How to Create a Marketing Dashboard that Simplifies Reporting 

They often must make quick but significant decisions that can alter the business trajectory significantly. 

Thankfully, nowadays, everyone involved in the marketing campaign has a hidden ace up their sleeves – the marketing dashboard. This simplified, information-rich data visualization tool gives decision-makers a quick but informative overview of their brand’s marketing performance. 

Most importantly, with modern tools such as Slingshot, marketers can streamline marketing operations by creating personalized marketing dashboards that show them precisely what they need to see. As a result, these professionals no longer have to shoot blind when making a crucial marketing decision. They can rely on a visual aid that can draw the most important information from any document without the need for countless hours of staring at numbers. 

So, how do you transform your tedious and endless spreadsheets into an elegant, concise, and data-rich marketing dashboard?   

What Are Marketing Dashboards? 

Before we get to the “how,” let’s take a moment to discuss the “what.” Marketing dashboards are visual reporting tools, such as Slingshot, that help stakeholders in a marketing campaign monitor, analyze, and optimize its performance in real-time. They present essential data, metrics, and KPIs in an easy-to-read visual format, such as graphs, charts, and tables. This gives the decision-makers a general overview of the entire marketing process. Moreover, it gives them the power to act and strategize based on precise data rather than assumptions. 

For example, you can instantly see that your Facebook ad brings more traffic than your Google PPC campaign. However, Facebook’s ad leads convert 3 times less than the PPC traffic. 

Without a marketing dashboard, you must go through several sheets, take the numbers, and cross-reference them by hand. As you know, this is a mundane and soul-crushing task that takes ages. 

Naturally, while you’re constantly switching tabs and taking notes, you’re missing the opportunity to push where your ads make an impact and save money on the channels that don’t work. 

On the other hand, with a customized marketing dashboard, you can effortlessly cross-reference all relevant data, visualize the facts, and make a suitable decision within minutes.    

Essentially, marketing dashboards are the command center of your entire operation. They allow you to focus on the right metrics without distractions. A great marketing dashboard system is an irreplaceable assistant crunching the numbers, giving you precisely what you need to make that crucial decision to lead your product to success, regardless of your role.   

What Are The Benefits Of Structured Marketing Dashboards? 

Customizable marketing dashboards are not a luxurious purchase that only the biggest brands can afford. Quite the opposite. These illustrative boards pack some serious power that can instantly transform the decision-making experience for all relevant team members. Whether managing a multi-million-dollar international marketing budget, a small local Facebook campaign, or just writing the copy, you can always count on the benefits marketing dashboards bring. 

Centralized Data And Easy Accessibility 

54% of marketing specialists agree that data integration and unification is their biggest challenge. The solution is a marketing dashboard. It integrates data from various sources into a single workspace. You can cross-reference traffic from Google Analytics, Social Media platforms, email marketing, CRM, or even customer spreadsheets. 

Say you manage a brand’s online department with multiple physical shops. Naturally, you need to consider physical and online sales and other metrics. Of course, you can quickly gather data for the online branch through various platforms. The offline shop is not that easy. You’ll need to count on hand-made spreadsheets. 

That’s the beauty of a marketing dashboard. It effortlessly combines data from all sources and reveals up-to-date information, ensuring decision-makers work with the most current data. 

Real-time Performance Tracking 

Nothing can give you a general real-time overview of a multi-channel campaign like a marketing dashboard. It gives you immediate feedback from multiple third-party panels, allowing everyone responsible for parts of the campaign to make vital decisions in a timely manner. For example, if there is a significant surge of traffic from Instagram, you can see which ad went viral and scale it. Copywriters and graphic designers can replicate the visual part and message to fit other channels. At the same time, the project manager can consider transferring the budget from underperforming channels or adding to the one that drives the numbers. 

Enhanced Decision-Making 

Having the power to see all relevant data in a visual display doesn’t only help timely reactions. It also enhances your ability to make proactive data-based assumptions, creating winning marketing strategies efficiently using the available resources. Around 78% of high-performing marketers leverage marketing analytics to drive decision-making. For example, a comparative analysis with the help of a marketing dashboard can show which ad types brought the best quality traffic in the past quarter. Thus, you can plan your next campaign based on that invaluable information. 

Marketing Dashboards Improve ROI 

Having the means to follow your multi-channel marketing campaign in real-time from a single dashboard will inevitably lead to better ROI. Optimizing your creatives, ads, and budgets will naturally lead to fewer losses, better-quality leads, and a higher conversion rate. In the end, this all leads to a much better ROI. 

Better Teamwork 

The biggest failures in marketing can all be traced back to miscommunication, forwarding outdated information, or simply the lack of access to relevant data from key factors in the marketing process. For a marketing campaign to be successful, everyone working on it must have access to the same data. Thus, marketing dashboards are a genuine goldmine for high-profile marketing teams. It allows stakeholders to get information from a centralized space and synchronize their goals and KPIs. 

Greater Focus On Metrics And KPIs 

Having a visual representation of the crucial numbers significantly helps retain your focus on the metrics that matter. Instead of looking through an overwhelming amount of numbers, you can get all the relevant information with a few clicks. It saves time and helps you focus on what matters – enhancing your campaign’s performance and reaching the KPIs.   

What To Include In Your Marketing Dashboard 

You might be wondering how marketing dashboards can contribute to effective marketing. When it comes to marketing dashboards, they are only as effective as the data you request. The best marketing dashboards have great filtering systems, allowing you to create elaborate charts, schemes, and graphs showing analysis, comparisons, and pure data. However, the point of having a customizable marketing dashboard is to bring front and center the precise numbers to help you make a data-driven decision. Naturally, you need to include some key metrics in your charts. Of course, they vary based on your campaign type. 

• For Brand Awareness, you need the impressions, reach, engagement rate, website visits, social media followers growth, and share of voice. 

• For Lead Generation, you need the leads, conversion rates, CTR, lead quality score, cost per lead, and landing page conversion rate. 

• For Customer Retention, you need the retention rate, customer satisfaction score, net promoter score, churn rate, repeat purchase rate, and customer lifetime value. 

• For Sales, you need the revenue, conversion rate, average order value, customer acquisition cost, revenue per channel, and upsell and cross-sell rates. 

• For Email, you need the open rate, CTR, unsubscribe rate, email conversion rate, email bounce rate, and email list growth rate. 

• For Social Media, you need the engagement rate, post reach, social media traffic, hashtag performance, share rate, and audience demographics 

• For PPC, you need the cost per click, CTR, return on ad spend, cost per acquisition, impression share, and ad quality score. 

How To Choose The Right Data Visualization Tool 

Any marketing dashboard is a goldmine for the various specialists working in the marketing team. Still, when choosing the right data visualization tool, you must go beyond your primal needs and evaluate the possibilities. 

So, several factors must be considered before purchasing a marketing dashboard tool. 

Ease Of Use 

First and foremost, look for a tool without a steep learning curve. The less time you spend learning how to create the perfect visual data representation, the more time you will spend on tasks that matter. Moreover, your team should be able to become proficient with the tool quickly. That’s the only way for everyone to be on the same page when working on a project. 

For example, Slingshot’s user-friendly interface enables anyone, from data analysts to executives, to seamlessly navigate, explore data, and generate visual insights. With minimal onboarding, your team can immediately leverage data to make smarter decisions.   

Connectivity 

Consider whether the tool can integrate with all existing tech stacks like CRMs, marketing platforms, and analytics tools. Salesforce, GA4, Google Ads, and the various social media platforms are a must. Still, don’t underestimate the power of integrating a custom spreadsheet. It can open many doors and give you a significant competitive advantage. 

For instance, Slingshot connects directly to popular platforms like Google Analytics, Salesforce, and SQL databases. This allows you to gather and organize data from different sources into one unified dashboard. 

Customization options 

Every business, every marketing campaign, and every team has its own data needs. So, the ability to customize your marketing dashboard and reports is essential for a good data visualization tool. 

This is where Slingshot excels. It offers flexible customization options, enabling you to design dashboards that fit any marketing need. Whether adjusting chart types, adding brand colors, or personalizing layouts, Slingshot ensures that your dashboards reflect what matters most to your business. 

Capabilities 

Real-time data display and automated updates are among the most important capabilities of any data visualization tool. It’s the cornerstone behind your marketing efforts’ success. 

Slingshot supports real-time data streaming, highlights data trends, and provides insightful comparisons featuring an overview of MoM and YoY metrics. Moreover, by leveraging AI, our platform helps you make proactive data-driven decisions faster and more accurately. 

Drill-down options 

The drill-down options are a must for high-level marketers. They allow decision-makers to dig deeper and gain a deeper understanding of what causes specific campaign behavior. 

Slingshot goes a step further. Our drill-down option provides detailed insights into specific metrics only when needed. This allows deeper product sales or regional performance exploration (among many others) without cluttering the main dashboard. 

Allowing Filtering 

Being able to filter data by specific criteria (like product, campaign, region, and others) is also essential. It allows everyone to narrow down and pinpoint potential problems that disrupt performance. 

Slingshot is a prime example of how vast filtering options can bring results. For example, you can filter sales data by product line or marketing campaigns to pinpoint what’s driving conversions in a specific region. This level of granularity enables you to tailor your strategies for maximum impact. 

Slingshot is the best choice. 

Slingshot is the best choice when it comes to marketing dashboards. Our platform is not just another data visualization tool, though – it’s an all-in-one, AI-powered business intelligence engine. Unlike all other solutions on the market, ours focuses on the bigger picture. Slingshot combines advanced analytics, data visualization, project management, collaboration, and artificial intelligence in an intuitive app. An app that’s a must for every marketing team.     

How to Create a Marketing Dashboard in Slingshot 

You have little time to wrestle with complex marketing dashboards as a marketing specialist. We understand that. That’s why our team created Slingshot to be as streamlined as possible, allowing you to build the dashboard you need within minutes. Thus, Slingshot packs various marketing dashboard examples and featured templates, which you can use or customize further to meet your and your team’s expectations perfectly. 

However, if you need a unique dashboard, you can always build one from scratch. It’s just as easy. We already created a step-by-step tutorial, but for faster onboarding, you can check out this video as well: 

Conclusion 

Marketing dashboards are no longer a mere suggestion. They are a must for a successful marketing team. These marketing visualization tools are behind every insightful decision, giving an unparalleled overview of the entire marketing process. 

Slingshot, a leader in innovation, flexibility, and market power, is precisely what you need to enhance your decision-making and skyrocket your marketing campaign past all your competitors.