Chris Wolski -
Talking with Jon Taylor (a.k.a Klipfolio Digital Marketing Guru) last week, he was geeking out about a digital marketing dashboard we don’t have. As a SaaS company focused on inbound marketing, search engine rankings surrounding keywords that are core to our business are incredibly important to us; Jon was excited about the idea of building a dashboard that tracks our search engine rankings on important keywords in real-time. I thought this was a great idea too, but not eyes sparkling, mouth watering, dashboard dreaming good...I’m sure you’ll get it built Jon.
Truth is, while there is a lot of commonality in the metrics that marketers want to track - web traffic, ad spend, conversion rates etc. - at a more granular level, we’re often looking for marketing metrics that are specific to our industry, sector, company and marketing function. Mychelle’s blog last week on the benefits of building role-specific dashboards hits the nail on the head in that last respect. Jon wants to see keyword search rankings in real-time. I want to know how many people read this blog and go on to start a trial.
Effective marketing dashboards will also reflect industry and sector specific contexts and metrics. A friend of mine working in the pharmaceutical industry would love to have real-time visibility into prescriptions being written for the drugs she manages, and what proportion of the market for a particular drug category her company is capturing. Another friend manages social media for a large cosmetics company. She would love a dashboard that helps her monitor customer trips from social media properties to the company's ecommerce site, and metrics that connect specific digital marketing content with the purchase of specific SKUs would be, in two words, “game changing”.
What’s your dream marketing dashboard?
If you’re not dreaming yet, start with this: what’s a marketing metric you could track in real-time to help you do your job better? Its likely a few metrics will come time mind. Next ask yourself, what data sources are the basis for these metrics, and can you connect to them in real-time? Only after you’ve answered these two questions should you start dreaming about data visualizations and dashboard configurations.
As marketers at Klipfolio, we’re constantly thinking about performance metrics, and ways of tracking them, and yes, we dream about dashboards. We’re working to build our dream dashboards everyday, and we’re always looking for inspiration.
If you are too, here’s an ebook that you want to download. It's our first crack at a comprehensive guide to building digital marketing dashboards, packed with templates and examples that we hope incite conversation and inspire a dream dashboard or two. There’s something in this ebook for marketers working in every industry, sector and role. And if you have a marketing dashboard idea and you don’t see it in this ebook, please share it with us!