle
  • Customer lifetime value (LTV)

SEO KPIs

It’s easy to get lost in the pool of SEO metrics. Google itself, for instance, uses over 200 ranking factors in its algorithm. On-page optimisation, domain authority, backlinks, content marketing, SERPs – there are plenty of daily tasks that require your attention.

As we know, SEO is a long-term game and results can’t be seen overnight. The ability to frequently and accurately evaluate your progress will allow you to review tactics that may not be working or eventually focus more on the aspects of your campaign that have proven to make improvements in traffic, sales, or lead generations.

It’s best to stay focused on a few KPIs to start monitoring your SEO efforts. Here are some that we see as most important:

  • Organic traffic
  • Search rankings
  • Search Visibility
  • Backlinks
  • Backlink referral traffic
  • Internal links
  • Organic CTR
  • Domain authority
  • Cost per Click (CPC)
  • Conversions
  • Return on SEO investment (ROI)

PPC KPIs

Picking the right KPIs for your PPC (pay per Click) campaigns can help you assure ‌you’re spending your budget effectively.

The great thing about PPC is that we have data in real-time and we can make changes on the go. Being focused on the right KPIs will, of course, simplify the process of analysing the data and bringing informed decisions. Here are some fundamental ones you should include in your daily reporting:

  • Impressions
  • Clicks
  • Click-Through Rate (CTR)
  • Cost per Click (CPC)
  • Conversions
  • Conversion rate
  • Cost per Acquisition (CPA)

The advantages of automating your reporting with KPI dashboards

KPIs are one of the most valuable assets that digital channels provide. As such, we should use them in their full potential. But with the tones of data coming through from all the different channels your business uses, we know how exhausting it can be to be jumping across the spreadsheets, from one chart to another one.

Help you stay focused

KPI automation tools are designed to simplify this process while leaving you the time to focus on those tasks that actually provide results. You will eventually have more time to analyse these data more closely, optimise your campaigns and produce valuable results. If you use various platforms for your or your client’s campaigns, you have most likely, at least once, been stuck creating spreadsheets and collecting all these data. That’s where the need for automated KPI reporting comes in.

So, in the first instance, the time you spend on copy-pasting or downloading various data points and putting them together can be invested into the more important tasks of planning and executing your activities.

Analyse Data in Real Time

KPI dashboard template allows you to organize, visualise, filter, and analyse your most important key metrics. Instead of going through various, complex datasets, you will be able to translate these data in easy to understand formats.

Increase Effectiveness

This leads us to the next important benefit that an automated KPI reporting dashboard provides, and that’s the ability to respond to changes or issues in a timely fashion. The data from all your active platforms are synced in real-time, giving you the opportunity to identify whether your campaign is moving in the desired direction and if some changes need to be applied.

Save Time

A great portion of the time that marketing teams have is spent on preparing reports and trying to read them. Automated KPI reporting dashboard collects the data accurately and faster, with the result that hours of time are saved each week, it allows you to focus on what you do best – and that’s managing well-performing campaigns that produce real results. This will increase your overall effectiveness, ensuring you’re running successful campaigns.

List of Marketing KPI Dashboard advantages

In a nutshell, these are the most important advantages your business will experience when you start using automated KPI reporting dashboards:

  • Save time
  • Increase effectiveness
  • Analyse the data in real-time
  • Bringing informed decisions in a timely fashion
  • Monitor your progress more closely
  • Detect any challenges before they affect your plans
  • Enabling you to focus on things that actually provide results
  • Eliminate human error

What are the best KPI dashboard tools or solutions for marketing reports?

There are plenty of KPI dashboard tools available out there. From simple metric-tracking tools to advanced business intelligence solutions they all help you gain better control of your data. Some of them are straightforward, and easy to set up and use, while some are more complex and might come with more advantages.

While the main goal of the marketing KPI dashboard software solutions is to make your life simpler when it comes to reporting and reading metrics, some of them really can be complicated. That’s why choosing the right tool suitable for your needs is important.

Below we will review the 8 top-rated, based on our customer’s feedback:

  1. Marketing Reports
  2. Databox
  3. Google Data Studio
  4. Google Analytics
  5. Google Sheets
  6. Tableau
  7. Geckoboard
  8. Whatagraph

Marketing Reports

Our clients pointed to Marketing Reports as their first choice for a KPI reporting dashboard tool because of its simplicity. The dashboards are quite intuitive, easy to set up, and easy to navigate through. You can choose from the pre-build reports or create a custom one. You have the opportunity to do cross-channel reporting and combine stats from multiple sources for better decision-making. All of the reports are synced in real-time, and are mobile-ready, giving you accessibility to your data on the go.

Databox

Databox is a Business Analytics platform built to help you understand what’s going on with your business. It collects KPIs from cloud services, spreadsheets, and databases in one place.

They provide 3 paid plans where the prices vary mainly depending on the number of data source connections, dashboards, and users. Databox also provides a free plan which unfortunately is limited to only 3 data source connections.

Google Data Studio

Google Data Studio is a free online reporting tool from Google. It converts data into customizable informative reports and dashboards. You can connect your data from various sources, like Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google BigQuery, and other digital platforms. Despite the important benefits of it being free and easy to use, there are of course some limitations, like lack of real-time updates, no API or automation, and report creation can take too long.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is also a free tool from Google, build to measure website traffic. It tracks users’ behavior on your website giving you valuable data insights into your site and visitors. However, Google Analytics alone can’t do much beyond website analytics. Combined together with another reporting tool like Marketing Reports it can work miracles. You can analyse your website performance together with the data coming from the other platforms and use Google Analytics to its full potential.

Google Sheets

Using Google Sheets is probably the most common way that people use to create some kind of report before they decide to switch to a tool that offers more advantages. From exporting the data and working with it manually, to using add-ons that can generate this data for you, there are plenty of options that Google Sheets provide. Aside from the many limitations, like the inability to fully automate your reports, or to sync the data in real-time, the end goal of generating graphs and charts to analyse trends can be met by simply using Google Sheets.

Tableau

Tableau is a very efficient tool to use for data visualization. It collects data from internal sources and allows you to quickly create interactive visualisations through graphs, charts, or tables. Unfortunately, Tableau uses only internal data sources and is unable to pull data from external apps. Another challenge you may face with Tableau is that it’s not so easy to set up and you might require more advanced tech skills. If you wish to overcome these challenges, Marketing Reports is known for its simplicity and integrates with plenty of other apps to automatically sync their data into a single dashboard.

Geckoboard

Geckoboard is another dashboard tool that also pulls data automatically from various external sources. While it’s great that Geckoboard gathers the data in real-time, it lacks the opportunity of sending notifications. This means you’ll need to be checking your dashboard on a regular basis in order to identify whether some downward trends are happening.

Whatagraph

Whatagraph automatically connects the data from other platforms to present it in one place. It provides up-to-date data from websites and social media accounts that you’re managing. Like the other KPI reporting dashboard tools, it allows you to make data-driven decisions on your marketing activities. While Whatagraph excels at creating dashboards on desktop devices, it does not have a separate mobile app that limits your access to your data.

KPI dashboard best practices

Creating the most suitable format for the KPI dashboard can be challenging until you define what will work best for you and your team. Regardless of the metrics chosen for a dashboard report, its purpose will always lie in allowing you to focus on priorities while maximising the results of your campaigns.

KPI dashboard should provide a single view of active processes. Thanks to them, the process of data monitoring can be made much more simple, more intuitive, and more effective. But to come to that stage when you’ll be comfortable that your dashboard serves you well, you first need to make sure that you have the design and format of the dashboard that meets your goals.

In today’s world, there’s no need for advanced tech or design skills to be able to create a vibrant data dashboard. Most of the reporting tools give you the opportunity to choose predefined dashboards, customise them, or design your own from scratch with simple drag and drop techniques.

Best Practices

Regardless of the type of dashboard reports you’re producing, here are some best practices to ensure you’re staying organized, productive, and efficient:

  1. Consider the users: Who’s going to use the dashboard on a daily basis for reading reports? A marketing person trying to identify patterns, or a c-level executive interested in conversions and ROI has different interests and different levels of elaborating the numbers.
  2. Determine your goals: Another key point to have in mind before setting up your dashboard are the goals that you’re aiming to achieve with it. You need to carefully consider what metrics and data sets will bring value to these goals. Understanding what exactly needs to be measured, who will track it, what is the time interval for monitoring, etc.
  3. Choose the right KPIs: Choosing the right Key Performance Indicator (KPIs) for your dashboard is in direct correlation with your goals. Once you determined your goals, it will be easier to identify the most relevant KPIs you’d like to track. 
  4. Keep your dashboards organized: No matter how simple you aim to keep your dashboard, putting all the data on one page can make you messier. Try to split the KPIs into different dashboards, each focused on a different set of metrics and relevant to different users. This way you’ll gain better visibility, and even users can see what’s of interest to them.
  5. Choose the right type of chart: Once you’ve completed the previous steps, it’s time to spend some time on the data visualization part of the reporting process. You’ll need to visually represent your data in a way that’s easy to digest. Depending on what you want to communicate or show, there is a chart type, from line charts, pie charts, or bar graphs, to suit your goals.

Our favorite KPI dashboards

With a reporting tool like Marketing Reports, you have the chance to create as many marketing dashboards as you might need. Below we will review our favorite ones (and most common ones in marketing teams).

General business-related KPIs

  • Management KPI Dashboard
  • Operational KPI Dashboard
  • Marketing Dashboard
  • Lead Generation Dashboard
  • Sales dashboard
  • Financial Dashboard
  • Website Analytics KPI Dashboard
  • CRM Dashboard

Marketing focused

  • Social media dashboards
  • Email marketing dashboards
  • Website Analytics KPI Dashboard
  • Lead Gen