How To Build A Marketing KPI Dashboard (and Which Metrics to Include)

Taking insights from data and understanding the meaning behind metrics is a crucial skill all marketers need to have. But looking at the raw data, organising it, manually pasting it into a spreadsheet, and getting formulas to work can be a time-consuming process. That’s why you should be looking into BI dashboard tools. 

Using BI software to create marketing KPI dashboards will strengthen your data analysis skills, provide real-time reporting with easy-to-read visualisations, and help improve your ROMI. Here’s how to create yours.

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What is a KPI dashboard? 

A KPI dashboard is a visual and interactive representation of your business metrics. No matter the type of dashboard that you use, it should always give you the most updated information about your business on one screen. You can use KPI dashboards to

• Review previous data
• Forecast new scenarios
• Use graphics to simplify the way you present your metrics 
• Filter your data and review different data segments in the same file.

Must-have features for any KPI marketing dashboard

KPI marketing dashboards should simplify the way you and your marketing team look at data. To help you do so, don’t miss these important dashboard features:

• Charts and other visualisations to display your KPIs 
• Dynamic text boxes to highlight the most essential data
• Automated Slack alerts to get notified on key metrics without needing to access the dashboard
• Custom cells to define new calculations and combinations of your data
• Automatic syncing with SQL and non-SQL (Google Sheets) data sources
• Drill-downs, drill-throughs, and filters to review data in detail without needing to create a separate report or dashboard.

Marketing KPI reports vs dashboards

Reports and dashboards are two different ways of presenting analysed data. They both help marketers review marketing performance metrics. However, reports and dashboards have some differences.

Let's say you monitor the number of new Instagram followers you gain every month. In a report, you might contextualise this data by comparing it to previous months and offering possible explanations for any growth trends.

With a dashboard, you can still monitor new followers, but your stakeholders get to interact with the data themselves and define the comparisons they’re interested in. They can use drill-downs, filters, and drill-throughs to dissect the data any way they choose, e.g. sorting new followers by gender, country, or which post they engaged with before deciding to follow your account.

5 Marketing dashboard examples (and recommended KPIs)

Marketing is the place where analytics and creativity meet. You can be as creative as you want when defining content, campaigns, Facebook ads, Google ads, or social media posts for different marketing channels. But then, you need to be able to measure if your ideas paid off. 

KPI dashboards make it easier for you to review marketing metrics at-a-glance and gather insights on which efforts are performing better than others. Here are some BI dashboard examples for marketers: 

SEO analytics dashboard

For companies that have an SEO and organic growth strategy, an SEO analytics dashboard is a digital marketer’s best friend. This dashboard is used to keep track of organic traffic coming from search engines. The KPIs may vary depending on your SEO strategy, but these are some of the most important ones to include: 

• SEO traffic. This metric represents the number of visitors that get to your website due to SEO marketing efforts. For example, users that organically searched for something related to your brand and clicked on your website. 
• Keyword ranking. This data point relates to how your on-page content is ranking for intended keywords. For example, if you’re positioning “best training harness for dogs in Bristol” as a keyword, this KPI shows you which position your page appears in when someone searches for that sentence.
• Page load time. This KPI is crucial to track when you’re doing technical SEO. It tells you how long your page takes to load. A good target for SEO is 0-2 seconds. If it takes longer than that, it’s likely that search engines won’t push it to the first page since viewers will bounce.

Social media marketing dashboard

Social media is the king of all digital marketing efforts. Most brands have some sort of social media presence and it plays a huge role in marketing activities. Whether you’re creating content in-house or outsourcing this service, you should keep track of these social media metrics: 

• Follower, page likes, or subscriber count and growth. While followers alone don’t necessarily tell you how well your content is being perceived, tracking them is a good way of evaluating growth. Separate the number by social media platform and compare it against demographics and previous months. 
• Engagement rate. To measure if your followers are finding value in your content, you should be monitoring engagement rates. To get this number, you should divide total engagement by total followers (subscribers, or page likes) and multiply that number by 100. This metric indicates the percentage of your followers who engage (comment, like, share) with your content and marketing campaigns on a monthly basis.
• Reach and impressions. These two metrics share how many people are viewing your content. Reach means the number of unique users that saw your content. Impressions are the number of times your posts were shown. Get these numbers directly from your social media platforms or from your preferred analytics tool.

Email marketing KPI dashboard

Email marketing is one of the most profitable marketing practices. It’s crucial for marketers to access and analyse their email marketing campaign data. Connect your KPI dashboard tool to your CRM and filter your data to answer queries in a visual way. Here are some of the KPIs that you can include in an email marketing KPI dashboard:

• Active contacts. This metric tells you how many active customers are consistently reading your email campaigns. Compare it against previous months to evaluate growth. You can also measure it against gender or location to discover deeper insights.
• Open rate. This is a very important metric. It tells you how many people opened the email you sent. This number gives you insights into your leads’ interests and the appeal of the subject line.
• Email click-through-rate (CTR). Unless you’re writing a newsletter, email campaigns should have one clear objective. This KPI tells you how many of the people who received your email, clicked on the links. 

Paid ads marketing dashboard

Ad campaigns are also a huge part of most company’s marketing strategies. Tracking the performance of paid ads is critical to ensure ad optimization and a positive return on investment (ROI). 

• Pay-per-click  (PPC). This data point indicates the amount of money you’re paying for each person that clicks on your ad. For example, let’s say you’re paying $100 per ad, but only one person clicks on it; then, you’re spending $100 per click. However, if the same ad is clicked by one thousand people; then, your cost per click is $0.1.
• Conversion rate. This can be measured in two different ways to discover how many people are converting to your product or service. One way to do it is to divide the number of ad clicks by the number of ad impressions. The other way is to divide the number of purchases, demo requests, or sign-ups by the total number of ad clicks. You can create a sales KPI dashboard for specific sales-related metrics.
• Return on marketing investment (ROMI). This KPI shows how much profit you’re making out of each customer based on your marketing investment. To calculate ROMI, you should divide net profit by marketing investment cost and multiply it by 100. For example, if you spent $100 dollars on an ad, and the converted customer spent $500 on your product, then, your ROMI is 400%.

Digital marketing dashboard

A digital marketing KPI dashboard can contain all the most relevant digital marketing-related metrics to give you an overview of your marketing performance.

For example, if you’re doing email, social media, SEO, and influencer marketing. Then, you can create an individual dashboard for each one, and use dashboard features to double down on each particular channel from the digital marketing KPI dashboard. Some crucial metrics to include there are:

• Email marketing metrics
• Social media metrics
• SEO metrics 
• Paid ads metrics 

The easiest way to set up a marketing KPI dashboard (template not necessary)

Setting up your marketing KPI dashboard is a simple task. The best part is that you only have to set it up once and get real-time updated data forever.

Using Trevor.io is one of the simplest ways to create your marketing KPI dashboard. Setting up your account, connecting your data sources, and it takes less than 5 minutes to start building. Also, Trevor.io is highly scalable because it never makes a copy of your data. So, no matter how large your databases get, the dashboard will always load fast.

Trevor.io is so easy to use you don’t need any coding experience or a dashboard template to get started. In fact, you can get answers to unlimited ad hoc queries without needing to write a single line of code. Here’s a step-by-step guide to BI dashboard creation.

1. Define your objective

The first step to creating a dashboard is to determine what you and your audience will use it for. This and the previously shared examples will allow you to define which and how many KPIs you should include.

2. Get to know your audience

Dashboards need to be useful for a specific purpose and audience. Getting to know who’ll use this dashboard will allow you to create powerful and colourful visualisations that speak directly to their needs. 

For example, if you’re sharing this with your leadership team, they may be more interested in a digital marketing metrics dashboard instead of a super-specific social media one. 

3. Choose the key metrics

Once you’ve defined your objective and audience, you can start listing the metrics that you’ll include. Remember to add other data points for context to get rid of data silos, and come up with deeper insights. You can always adjust your dashboard if needed.

4. Connect your data

Define the data sources you need to add to Trevor.io or your preferred BI tool and follow the process to connect them. Use Trevor.io Zapier integration to connect to any source that you can’t find.

5. Make it visual

KPI dashboards are your playground. Create data visualisations to showcase marketing analytics. Choose colours and graphics that tell your story. Avoid using too many long tables or blocks of text.

6. Build automation 

Automate alerts, real-time updates, and daily snapshots to make marketing data come to you wherever you are. 

7. Share and gather feedback

Share the dashboard with your marketing department and key stakeholders to collect feedback and make modifications. Enjoy having your marketing data at-a-glance.

Why marketers need KPI dashboards

Every marketer needs easy access to their data because:

• It increases data-driven decisions
• Helps you streamline your marketing efforts
• Allows you to write data-supported pitches for new ideas
• Helps to save money by stopping ads or efforts that aren’t performing as expected
• Lets you analyse ROMI 

Marketing KPI dashboards are a way of connecting marketers to insights, and using a BI tool like Trevor.io, can make it easy. Also, with Trevor.io you can automate timely updates of your data and alerts with snapshots of your data to reduce the time spent writing and sending reports.  

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Frequently asked questions about marketing KPI dashboards

What should be on a marketing dashboard?

A marketing dashboard is a file that contains visualisations of your KPIs. The metrics you include should be aligned with your dashboard objective. If you want your KPI dashboard to help you review the performance of your paid ads. Then, you should include data that’s aligned with that objective. For example: 

• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Pay-per-click (PPC)
• Ad impressions
• Demographics
• Return on investment (ROI)
• Conversion rate

What are the best KPIs for marketing?

The best KPIs for marketing are the ones that give you insights on your marketing strategy. Some of the most useful marketing KPIs to measure are: 

• New leads
• New customers
• Monthly qualified leads (MQLs)
• Conversion rate
• Cost per lead
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
• Social media marketing metrics 
• Reach
• Engagement
• Clicks on links
• Monthly website visitors
• Page views

How are KPIs measured in marketing?

Marketing key performance indicators are measured the same way as other metrics. Usually, you define a set of targets and track metrics over time to evaluate performance. Depending on the KPIs, tracking the numbers may be all you need to do, but some other times you need to calculate rates and percentages.

What is an example of a marketing KPI?

Marketing KPIs vary depending on the marketing efforts. However, one of the most common KPIs is measured across marketing practices under different names: new leads. This can also be presented  - with some differences - as new followers, new website visitors, or new free trial accounts.

What is the difference between Google Analytics and a dashboard tool?

You can build dashboards in Google Analytics, but it isn’t a dashboard tool. With BI software, you’re able to bring various datasets from different data sources together and analyse them all in one place. Also, BI dashboard tools let you ask the data for answers using queries, while Google Analytics only lets you filter and organise your data.