The Marketing Dashboard: What It Is and How To Make Your Own

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Published in Project Management on 17/02/2023, last updated 16/05/2024.

It’s all too easy for a marketer to just jump onto the next campaign or initiative as soon as they finish work on another one. But if you don’t know how your work is contributing to overall business goals, how are you supposed to decide which campaign to work on? Usually, you’d get data on your campaigns from a specialist in the organization, who’d create some kind of report you can use to show stakeholders. But did you know you can give everyone in the marketing team the ability to check and share their own data? That’s what a marketing dashboard is for.

Find out what a marketing dashboard is, how they’re built, and what information they should absolutely have.

What is a marketing dashboard?

A marketing dashboard is a tool that displays your marketing metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) in real-time, as well as insights from multiple data sources. It’s a single place for marketers to get all the information they need to review the performance of their campaigns and other marketing initiatives. With a marketing dashboard, a marketer can get an accurate idea of how their work impacts broader business goals. From there, they can make adjustments on the fly, ensuring that every initiative contributes to the organization’s success.

Marketing dashboards can vary pretty widely depending on the tools used to create them. Some marketers use tools like Google Analytics and Google Data Studio to put their dashboards together, while others will use the features built into their marketing tools. But no matter how their dashboards are built, they usually track similar metrics.

Let’s dive into these metrics.

The success metrics your marketing dashboard needs

A marketing dashboard is only as good as the data you’ll find in it. That means a strong dashboard needs to cover enough success metrics and KPIs so that you can use it for most of your work. Otherwise, you’ll be constantly building throwaway dashboards, which will swallow up work hours that could be better spent on high-value marketing initiatives.

Here are some of the marketing metrics you absolutely need to include in your marketing dashboard:

• Traffic: No matter the marketing tactic, you need to know how much interest it drummed up. This metric can cover website traffic, blog traffic, and traffic to any other content channels you have.
• Bounce rate: How many of the people who see your marketing content leave after a single visit?
• Conversion rate: This metric tracks how may of the people who see your content click on a link.
• Impressions: Used for social media marketing, this metric reveals how many people have seen your posts.
• Engagement: This metric tells you how many of the people who’ve seen your social posts interact with it.
• Customer acquisition cost: Adding this metric to a marketing dashboard requires a bit of technical know-how, but it’ll track how much it costs to acquire a single customer through all your marketing efforts. A very useful thing to know.
• Email open and click rates: These are the two most important metrics in email marketing. How many people open your emails, and how many click on the links in them.

You can learn more about these metrics — and other marketing terms — here.

5 steps for creating a marketing dashboard

No matter which tool you use to build a marketing dashboard, there are a few steps you need to follow to make sure you get it right.

Pick your data sources

Marketers work with a lot of data. Before you actually start building your marketing dashboard, you need to know where that data’s coming from. Some organizations use Google Analytics exclusively, while others might use a combination of data sources. You might need to reach out to a data specialist to get some input on this.

Pick the tool your marketing dashboard will live in

You could use a purpose-built tool for this, like Google’s Data Studio, which pairs nicely with Google Analytics. Some marketing tools — like HubSpot — even have built-in dashboards that give you the results of your marketing initiatives in real-time.

Connect your data source with your dashboard

Depending on the tools you pick, you might need to use an integration or two to get all your data into your dashboard tool. Some of these integrations are built-in, whereas others mean you’ll have to look for third-party tools.

Test things out

Once you’ve connected everything and your dashboard is up and running, make sure to check in on it from time to time before sharing it with the rest of the team. You might run into some issues or find things that don’t work quite right. Take your time to get it right.

Share your dashboard with the team

After you’ve taken the time to test out your dashboard, make sure you share it with the team! You’ll likely get a ton of valuable feedback you can use to make it even better. Make the dashboard easily accessible for everyone, so that the whole team can use it to track the success of their campaigns.

How to use Unito to build a marketing dashboard

What if you could use a single platform to turn any tool into a custom marketing dashboard? That’s what you can do with Unito.

Unito is a no-code workflow management solution with the deepest two-way integrations for some of the most popular marketing tools on the market, including Asana, Trello, HubSpot, Salesforce, ClickUp, monday.com, and more.

The best part? Unito automatically keeps all your data up to date in all your tools.

With Unito you can build a marketing dashboard with any tool, and keep it updated in real-time automatically. For instance, you could sync Asana tasks from multiple projects to a single spreadsheet in Google Sheets, using charts to report on progress for various marketing tasks.

Now build your own marketing dashboard!

The marketing dashboard is a great way to give the marketing team a way to see how effective their work is at contributing to broader business goals. They can take a bit of time to set up, but they’re worth every minute. Just ask the data specialist who’d have to keep generating reports for you if you didn’t have that dashboard.