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Whitepaper

The Definitive Guide to Marketing Dashboards

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Big data should be a marketer’s best friend. We now know more

about our prospects, customers, campaigns and marketplace than

ever before. Think about the customer data collected today – online

browsing data, click through rates, social media behavior, mobile

device usage, location data, and these are just the tip of the iceberg.

Having more data doesn’t necessarily mean we are getting better at

using that data. The raw material is there but what we do with it is the

challenge.

This document walks marketers through the importance of metrics

and KPIs and then goes through the five secrets to creating powerful

and effective marketing dashboards.

Selecting the scope of the data covers your first two tips and explains

the difference between breadth and depth of data and the power of

the data source mash-up. Having independence to adapt and evolve

your reports without IT intervention will give you the flexibility and

agility you need to be responsive to market and organizational need.

Using presentation tips and accessibility and interactivity will keep

your dashboards alive long after they are taken out of the conference

room.

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Here are the 5 secrets to help you craft an elegant, effective

marketing dashboard:

The Importance of Metrics and KPIs The field of marketing has shifted from a feel-good field of branding

and awareness where success was measured by vague

measurements like how favorably someone thought of your brand, to

a scientific field based on precise metrics and optimizations where

measurements and insight are now mandatory tactics. To keep your

executives calm and your marketing team focused, you need a

marketing dashboard based on key marketing metrics that is used as

the foundation for all decision making.

Regardless of what field of marketing you find yourself dealing with,

whether it be digital marketing, marketing communication, PR or

corporate marketing, marketing metrics, or KPIs (Key Performance

Indicators) generally fall into one of four categories:

1. Consumption metrics –

This is simply how many

people have seen your

campaign or content.

This is the most basic

metric and often as far

as metrics go. In the

online world, this can be measured relatively easily by using free

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tools such as Google Analytics. Common metrics would be page

views, time on page, click through rate or downloads. This can be

slightly more challenging for offline campaigns but can be

measured by in-store visits, in-bound phone calls etc.

2. Social metrics – Social or Sharing metrics measure how viral your

campaign or content is by measuring how often your viewers are

sharing it with their friends and colleagues. Most relevant for

online campaigns, sharing metrics can be measured by looking at

the shares, likes and tweets your content is getting. Often

overrated, sharing metrics might make you look more successful

but if these shares aren’t converting to your end goal, this could

just be a lot of hype.

3. Lead generation metrics – This is where your efforts are starting to

bear fruit. In some companies measuring how much new interest

your campaign or content is generating in terms of new leads

generated could be the end goal with sales taking over from there.

Lead generation metrics can be measured by form fills, calls

recorded or any other call to action your campaign is driving.

Common metrics you will see here are new leads, converted leads

or conversion rates. Often more difficult to track because of a

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user’s meandering, exact source is the only way to attribute

revenue to a specific campaign and this is where tracking

parameters and cookies come into play.

4. Sales metrics – In

many traditional

organizations,

marketing’s impact

is measured up

until new lead is

created at which

point the sales team takes responsibility. In today’s cutting edge

organizations, the entire revenue cycle is measured in one set of

funnel conversions where the team is responsible for the entire

cycle from lead generation to deal closed. Organizations with this

priority are using integrated lead collection, marketing automation

and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools such as

Marketo and Salesforce.com and are continuously measuring and

optimizing the entire cycle. Common metrics measured in these

organizations include conversion rate, lead to close ratio, cost per

lead and lifetime lead value.

Agreeing to and measuring a relevant set of metrics is fundamental to

understanding the success and failure of a campaign and an entire

marketing team. Dashboards that are accessible to all team

members, as well as to management, become the lifeblood of the

marketing team.

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But how often have you presented an agreed upon dashboard only to

be asked for additional data points or for a dissection of the data in

ways you hadn’t anticipated?

The true power of metrics and dashboards is the confidence of having

a single source of truth and the ability to drill down or step back to

view a big picture perspective of the data. Marketers need to develop

a more valuable and insightful dashboard that can be used to

optimize performance and make actionable decisions. This kind of

dashboard needs to provide an accurate summary of the key metrics

and KPIs that quantify the overall impact marketing is having on the

business.

Our team of experienced designers and data scientists have teamed

up to focus on what they believe to be the 5 laws of creating effective

actionable marketing dashboards.

1. Go Deep – In Marketing, History is Everything Marketers are collecting more data than ever and reporting on it,

which is good. Less positive is the way marketers are often forced to

look at the end metrics rather than the velocity or time based metrics.

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According to Denis Pombriant of Social Methods, over two thirds of

marketers do not have the data on hand to be able to measure trends.

Due to storage space limitations most marketers are forced to store a

single point in time for a lead or campaign rather than tracking change

over time. Instead of saving an additional data point for each update,

most marketers overwrite old data losing the precious ability to

measure velocity and change.

The issue is that as data sets get larger and more complex, many

tools start slowing down or failing completely. If you are part of the

one third of marketers who are actually saving all these data points,

you don’t want to be limited by the strength of your analytics tool

when it comes time to crunch those numbers and view trends at

decision time.

2. Go Wide – Mash-up as Many Data Sources as Relevant In today’s marketing environment, where everything can and is being

measured, marketers need to be able to juggle multiple tools to

collect the relevant campaign data they need to run their day-to-day

business. According to Kelton Research as reported by eMarketer, the

average marketers uses 5-6 marketing tool to execute and measure a

typical marketing campaign. This is no easy task considering most of

these tools come from different vendors and integration of the data

across platforms can be complicated or often impossible.

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Think about the types and masses of data you are collecting on a daily

basis. If you have a website and web analytics software like Google

Analytics, you are collecting website traffic data. More and more

marketers are using marketing automation tools like Marketo or

Eloqua to collect data about leads and campaigns. Many marketers

today depend on CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools

like Salesforce.com to measure what happens to campaigns after

they are passed on to the sales team. The list goes on and on.

The real strength in analyzing these data sources is the ability to

aggregate this data into a single dashboard. How many organic leads

responded to a specific campaign and converted to a qualified lead?

With this much data available it would be virtually impossible to

define in advance all the angles you will want to investigate. You need

an analytics tool that will give you the flexibility to look at the data

from every perspective without needing to recompile the data.

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3. Stay Independent – Don’t Depend on IT Resources Marketing is a dynamic and fast paced field. When a marketing

opportunity arises it often needs to be acted on immediately to be

effective. Any delay in immediate action can be the difference

between success and failure.

Let’s say you want to create a new marketing dashboard that proves

to management that attending weekly webinars has a positive effect

on the sales cycle. First, figure out a way to get your webinar

attendance data to mash-up with your lead and sales CRM database.

If the two platforms aren’t already integrated you’d have to go to the

IT department and request development time, get added to the task

queue and wait…

What if you could just click and drag a new data source and mash it up

with your current database with no IT interference? This would give

you the flexibility and agility to respond quickly to marketing needs

and stay a step ahead of your competitors. Being dependent on an IT

department will cripple your ability to execute.

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Diagram 3.1: Adding new data sources in Sisense is as easy as click and drag without

requiring IT resources

4. Be Sexy – Focus on Powerful and Meaningful Design A dashboard’s function is to display a dense array of information in a

small amount of space in a manner that communicates clearly and

immediately. To achieve this, a dashboard must leverage the power of

visual perception and the ability for people to sense and process

information quickly. Dashboards can only be successful when the

visual design is central to the development process.

People tend to believe that dashboards must look flashy, filled with

pretty colors and graphics. Only those who cut through the hype and

learn practical dashboard design concepts will produce dashboards

that actually work.

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A few pointers about beautiful and inviting dashboards.

A picture is worth a thousand words – Rather than trying to

convince with words or a lot of numbers and charts, use graphics,

colors, images or illustrations to demonstrate what you mean.

Priorities must stand out at first glance – Don’t show 5 metrics

that all point to the same conclusion when you can use one metric

to make your point.

Don’t confuse good and bad – Make sure to use visualization keys

to demonstrate the good and bad news you are presenting.

Trends or KPIs - Be frugal about the amount of information you are

presenting. Determine when it makes sense to use a trend report

versus a single KPIs.

Diagram 4.1: A SIsense graphical dashboard allows you to represent large quantities of data in a way that is easy to digest and understand.

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5. Be Engaging – Design for Interactivity Marketing is an integrated effort that requires consolidating many

moving pieces to get a clear view of your company’s performance.

Any successful marketer knows that to be successful, you need to

constantly measure, assess, and refine your campaigns. To do that,

you need to be equipped with the latest and most relevant marketing

KPIs.

Agreeing in advance on a base set of KPIs is good practice, but how

often have you presented a dashboard only to be faced with

additional questions you may not have answers to at the tip of your

fingers? After your meeting, everyone will go back to their desks and if

you’re lucky, some might go back to your dashboards to delve deeper

into what you presented. At that point they will have their own

questions and areas they want to investigate more thoroughly.

Customizable dashboards allow viewers the ability to tweak your

dashboards to get the information they need. By filtering and drilling

down, viewers can go from big picture to details and get the

information they need to get their jobs done.

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Diagram 5.1: Dashboard that can be manipulated by date, region and adgroup allows users to deepen their perspective on the data at their convenience.

Final Thoughts While there is no single solution for all the challenges in measuring

marketing campaigns, there is overwhelming agreement that metrics

and KPIs must be used to measure day-to-day marketing activities to

improve performance. Marketing Dashboards provide a holistic

framework to organize and measure the increasing number of

complex marketing activities while providing management with the

data, metrics and KPIs they need to measure performance.

Keeping these 5 guidelines in mind will help ensure you are

presenting the most effective marketing dashboards.

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