KPIs: 3 dashboard recommendations for tracking your marketing activities
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Business strategies
KPIs: 3 dashboard recommendations for tracking your marketing activities
By now you probably understand that KPIs (or key performance indicators) are valuable tools for decision making. Which makes it all the more important to track KPIs using a dashboard that can present them in their best light. Here are the ABCs of dashboards.
When you think “dashboard,” likely the first thing that comes to mind is the one in your car. And actually, it can serve as a perfect example: In both business and on the road, dashboards provide a global view of your present situation in real time. From the comfort of the driver’s seat, you can view the fuel gauge, the speedometer, and the number of miles you’ve travelled since either the beginning of your trip or the day you first purchased the vehicle.
In the same way, the dashboard used for your SME’s marketing campaigns is a valuable ally. It helps you manage and track your efforts and provides at-a-glance data for each predetermined performance indicator.
While there are many different dashboards, their main functions are the same: enable the visualization, tracking, and easy utilization of relevant data provided as statistics, figures and graphics. Thanks to this tool, potential problems or opportunities can be identified at a glance.
This makes the dashboard a kind of productivity guarantee: High-performance companies use it to mobilize their teams and support their continuous improvement processes. A visual representation of KPIs in real time enables you to determine which strategies or activities need improvement.
There are many types of dashboard. Here are three dashboards that are the most likely candidates for supporting entrepreneurs in their marketing efforts.
1) SEO dashboard
This first tool displays the results of your work in web referencing. Google Analytics offers you the possibility of creating your own customized dashboard. This will enable you to determine whether your most recent campaign returned results. There are a wide range of indicators that can help you answer such a question: the number of unique visitors, the number of pages visited, the duration of these visits, and the clickthrough rate or bounce rate, for example.
2) Digital marketing dashboard
This dashboard brings together the main KPIs used in marketing to evaluate the effectiveness of a digital strategy. This management tool particularly enables an understanding of your return on investment for a web campaign and to verify if it brought more results than another initiative.
3) Social media dashboard
This dashboard enables you to follow ad campaigns that are underway in real time and to analyze your audience’s behaviour on social networks. The number of followers for each platform, the number of shares or comments, your posts’ reach, and the number of visits to your website coming from social networks are a few examples of the indicators available.
The 5 commandments for getting the most out of your dashboard
1) The intended users of the dashboard should be involved in its creation, since they are the only people who understand the challenges and priorities involved in their daily tasks!
2) Create the dashboard in such a way that it converts complex data into simple, useful information. Users need to clearly understand the data collected in order to act in the best interests of the organization.
3) Include a limited number of key performance indicators in order to highlight what is truly important: the achievement of your corporate goals. Obviously, the most important data should be emphasized.
4) Be sure you are relying on accessible and reliable sources of data—provided by enterprise resource planning (ERP) software—so that the calculation of the indicators can be done automatically and without any manual processing.
5) Choose a user-friendly dashboard. Given that you’ll be using it regularly, it might as well be a pleasant experience! To this end, avoid overloading the dashboard with too much information.