What are the best principles for data visualization and reporting in marketing analytics?

Knowing who your audience is, what to achieve and how to achieve it, are the most important 3 things you need to know before doing anything else. You need to develop a strategy for your report to work. You need to create the report based on how you are presenting and the amount of details you provide in the report may vary because once you are presenting the report you can explain it but if you are emailing your report, you are not there to explain so should provide more written details.

Clarity, consistency, and actionability. Clarity means making sure your visuals are clear, concise, and easy to understand. Consistency means using the same format, style, and design elements across all your visualizations. And actionability means making sure your visuals can be used to drive action and decision-making. For example, if you're visualizing web traffic data, your visualizations should be designed to answer questions like "Which one is driving the most traffic?" or "Which channels are most effective?".

If you want to start your learning journey on what type of charts is useful for the insights you want to convey, I strongly recommend Alan Smith's book "How Charts Work". The visual language explained in the book is amazing. Once you have learned it, then practice it!

If you want to be best at designing good visuals, another perspective you cannot run away from is to understand how does our eyes and brain 'digest' these images/visuals. Some understanding of psychology and neuroscience will definitely be helpful.

There are two additional points. First, every visualization should have a story or insight to tell. If you cannot get any insight from that graph, that graph should probably not be there in the first place. Because less is more. Give your audience sufficient information rather than bombarding your audience with lots of irrelevant information. Second, you should always be able to share actionable insight which is based on your understanding of the business. If not, then your insight may not be actionable enough for your audience to take action.

What is missing in this article is the common tools we are using. For marketing analytics, you are going to use Looker Studio (formerly known as Google Data Studio) which can be used to build a dashboard. Because it connects with common MarTech platforms like Google Ads and Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Even in GA4 you could build a custom report for investigating your customer behaviour on your website or/and app.

Before you get started with anything in this list, it's super important to tightly define the question you're answering with your report/visualization. Examples... 1. For leads created this year, how many turned into Opportunities? 2. For Opportunities created this year, where did they come from? These two questions would pull from the exact same sets of data... Leads and Opportunities. But, they approach the data from a different perspective. The structure of the report is quite different. So, before you think about your audience, or start designing your visualization, make sure you have a narrow and tight question that you're answering.