5 Elements Your Reporting Dashboard Must Have

The beauty of digital marketing is in its ability to measure absolutely everything.  Gone are the days when you run a print ad, put up a billboard or broadcast a radio ad and hope your target market respond to it. While there’s no denying that these types of advertising are effective, particularly for brand building, it can be more difficult to measure your results on these channels. Fortunately, with digital marketing, this isn’t the case.

Digital marketers have an abundance of data at their fingertips; from the channels driving traffic to your website, to user behaviour on the website, conversion rates, and everything in between.

The best digital marketers analyse this information and use it to inform their campaign strategies.  A marketing dashboard can be a helpful tool for gathering information and presenting it in a way that is easy to digest.

What is a Marketing Dashboard?

A marketing dashboard is simply a platform that collects your data and the metrics that you want to measure to provide a summary of your marketing efforts. Marketing dashboards give you the ability to easily see the information that you need to make marketing decisions and other high-level strategic decisions that add value to your business. There are a number of companies that offer marketing dashboards. You can use one of these options for your business, or create your own in-house.

What to Include In Your Marketing Dashboard

There are a number of different elements that can be included in a marketing dashboard. You should customise your business’ dashboard to you’re your specific marketing objectives or overall KPIs. If you still need some inspiration to get started, the following are useful pieces of data to inform your campaigns.

1. Sources of Traffic by Channel

Looking at traffic by channel is an excellent starting point. Your digital strategy is likely to incorporate several different channels. It’s important to know which are the most effective in bringing traffic to your site so that you can decide where to allocate your budget. Your dashboard should include a section that details whether traffic is from Social Media (and which site), Display Ads, Search Engine Marketing or other website referrals.

You can then look at how traffic from each channel performs so that you can focus your time developing the most successful channels. In order to do this, consider metrics such as Bounce Rate, % New Sessions, Time on Page and Number of Pages per Session for each channel. These metrics can be used to inform your entire marketing strategy going forward.

2. Overview of SEO

This section should include an overview of ranking positions for targeted keywords. Then, depending on the SEO tactics that you are using, you should provide additional information about what you have done to get your results, for example, a table showing new backlinks for the month can be included, or statistics about on-site optimisation.

Keeping an eye on the keywords that work for your company is another vital part of your SEO campaign.  If you know what keywords are working for you, you can optimise your campaigns to place more focus on these.  In addition, if you notice that there are keywords that are important to your business but are not bringing visitors to your website, or converting them when they get there, you can place more emphasis on your strategy for these terms.

3. Pay-Per-Click Campaign Stats

If you are running PPC campaigns, a section of your report should be dedicated to displaying the metrics of your paid channels. The key metrics that indicate the effectiveness of a PPC campaign are: Impressions, Click Through Rate, Cost-Per-Conversion, Total Spend and ROI.  These can be displayed at either AdGroup or Campaign level.

By looking closely at these metrics, you can make recommendations on where ad spend and budget should be focused.

4. Social Media Overview

If Social Media marketing is part of your digital marketing strategy, it should also have its own section in your marketing dashboard. Outline the performance of each channel individually with a focus on engagement metrics.  This gives you a more in-depth understanding of how each channel is working for you and which are best at reaching your audience. For a more in-depth report, consider adding a web traffic report that is filtered by “social” that shows how many people came to your website from your social channels.

5. Conversions

This is the part of your dashboard that most people will pay attention to – as ultimately, everyone is most interested in the metrics that impact the bottom-line.

This section should include metrics, statistics and charts showing the number of online conversions. Good metrics to include in this section are:

• Leads and conversions by Channel
• Revenue – particularly if you’re reporting on an e-commerce website
• Number of conversions from Paid Vs Organic
• Cost Per Conversion for Paid channels

These metrics should be compared month on month so that you can clearly see which channels are converting best for your business over time.

Your marketing dashboard is a powerful tool as it allows you to dive into the different attribution areas that are most important to your business. By appropriately analysing your data and adjusting your campaigns accordingly, you are able to eliminate bad leads and wasted money.

If your digital marketing strategy needs a boost, maybe your Facebook Marketing Hong Kong or AdWords Marketing Hong Kong – get in touch with a digital marketing agency Hong Kong today. With years of expertise, we can also help you with your social media marketing Hong Kong, Google Shopping Hong Kong, Bing ads and Google display network ads. Additionally, talk to us on how your business can leverage the power of programmatic advertising Hong Kong, marketing automation and social media marketing Hong Kong.