Marketing dashboard(s) for the marketer - episode 1
Visualization, dashboard, report - different names for the same category of tool, all intending to give you insight into your program, your funnel, your spend.
That “tool” is your eyes and ears for what is happening with your business - it tells you what gear your in, critical issues, and your pace.
What signals do you need?
With great potential, there is also the potential for greater confusion. A dashboard doesn’t magically give the marketer clairvoyance about their program - to avoid this confusion, there are some pretty essential principles, approaches and practices that the enthusiastic marketer can implement, for simplicity, usability, and insight.
Today’s post will will kick off a mini-series on best practices to monitor and highlight your marketing data; future posts will delve into common tools like Google Sheets to empower you. If you want to effectively track your online marketing program, and you are looking for a template that can help you accomplish that…
THIS IS FOR YOU.
Today, we will be discussing the best practices for setting up your reporting - we’ll be talking about
A dashboard’s purpose
🚨 Spoiler alert: it’s not a catch-all for every single lever you have - that would be a nightmare to monitor
A framework for determining what you include in your dashboard
What metric (SINGULAR) is meaningful to you?
What dimensions provide QUICK insight?
What comparison matters to you?
The layout of your dash
In this series, we are going to work on building out your dashboard, so that you have something like this ➡️
A dashboard’s purpose
Dashboards are critical for helping you understand how your business, project, or plan is progressing. They shine a focused light on what is happening (metrics), and whether it’s good or not (comparisons).
I’ll give you a couple examples:
Let’s say you want to 2x your revenues for this fiscal year. You are planning 5 initiatives to get there, spread across the year.
Your boss gave you $1 million bucks to spend on marketing this quarter - and you said you would drive 1,000 conversions.
If your efforts aren’t working, the best time to know that was yesterday. The second best time is today.
✅ So we use dashboards to monitor our progress, on the stuff that matters for your goals.
What makes a dashboard actionable?
One word: comparisons.
We need to compare our metrics (conversions, revenue, web traffic) to something. Otherwise…. how would I know if my metrics are good or bad?
I drove $300,000 in revenue in H1 - yay!
💩 Crappola - that was only 30% growth versus last year - to hit my 2x revenue goal this year, H2 will need to be a killer half.
I drove 1,200 conversions this quarter - success!
😭 Fudge - I only spent $800K - my efficiency was good, but maybe I could have driven even more conversions for the quarter.
Comparisons give your metrics context - allowing you to optimize your business, adjust your marketing plans, or celebrate a success in your annual review.
Frameworks to keep you on track
“Defining the focus is a journey inward ☮️. It’s a ruthless conversation with yourself, your coworkers, or your boss, to figure out what is important to the business. ”
The framework for defining focus here doesn’t have to be difficult - it’s understanding:
What is the one metric that matters most to your business?
What are the critical dimensions that help me diagnose a metric?
What is the comparison that will give my metric meaning?
Let’s dive into each of these, and demonstrate the thought process that goes into each component of our dash.
The metric
Did ya know - your obsession metric doesn’t always have to be revenue?
HR might want to reduce the number of total workplace complaints
Recruiting might want to minimize the time between position opening and position fulfilled
Marketing might want to drive new highly engaged converters to their site or product
Once you have that one singular metric, you can work back ⬅️ to all the stuff that affects the metric. This “stuff” becomes your dashboard!
Let’s take the marketing example - our theoretical marketer believes:
They are reliant on the buyer journey, but have limited ability to change it
Digital marketing channels are becoming less efficient and increasingly competitive
20% of their spend drives 80% of their results
So our marketer wants to understand if they drove high quality traffic what it cost them. They want to understand whether traffic efficiently converts, and ultimately, they want to know if converted traffic actually use the product (if not - churn will rear it’s ugly head!) Our marketer picks their metrics ⬇️:
🥇Primary: conversions with active product usage
🥈Secondary: spend, sessions, engaged sessions, and conversions
2. The dimension
Dimensions are the ways we break out our data - this is important because it allows you to go one or two levels deeper than your aggregate performance, to figure out why something is happening. Dashboards often include date 🗓️ as a table-stakes dimension - other dimensions are typically specific to the business or dashboard application.
ℹ️ To reduce dashboard complexity and increase readability, it’s best to consciously limit the amount of dimensions. Ask yourself - will this dimension allow me to segment my business for quick, meaningful insights?
Let’s take a look at our marketer’s thought process above - they know that the following dimensions will give quick context on changes in performance over time:
✅ User device
✅ Attributed channel
✅ Ad Publisher
They know the following dimensions have no place on their dash - either because they aren’t meaningful, or would introduce be impossible to consume at scale:
❌ Campaign name / ad group
❌ Targeting audience
❌ Landing page
❗ Remember - we need dimensions that give QUICK insights - not a laundry list of possible values!
3. The comparison
Comparisons are powerful for providing context - four super common ways of achieving this context are by comparing metrics versus:
Last year
Forecast
A prior step in the funnel
Mixture
💡 And when we make these comparisons - we make them via rates! Rates condense two sets of numbers into one, and are easy to monitor over time.
Let’s revisit our marketing example from above. Our marketer knows that seasonality has a massive effect on their business; they know that changes in publisher platform changes can create performance swings overnight; and finally, they need to know how they are performing against goals. So, our marketer compares their primary and secondary metrics against:
last year, represented as growth rate
goals, represented as a completion rate
each other! Primary metric divided by secondary metric, as a conversion rate
These comparisons quickly reveal where our marketer is excelling, or falling short.
How do I structure my dashboard?
First and foremost - your dashboard needs to be easily consumable. It needs to be informative enough to encourage repeat usage, and it needs to be simple enough that Joe Schmo can understand how to use it within a minute.
Dashboards typically need a few key ingredients:
A filter section - allowing a user to configure the report to answer their specific question(s)
A configuration summary - providing the user an easy overview of what is included in the dashboard
Summary statistics - a couple high-level comparisons to quantify performance
Visual aids - charts to help the user understand their metrics at a glance
Numerical aids - a small amount of structured, numerical data to help quantify the actual metric volumes for a user
This sounds complicated, but it’s not - see a template below for a simple plug-n-play way of dashboarding ⬇️.
What’s next?
In our next installment, I’ll walk you through a GSheets template, highlighting what makes it work - so you can explain it to your boss 😉 Then, we’ll touch on importing your data into the dashboard.
✅ With any luck - you’ll have a dashboard ready to go within 15 minutes - no GSheets wizardry needed!
