At this point, it’s not even worth contesting that marketing is a science. Between the amount of data collected and marketing dashboard software available, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with all the options and what to focus your efforts on.

It can be especially tricky when you consider how the data are to be displayed. We all want a marketing dashboard to help solve this problem and provide an easy-to-interpret view of key marketing metrics and marketing KPIs.

We’ve seen our fair share of bad dashboards and honestly, they make our heads hurt. At Improvado, we take marketing dashboards seriously. It’s what we do. And because we’ve seen so many suboptimal marketing dashboards, we’re continuously focused on making our dashboards the absolute best they can be.

But what does “the best marketing dashboard” actually even mean? For us, a good dashboard includes data from multiple channels, updates to data in real-time, and easy-to-create visualizations to help you interpret the data.

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Using a good marketing dashboard for the first time will absolutely change your life… not to mention saving you 10-40 hours of tracking metrics, campaign performance, and website stats every week.

Here you can learn about 12 best marketing dashboards.

What is the marketing dashboard?

A great question. If you haven’t used a marketing dashboard before (or have been stuck using a bad one) you may not know what to expect.

The goal of a good marketing dashboard (and what we focus on at Improvado) is to display key metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators) in a visually appealing/easy-to-interpret way.

Not knowing what data to focus on is the downfall of many marketers, so finding a dashboard that works for you is something to prioritize.

These dashboards can exist in whatever form you’re most comfortable with: in excel or using a BI or visualization too (think Tableau, Looker, or Google Data Studio). As long as you can get the data you need and display it in a way that key stakeholders/decision-makers are comfortable interpreting, you’re good. However, you want to be sure this data is being updated in real-time to evaluate and measure how your efforts and campaigns are performing.

There are a number of different types of marketing dashboards ─ but we’re only focusing on the absolute best ones ─ which we will explore further here:

Marketing Performance Dashboard

Use a Marketing Performance Dashboard when you want a high-level look at the overall conversion funnel and to display the funnel. This is a good way to explore how your marketing mix is currently set up to work and will help marketers to make decisions on conversions and their sources.

A marketing performance dashboard takes into account data like leads, website visits, and clicks. Successful campaigns will always have a predetermined goal that has been established by higher management or lead marketers and will be measured using KPIs like Return on Marketing Investment, Traffic Sources, and Funnel Conversion.

We would use this data to help optimize marketing campaigns in the future and to establish other opportunities for data pipelines and conversion funnels.

1. Digital Marketing Dashboard for Data-driven advertising

Use a Digital Marketing Dashboard to track the performance of your online marketing activities. Marketing dashboard tools here will be focused on a variety of metrics across multiple channels. This will include digital marketing activities like social media, advertising, and email marketing.

Again, you’ll want to monitor your marketing activities here in real-time to determine which campaigns have been working well, and where to allocate or shift your digital marketing budget. The main focus of this dashboard is lead generation data (as that is the focus of digital marketing).

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2. SEO Analytics Dashboard

As content marketing has grown so much in the past few years, there are many SEO analytics dashboards available online. We use Google Data Studio dashboard. Check our template for Google Data Studio.

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Ideally, this type of dashboard is where all your web analytics data will be displayed. You’ll want a comprehensive insight into your SEO performance through many metrics.

Given the popularity of content marketing at present, you’ll want to use many SEO KPIs to measure the performance of your business’s website for organic search results, ranking, and traffic.

A SEO dashboard will help determine where you could improve, insights into top keywords, posts, and pages. Ideally, you would want to drive the most traffic to a website or page through back-linking, internal linking, and keyword optimization, which helps contribute towards your internet marketing optimization.

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3. eCommerce Marketing Dashboard

eCommerce Marketing Dashboards are exactly what they sound like, and almost every single eCommerce platform will provide one. However, you can also integrate an external eCommerce Marketing Dashboard if your platform’s dashboard is not up to par or the data being tracked is not sufficient.

eCommerce dashboards display metrics and KPIs dealing with your eCommerce site and sales. These are tracked on a continuous basis since you are hopefully making sales on a continuous basis, so the data will be ever-changing.

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Data like cost per lead, traffic sources, ROI, churn rate, retention, subscribers, added to cart, and coal completion rate are tracked (plus many more, depending on your platform).

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4. Web Analytics Dashboard

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This type of dashboard tracks website performance in real-time. Web Analytics focus on mostly high-level data of your site, monitoring metrics including online conversions, page views, and visitors. You can even see live visitors based on location.

Some of the most important metrics tracked through web analytics dashboards are bounce rate, page views, visitors, referral traffic/sources, unique vs new visitors and other KPIs that are specific to your website in particular.

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Check out Free Tableau Templates!

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5. Social Media Dashboard

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In the era of influencers, social media dashboards are more important than ever. Here, you’ll be able to see your social performance vs. website performance, which can help measure the success of social campaigns.

However, it’s important to note that “likes” don’t equal conversions… or even engagements. Therefore, it takes a smart marketer to get results through social media that translate directly into website sales. Most of the time, its a combination of a strong social media game and other smart marketing tactics that will provide good traction.

6. Email Marketing Dashboard

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Email marketing dashboards can be extremely useful now that drip campaigns and segmentation/hyper-custom marketing are the norms.

A good email marketing dashboard will display the key metrics determining ROI, and the performance of your email campaigns. Most will display metrics in real-time and rank them against past campaigns, so you can constantly improve your metrics.

Engaging subscribers through entertaining and valuable content will create a strong mailing list that you can come to rely on and use as another revenue stream. It’s an easy way to convert subscribers into customers.

Using data-driven advertising approaches within your subscriber base will allow you to provide highly targeted content and evaluate what messages work for your audiences by the metrics on your campaign dashboard.

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7. CMO Marketing Dashboard

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Exactly what it sounds like, the CMO marketing dashboard is an overview of all marketing services by your company. CMO’s should be able to look at this dashboard and determine the health/status of marketing activities for the company right away.

It is a smorgasbord of metrics from different sources like social media, email marketing, SEO, and website dashboards.

This is designed specifically to make decisions about current marketing campaigns and their performance across several platforms. For example, a social media campaign may have good results on the social media dashboard but can yield no website conversions or sales.

8. Enterprise Marketing Dashboard

Enterprise Marketing Dashboard Example — Scheme by Gartner

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Similar to the CMO Marketing Dashboard, the Enterprise Dashboard provides a visualization of all marketing services your company offers and provides an overview at any point in time to company execs and management.

It also allows you to track inter-departmental marketing activities across the entire company. What may work in one department/area of business may not work in another, so this enterprise marketing dashboard provides some great corporate intelligence at a glance.

9. Agency Command Center

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The agency command center or marketing agency software is used to monitor the marketing performance of your agency. This type of dashboard is also similar to the Enterprise and CMO dashboards but also acts as a CMS to keep track of your client performance and the performance of their campaigns. This is really useful as there is no need to log into all your clients’ different platforms and accounts.

Keeping track of clients’ marketing data and providing useful insights is a valuable activity when it comes time to renew contracts.

Not sure which marketing dashboard is right for you or still have questions?

If you still have questions after reading our top 11 best marketing dashboard templates article, we can help with your marketing dashboard software! At Improvado, marketing dashboards are what we do. If you require a hybrid or are stuck between two dashboard types, we can help collect all your data from multiple channels (online and offline) and update it in real-time for the most impactful analysis.

Send us a message or schedule some time to chat here!