7 Key Elements All CMOs Need to Rock That Marketing Performance Dashboard

Anyone can start a marketing campaign, but measuring your performance and optimizing to meet your goal is another thing entirely.

Finally, it feels like your campaigns are finally working. Sales are up because those pings from Shopify are getting more frequent. Ok so now for validation and your list of basic questions after running a campaign, like “how much are we spending?” “is it jiving with what was initially planned?”, “how do we measure the success (or loss) of a campaign?”. These are the questions a good CMO would want to be answered in an effective marketing performance dashboard.

The Beauty of Marketing Dashboards

A marketing dashboard is a powerful tool to create automated marketing reports and analyze data to make sound marketing decisions. The dashboard shows valuable metrics and updates the data within real-time according to your campaign performance. It can track and evaluate the performance of all your paid and unpaid campaigns and keep a tab of your costs while making sure your marketing campaigns are converting at the level you anticipated.

So, what key performance indicators (KPIs) would you need to take note of in your dashboards?

Buckle up as we discuss the seven key elements you must consider in your marketing dashboard to ensure you’re tracking what matters most.

 1. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

How much did you spend to get a customer to purchase that watch? The cost per acquisition (CPA) addresses this question and is critical to know as you work toward growth plans.

With the CPA metric, you can easily compare and decide what strategy worked best, which ones didn't live to your expectations, and most importantly, why it did (or did not) work.

Thanks to these insights, you can now strategically decide where to allocate your money and then replicate the best practices from that campaign to others.

  2. Customer lifetime value (CLV)

How much is a customer worth in total? If you’re getting customers for $75 each, but they are only shopping with you one time for an average order of $50, you need to make some adjustments.

Now, it’s okay to have a negative ROI initially, BUT you need to make up the money (plus more) in the long-run. To understand this, you need to know your CLV; otherwise, it is impossible to understand your profits.

In the medium term, use engagement, return website visitors, and the number of inquiries as an indicator of CLV. The invisible costs of calculated CLV only consider the acquisition costs. So please don’t get it mixed up with shipping, where isn’t included. Buyers go by predicted CPA and the different patterns you may see.

  3. Web traffic and organic search

Web traffic is important. There’s a ton of ways to segment it (sessions, duration, bounce rate, users, etc.), but it’s critical to keep an eye on these stats in today’s digital world. Google Analytics is an easy way to find out these answers and more. You can also find out if your SEO efforts generate traffic for your site and see which pages are generating traffic so you can recalibrate your efforts where needed.

4. Landing page conversion

Relative to website traffic, landing pages are vital in the funnel to conversions. You need to know which of your pages are great performers and which ones need tweaking. For example, you may have a high traffic landing page, but it may not reach the expected customer conversion rate. Keeping track of the traffic-to-conversion ratio is a great place to start for your marketing dashboard.

Getting to know your buyers through a more in-depth customer data platform is also a great help to course-correct your marketing strategy and develop a more targeted customer journey for them.

  5. Social media impression

Your customers are on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn, so 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 with tight marketing budgets. These companies need to be especially aware of which channels work best for them and what metrics to interpret data the best way.

Cost per thousand impressions (CPM) generally goes with awareness. It is the total amount spent/total measured impressions x 1000. Viewable impressions and impressions are what you look at a lot for driving awareness – in partnership with reach.

Cost per click (CPC) is good depending on the competition and the channel you are in. It differs by platform, keywords, industry, channel, and ad format. If you’re targeting an increase in subscriptions/followers, having a CTA with CPC as a metric is effective.  

  6. Leads

Lead generation metrics are essential for monitoring, but it’s got to be done the right way. A research study done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company shows that it is more profitable to target loyal customers than to acquire new ones. That means tracking leads who fall under your valuable customer segment because these are relevant leads that are likely to go all the way and buy from you.

  7. Email conversion rate

Are you having a reasonable open rate but not getting any leads? That’s because the return only happens once subscribers complete a goal action. It’s essential to take the time to constantly monitor 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 accessible insights into what you can modify and improve every email blast.

Ready to jump into your marketing dashboard?

Whether you’re just starting to build your own or you already have existing data, making sense of all these raw figures can be overwhelming. Let me show you how ViewN does it for eCommerce stores selling on both Amazon and Shopify. We do the conversion and organization into key marketing and customer dashboards, so you wouldn’t have to worry about it! 

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