Calling all marketing professionals! Step up your game with an invaluable marketing performance dashboard.
A performance dashboard is a powerful tool for turning data into actionable insights. By effectively illustrating trends in key metrics, you can make smarter decisions, optimize your strategies, and ultimately achieve leadership’s business goals more efficiently.
Here are the essential questions your dashboard should answer, helping you steer your marketing initiatives toward success, and maybe get that promotion, too!
1. What Is The Company’s Goal and Are We On Track to Achieve It? Although it may not be communicated in plain terms, your CEO, at the end of the day, likely views marketing as an investment aimed at driving profit and growth, not clicks or website traffic. Your company’s business goals should guide your marketing efforts, and your dashboard should measure performance against this goal. Tracking pacing helps assess how close you are to your goal. If you're off track, it’s crucial to understand so that you can make necessary adjustments.
Recommendation: Align with the finance department to identify your "north star" metric, such as net profit or post-marketing gross profit (Contribution Margin), and place it at the top on your dashboard. This creates transparency and builds trust with leadership, showing you are prioritizing goals they care about! Leadership may already have a stated monthly, quarterly, or yearly goal or you may have to come up with your own. If so, aim high, but achievable. (“All-Time Record Year” doesn’t sound so bad.) Add a pacing metric to your dashboard to effortlessly indicate how you’re progressing toward your monthly or yearly goal.
2. What’s Driving the Trend? Understanding the root causes behind performance trends is key to making informed decisions. Ask yourself: What are the main KPIs that influence changes in my north star metric?
Sometimes, connecting the driving KPIs to your primary goal can be challenging due to latency, so the next thing you'd want to do as a marketer is be able to speak to trends in the KPIs that should ultimately be aligned with and indicate progress to the primary goal. For example, the campaign you launched last week hasn’t driven a lift in revenue yet due to latency, but showing a growing trend in qualified lead volume would be a strong signal that additional revenue is on the way!
Recommendation: Add causal metrics to your dashboard, such as revenue, average deal value, sales, and qualified lead volume, to explain fluctuations and understand the drivers of performance.
Bonus: A Slice is Nice! Slice metrics like revenue and deals by marketing channel can illustrate how much volume each channel is driving within each month. This will enhance insights, discussions, and strategies to improve and scale performance.
3. How Does This Period Compare to Previous Periods? Benchmarking against previous months, quarters, or years helps identify trends—whether positive or negative. This insight allows you to celebrate wins, address areas needing improvement, and have better strategy discussions within your team.
Recommendation: Include visual comparisons, like bar or line charts, to easily track progress over time. Although there are many options for chart types, it is important to make sure the tables/charts used appropriately portray the data represented.
4. Are We Maintaining Healthy Cash Flow and Efficiency? Poor cash flow is a major risk to business health. Your dashboard should track at least one financial efficiency metric relevant to your employer, such as ad spend as a percentage of revenue (ASPR), return on ad spend (ROAS), or cost per conversion.
Recommendation: Add an efficiency metric fitting to the business to gauge financial health and ensure you’re reinvesting revenue wisely without overextending. This will build trust with leadership that you are cognizant of risk and spending your marketing budget wisely.
5. Make It Automated! Automating your dashboard offers significant time savings and boosts accuracy. With real-time updates, you eliminate manual tasks like report generation and recalculating metrics.
Recommendation: Implement an automated system to ensure that data is always current and available, reducing the risk of human error and empowering you and your team to respond swiftly to emerging insights.
6. Style and Format Abiding by standard style guidelines will keep the focus on performance trends.
Recommendations:
A white background is perfectly fine. Your favorite bold shade of purple could distract from the stellar growth your efforts are driving.
Arrange your metrics top to bottom from most to least important. Your north star metric and efficiency metric should be the first thing you see when you look at your dashboard. An F-shape is great if you have too few or too many metrics to fill your screen’s view. To arrange a dashboard in an "F-shape", place key data at the top left, followed by a horizontal scan across the top and a vertical scan down the left.
Maintain the same colors throughout the dashboard:
Green is great for revenue.
Re-consider using red. It often indicates negativity. So, unless it’s applicable and necessary to use, it could distract from the primary story of performance.
Maintain cohesion across sliced metrics: Pick one color for each channel for use throughout your dashboard, for example: Blue = Google, Green = MSN, Yellow = Meta.
Final Thoughts: Marketing Performance Dashboards as Strategic Tools
A well-designed marketing performance dashboard is more than just a collection of metrics—it’s a strategic tool that provides clarity, drives informed decisions, and ensures alignment with company goals. By utilizing a dashboard to answer key questions and tell the story of marketing performance, you will accelerate your team’s capacity to drive long-term success in your organization.
As you continue to refine your dashboard, remember that it’s not just about presenting data, but about illustrating the story of performance in a way that empowers your team to take meaningful action. Start building today, and lead your marketing team to achieve unprecedented growth!