Usage and tools have changed, but the need of marketing and sales teams has not: measuring the effectiveness of what has been launched. Measuring is not enough, though; you also have to measure the right things.

Here is how to design marketing dashboards that genuinely help you decide, and the mistake that makes them useless in most companies.

The team behind our automatable and flexible CRM tells you everything.

Three questions before designing

What is the objective of the action being measured?

For a website, is the aim to generate revenue or traffic? They are not the same thing and are not measured with the same indicators. A dashboard can also cover acquisition, loyalty, a geographic area or a customer segment.

Who is it for?

The more specialized a dashboard, the fewer recipients it has. The detail of a campaign interests the marketing team and its manager, rarely beyond. Circulating an operational dashboard widely is the best way to give rise to hasty interpretations in the management committee.

How often will it be read?

An activity summary is read monthly, an operational view daily or weekly. The right benchmark is simple: the frequency of distribution must match the frequency at which you can actually act.

The main enemy: quantity

A useful dashboard can be read at a glance. Audience measurement tools collect enormous amounts of data, and that is precisely the trap: too much information kills information.

Sorting is therefore most of the work. Ideally keep between five and ten indicators. Beyond that, nobody reads, and those who do pick the figures that suit them.

A sorting criterion that works well: for each indicator under consideration, write down the decision you would take if it moved sharply. If you cannot find any decision, delete the indicator. It is then a comfort figure, not a steering tool.

What are the right indicators?

Let’s say it frankly: there is no standard set. Indicators are only relevant if they reflect a coherent marketing strategy, and they depend on your business.

The method is therefore to first define the strategic objectives, break them down into clear operational objectives, then choose the measures that reflect whether those objectives are met. Never the other way around.

Here are a few examples nonetheless, without claiming they fit your case.

For website audience

• Number of sessions and users.
• Engagement time and number of pages viewed per session.
• Number of contact forms submitted.
• Breakdown by acquisition source.

A remark on vocabulary that matters since the switch to the latest generation of audience analytics tools: the bounce rate has given way to the engagement rate, and the definitions have changed. Comparing a figure from before with a figure from after therefore makes no sense, and many dashboards still carry series that mix the two.

To manage a budget

• Cost per contact obtained.
• Cost of acquiring a new customer.
• Return on investment of the marketing plan.

These three are the most useful, and they are also the only ones the audience analytics tool cannot calculate on its own: you have to link the source of a contact to what it became commercially, which happens in the CRM.

For social networks

• Traffic generated to the website.
• Size and growth of the community.
• Level of interaction on posts.
• Advertising budget committed and what it returns.

This is the terrain most exposed to vanity indicators. The size of a community does not automatically translate into business, and an advertising budget with no measurement of the downstream result is an unmanaged budget.

The breaking point: linking audience to revenue

This is the limit of every dashboard built solely on an audience analytics tool. It can tell you how many people came and what they viewed. It cannot tell you which of them became customers or for what amount.

The link is made by keeping the source in the contact record at the time of its creation, then reading it in your dashboards. It takes little work and changes the nature of the conversation: you stop comparing traffic volumes and start comparing acquisition costs.

The subject is continued in our articles on marketing performance indicators and on reporting in SMEs.

Your questions about marketing dashboards

What is the maximum number of indicators?

Five to ten per dashboard. Beyond that, reading becomes selective and everyone retains what supports their position.

Do you need a dashboard per department?

Yes, but fed by the same source. Two departments that calculate the same figure differently spend their meetings debating the data rather than the decisions.

How can you spot a vanity indicator?

It always goes up and never changes anyone’s mind. The cumulative number of followers is the most common example: it can only grow, so it signals nothing.

How often should you review the list of indicators?

Once a year, or at every change of strategy. A dashboard that is never questioned ends up measuring last year’s objectives.

Who should build the dashboard?

The person who has to decide with it. A dashboard designed by someone else answers its author’s questions, rarely its reader’s.