3 Dashboards to Change Your Marketing Game

The multitude of marketing dashboard options can be overwhelming, and it's not uncommon to find yourself reaching the very same dashboard over and over again. The problem is that it most probably fails to paint the full picture, leaving gaps in insights and decision-making. 

To help you bridge the gap, we introduce three transformative dashboards that illuminate the aspects of your operations that are often overlooked, giving you a 360-degree view of your marketing performance.  

Geo Performance Dashboard

A geo performance dashboard aggregates and visualizes key marketing metrics and performance data across various territories — countries, states, or broader regions. It offers a centralized platform for monitoring, analyzing, and benchmarking critical marketing data.

What metrics to include into a geo performance dashboard?

A geo performance dashboard should provide a comprehensive overview of key marketing metrics and KPIs across different regions. What exactly is included will depend on your specific business objectives, marketing strategies, and the nature of your markets. Here are some suggestions:

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The total cost of acquiring a new customer in each region.
• Marketing Spend: The total cost of all marketing activities within each region.
• Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI): This shows how much revenue is generated for every dollar spent on marketing in each region.
• Channel Performance: Performance of different marketing channels (PPC, SEO, social media, etc.) by region.
• Product/Service Performance: How different products or services are performing in each region.

More advanced dashboards also incorporate market share data, demographic information, competitor data, net promoter score (NPS), customer retention metrics, and even predictive analytics capabilities. But remember, the key to an effective dashboard is not to include every possible piece of data, but to focus on the metrics that are most relevant to your business objectives and that will be vital for strategic decision-making.

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Collected marketing data can be examined in different time frames, for example, year-to-date, quarter-to-date, or week-to-date. This flexibility is crucial for identifying varying marketing trends and understanding the impact of specific marketing initiatives.

For instance, when analyzing data with a 'week-to-date' lens, marketers can gain valuable short-term insights like immediate impact of a recent marketing campaign or sudden changes in regional performance due to competitor’s actions.

A 'quarter-to-date' (QTD) perspective helps in understanding the impact of quarterly strategic initiatives. For example, if a new product was launched at the beginning of the quarter or a major marketing campaign was executed, the QTD view provides insights into how these initiatives have performed so far and if they are moving the company closer to its quarterly objectives. Also, many industries have quarterly cycles and analyzing the data in this way can help understand these cycles and plan strategies accordingly.

A 'year-to-date' view provides a broader picture, enabling the identification of long-term trends. This can reveal slower, more subtle shifts in market dynamics, the effectiveness of ongoing strategies, and seasonal patterns in customer behavior. Thus, marketers can determine whether their performance is improving, stagnant, or declining.

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Leveraging regional performance dashboard for strategic advantage

The key benefit of the geo performance dashboard is the benchmarking capabilities. This can provide valuable insight into the effectiveness of the marketing strategies and whether your marketing efforts are economically viable.

Benchmarks could be based on your company's past performance, industry standards, or the results of top-performing regions or competitors.

The dashboard helps to identify regions that fall short of your benchmarks and timely develop action plans to improve performance. This could involve adjusting your marketing strategies, allocating resources differently, or implementing new tactics or technologies.

Beyond benchmarking, a geo performance dashboard offers a multitude of other benefits:

• Understanding market differences: Different regions often have unique market dynamics. A dashboard can reveal these differences, aiding in developing localized marketing strategies.
• Trendspotting: Regular updates on regional performance can help marketing teams spot trends over time. This can be particularly beneficial in terms of forecasting and anticipating market changes, enabling proactive strategy adjustments.
• Better resource allocation: By tracking performance across various marketing channels (like social media, email, PPC, etc.), marketers can identify which channels are most effective in different regions. This can guide future channel selection and resource allocation.

Display Ads Influence Dashboard 

How marketers usually track display ads performance? They measure impressions, the percentage of total ad views that resulted in a click, analyze what actions followed after the click, and calculate the revenue generated for each dollar spent on advertising. 

But often, users will see an ad, not click on it, but be influenced by the ad's message. Later, they might directly navigate to your website or find it through a web search and complete a conversion action—purchase a product, subscribe to your newsletter, or book a demo call. Following the typical scenario and tracking only click-through conversions, you might underestimate the effectiveness of your display ads and disable campaigns that play a key role in converting your target audience.

A display ad reporting dashboard is a data-driven solution designed to provide a comprehensive view of your display ad performance, with a keen focus on view-through conversions.

The view-through conversion metric captures the impact of ads that may not have immediately led to a click but did contribute to a conversion down the line. It recognizes that display ads can influence user behavior even without direct interaction, and helps marketers measure the total value of their display campaigns.

How to build a display ads influence reporting dashboard?

This advanced dashboard matches data from post-view tracking platforms such as CM360, Adriver, and Sizmek and aligns it with the website or app performance metrics. Thus, it traces the influence of your display ads on brand website traffic, conversion rate, and sales, overcoming the challenges traditionally associated with evaluating display ad performance.

Tracking view-through conversions, however, does involve a bit more complexity compared to direct click-through conversions. It typically involves using a combination of cookies and pixel tags.

Here's a simplified explanation of how it can work:

• Tagging the ad and the conversion page: A pixel tag (a small piece of code) is embedded in both the display ad and the conversion page on your website. This pixel is capable of dropping a cookie onto the user's browser when the ad is displayed and also when a conversion happens on your website.
• Tracking ad displays: Whenever your display ad is shown to a user, the pixel tag in the ad drops a cookie onto the user's browser. This cookie contains information identifying which ad was shown.
• Tracking conversions: When a user completes a conversion on your website, the pixel tag on your conversion page also drops a cookie onto the user's browser.
• Matching ad display and conversion data: Using these cookies, you can match conversions back to earlier ad displays. 

Note: The specific metrics and tools a marketer might use to track display ad performance can vary depending on factors like the goals of their campaigns, the platforms they're advertising on, and their specific business needs.

Avoid chopping down the money tree, and other benefits of the dashboard

The display ads influence reporting dashboard enables your marketing team to better understand your ads' impact on brand awareness and recall, providing a more comprehensive view of your display advertising effectiveness. This can ultimately lead to more informed decision-making around ad placements, creative design, and campaign budgeting.

Some benefits you will experience with the display ad reporting dashboard include:

• Precise attribution: Incorporating view-through conversions into your attribution models can help you better understand the customer journey and the roles different marketing touchpoints play in driving conversions. Judging solely by the click-through conversions, you may cut on campaigns that are vital on the customer journey but perform poorly as a last-click touchpoint.  
• Understanding of the brand awareness impact: By tracking view-through conversions, you can quantify the impact of your display ads on these top-of-funnel marketing objectives.
• Better optimization: By understanding which ads are driving view-through conversions, you can optimize your ad placements, design, and messaging to further enhance their influence. For example, the dashboard provides insights into what formats of ads or ad combinations resonate best with your target audience, leading to higher conversion rates. It will be instrumental in refining your ad strategies and ensuring optimal resource allocation in the future.
• More accurate ROI calculation: Including view-through conversions in your performance metrics can provide a more accurate calculation of your advertising ROI. This can lead to more informed decisions about future ad spend.

Marketing Website Monitoring and Alerting Dashboard

The following dashboard is most relevant to the B2C companies that rely on their website as an e-commerce platform, where any downtime or drop in performance can quickly translate into substantial financial losses.

The marketing website monitoring and alerting dashboard offers a comprehensive view of the performance of various promotional elements on a company's website— a catalog page, banners, recommendation elements, pop-ups, etc.

It does more than just track real-time performance, it provides a comparative perspective against historical metrics over different time frames— hour-to-hour, day-to-day, and other. 

This immediate access to detailed and up-to-date insights empowers marketing teams to make informed and timely decisions, resolve issues causing drops in performance, and overall optimize and improve customer experience and engagement.

What metrics to include into a marketing website monitoring and alerting dashboard?

To effectively monitor the performance of a marketing website, the dashboard should include an array of data sources and metrics that provide insights into user behavior, promotional performance, and overall website functionality. 

Here are a couple of broad categorizations of what the dashboard might include:

• Website traffic metrics: Number of visitors, where traffic is coming from, average session duration, and so on.
• Promotional performance metrics: CTR for all on-site promotional placements, the conversion rate for all placements, and engagement metrics if needed.
• Conversion and sales metrics: Depending on your objectives, you may track sales volume, cart abandonment rate, etc.
• Website performance metrics: Sometimes, it's not a problem of messaging, design, or placement, but rather a website performance issue or malfunction. Track page loading time, error rate, time to first byte, and other metrics indicating your website health. 
• Real-time alerts: Alerts for significant drops in traffic and conversions, alerts for issues with website performance.

An advanced marketing website monitoring and alerting dashboard might include customer journey analytics, for example, sales funnel visualization, identifying typical paths users take on your website and where conversions are dropping off.

Tuning into your website’s pulse: The impact of proactive monitoring

A marketing website monitoring and alerting website helps to quickly identify technical issues, navigational hiccups, and underperforming elements, and resolve issues before it balloons into a significant problem.

The benefits of the dashboard can be summed up in three points:

• Real-time error detection: The dashboard allows teams to identify and fix any technical glitches, bugs, or website crashes in real-time, minimizing the impact on user experience and potential loss of sales. For example, looking at the dashboard, a team spots that in the past hour, no user bought a product from the catalog page. The team proceeds to investigate and discovers that all images on this page fail to load. 
• Improved promotional strategies: The dashboard provides a clear picture of what's working and what's not. For instance, if data shows that the catalog page generates the most sales, your team might decide to funnel more traffic to this page by strategically placing calls-to-action on other landing pages. 
• Enhanced customer experience: The dashboard plays a proactive role in shaping your customer experience. Continuous monitoring of website metrics helps businesses detect areas of underperformance and bottlenecks, allowing them to optimize the website for improved customer experience and enhanced conversion rates.

Moving Forward: How to Implement Your New Dashboard Knowledge with Improvado

The three dashboards we've discussed—geo performance dashboard, display ads influence reporting dashboard, and marketing website monitoring and alerting dashboard—can significantly amplify your marketing intelligence.

These dashboards, each tailored to specific marketing facets, enable swift response to market fluctuations and pave the way for informed, impactful decision-making. Yet, their implementation and ongoing customization can be a complex process.

Improvado is an advanced marketing analytics platform specifically designed to navigate these complexities. The solution automates the entire marketing reporting process, providing comprehensive support at every stage, from data aggregation to dashboard customization. Whether you need a marketing dashboard template or a custom-built solution tailored to your specific needs, Improvado is ready to deliver.