8 Critical Components of a Marketing Dashboard

You may think your marketing campaign is performing well, but how can you know for sure? And, how can you know that all your marketing efforts—social, digital, email, even PR—are working well together to move the dial on your business?

It’s time to take the guesswork out of your marketing strategy. Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are metrics that serve as a compass for navigating the path forward on your marketing road map.

These key metrics don’t just give you a sense of how well you’re doing; they drive accountability across your team. KPIs also give you an at-a-glance view on how well you’re working toward your goals, much like a monitoring tool would.

And finally, marketing KPIs justify your efforts as a whole—they offer a rock-solid, quantifiable view as to how well your marketing efforts are paying (or not paying) off.

Marketing professionals who want to hold themselves, and their teams, accountable create intuitive marketing dashboards to help keep their team and strategy on track. Are you a game? If so, make sure you include the following eight metrics in your marketing dashboard to ensure you’re tracking what matters most.

  1. Cost of customer acquisition

So, how much did it really take to snag Annie Smith in Ohio as your latest customer? The price it takes to wrangle a new customer can vary wildly. But what are you working towards as a whole? It’s not difficult at all to calculate: Just take your monthly marketing budget and divide it by the total number of new customers you acquired that month, and voila—there you have it.

This number is critical to know as you work toward growth plans. For example, you may want to grow your customer base 10x next year, but if it’s going to cost you an extraordinary amount, you may choose to adjust your goals and manage executive expectations about what is realistic.

  2. Customer lifetime value

In other words, how much is a customer worth, in total? If you’re acquiring customers for $75 each, but they are only shopping with you one time for an average order value of $50, you’ve got a problem.

To find out a customer’s lifetime value, multiple your average order value by the number of repeat annual sales, and the average retention time.

  3. Web traffic

Web traffic matters. There’s a ton of ways to slice and dice it (sessions, duration, bounce rate, users, etc.) but in today’s digital world, it’s critical to keep an eye on these stats. Google Analytics is an easy way to find out these answers, and more.

  4. Social media impact

Say what you will about social media—like it, love it, hate it—your customers probably hang out on platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. You should be there too. KPIs can help to justify your social media spend and track the extent of your digital reach. Tracking social media impact is especially important for companies that may lack a giant marketing budget. These companies need to be especially aware of which channels are working best for them.

  5. Landing page conversion

Landing pages are so important in the funnel to conversions. You need to know which of your pages are great performers and which ones need optimization. For example, you may have a high traffic landing page, which looks great at first, but it may garner an extremely low conversion rate. Keeping tracking of the traffic-to-conversion ratio is a great place to start for your marketing dashboard.

  6. Leads

Lead generation—isn’t that what your website is meant to do in the first place? Lead generation metrics aren’t just important for monitoring, it can justify your marketing department’s existence (ROI). But, it’s got to be done the right way. That means tracking website leads who may come back a second time.

  7. Email conversion rate

Email may be one of your most cost-effective marketing channels: it’s fast, easily personalized and you can track every click. Take the time to consistently track your send quantities, open rates, click-through rates, click-to-open rates, and conversion rates. Because email is so easily scalable, these metrics will give you fast and easy insights into what you can do to build on every campaign.

  8. Organic search

What are your SEO efforts doing for your traffic? Find out, by tracking organic search through Google Analytics. If you have a website, chances are you care about SEO. Peek at your overall traffic and also see which specific pages are generating traffic to see how you can improve your efforts.

Bottom line: KPIs justify your efforts.

Marketing KPIs and marketing dashboards aren’t designed to add a to-do item to your already hectic week. It’s your opportunity to see where you can improve, justify your efforts—or (hopefully) tout your achievements. Being disciplined about how you track KPIs can help you work towards your goals more efficiently.