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Marketers today have access to an array of analytical tools to make sense of their data and accurately measure performance metrics—from customer data platforms (CDPs), to bespoke homegrown systems, to good old Google Analytics. For advertising professionals, few such solutions have more valuable features than AI-powered custom dashboards, which can dynamically showcase brand stories and help you finetune your campaigns for optimal performance.
With tools like custom dashboards, marketers can get a more robust read on their data to better understand consumer behavior and anticipate next moves. And at a time when economic storms are putting brand loyalty on the line, and mis- and dis-information is a constant threat to brand safety, marketing organizations that can stay agile and data-driven will be best equipped to succeed and earn consumer trust. Let’s explore how bringing data to life through interactive graphic visualizations can help you improve your KPIs and ROI while simultaneously enhancing collaboration—both internally and externally.
Dashboards provide a visual summary of the metrics that are most important to your marketing operations, empowering you with a quick and easily-digestible overview of how the main elements of your program are performing—all in real-time. This ease-of-use means you can access critical insights without having to rely on your IT department or data analysts to parse and interpret the information for you. Advanced dashboarding tools also include discovery features that can help you explore data far beyond the most basic metrics.
Creating reports manually is an incredibly time-consuming process. You need to gather data from disparate sources, organize and stitch it together in spreadsheets, run your analyses, create visuals, and then distribute them to the appropriate stakeholders. The intricate process can often lead to calculation errors and analytical inconsistencies that themselves translate into potential wasted costs.
Automated custom dashboards, however, do all that menial work for you. And, against the backdrop of the Great Resignation, relieving your talent of manual tasks—and subsequently empowering them with more time to focus on higher-value strategic initiatives—can help your organization avoid higher rates of cost-sapping staff turnover.
Recent research revealed that advertising professionals use an average of nine platforms for a typical ad campaign and touch seven of those platforms in a typical day. The fragmentation makes it all the more difficult for marketing organizations to develop the kinds of fluid, cross-channel, hyper-personalized experiences their consumers expect—particularly when it comes to drawing meaningful holistic conclusions from multichannel campaigns.
Custom dashboards can help solve this problem by allowing you to bring all your data together in one centralized location. From there, you can determine the best metrics and graphics for showcasing your campaigns’ performance and results.
Marketing professionals can often feel pressured to make changes to improve campaigns before they’ve even had a chance to fully analyze and dissect performance. By utilizing custom dashboards, you can ensure you’re always making informed decisions based on the latest insights while boosting confidence in the data you’re using to make those decisions. You can also easily see how current and projected performance compares to your overall goals and then confidently reallocate budget and resources to optimize your media spend.
In the new work-from-anywhere reality where teams are often scattered across the country (or around the world), it’s important to consider how your tools can help foster cross-organizational collaboration. With the right dashboarding tools in place, marketing teams can simply create a report and seamlessly deliver it to any relevant internal and external stakeholders through one file or shared login. Gone are the days of needing to manually process spreadsheets or rely upon third-party programs, which inevitably slow down decision-making.
Whether your challenge is data consolidation, preparation, crafting presentations, or analysis, automated dashboards remove the barriers to collaboration and essentially act as a facilitator for ongoing discussions—if/when stakeholders ask questions, you can provide answers on the fly—streamlining the feedback process and allowing you to develop quick, actionable plans. The result: a simpler path to profitability.
Custom dashboards can help fuel employee fulfillment and productivity by replacing once-complex analytical approaches with powerful graphic storytelling that makes it easy to analyze and understand performance. Compiling data from all relevant reporting sources in a single location and highlighting the most relevant insights for your team can help them see how their work directly relates to results and overall business goals. For many employees, this is a huge motivating factor that can guide their work in the areas that matter most.
Traditionally, digital marketing success has meant demonstrating your team’s impact on revenue and the robustness of your marketing-generated sales funnel. But new research shows that KPIs like customer satisfaction, content engagement, customer acquisition costs, customer retention rates, mobile analytics, and customer referral rates are all growing increasingly important to modern marketers.
With basic reporting technology, it’s difficult to fully drill down into what initiatives are powering those aspects of business performance. Intuitive, data-rich visuals can change that, however, empowering marketers with better visibility into aggregated marketing impact and ROI. Suddenly, it’s possible to see what products, offers, and creatives are resonating with specific customers and segments across individual devices and channels.
Key players in sales and marketing often utilize performance reports to illustrate the effectiveness of their strategies and secure buy-in from their superiors. With custom dashboards, you don’t need to sift through dull, static spreadsheets while preparing your presentations—the dashboard has all the features you need to automate the illustration of those insights to your audience. And the engaging nature of the visuals can help you keep decision-makers informed with the most relevant insights.
Whether you’re speaking with a manager, board members, investors, or clients, custom dashboards make it easier to demonstrate performance and (ultimately) earn that much-desired buy-in.
Custom dashboards can offer users an array of benefits, but when it comes to improving KPIs and ROI, not all dashboarding tools are created equal. Here are a few key features to look for if you’re in the market:
Easily change parameters and uncover hidden insights from your data sets.
Create bar graphs, pie charts, boxplots, data maps, and other forms of visual reporting illustrations.
Move your dashboard elements around to keep the most important ones front and center. A drag-and-drop editor also allows you to easily add or remove graphs so you can focus on the data that best suits your business needs.
Instead of creating dashboards from scratch, choose from a list of predefined templates and then adjust it according to your specific needs.
Use more than one custom dashboard for the different aspects of your marketing initiatives. Examples include campaign performance with delivered spend, groups and tactic performance, and location targeting performance, among others.
Easily export your dashboards into PDF, PNG, or CSV files, or create logins for your internal and external stakeholders to view your dashboards on their own time.
Create alerts that inform you when any key metrics you’re tracking on your dashboards experience volatility.
Step back in time to see which behaviors led people to click on your ads.
Change is constant in marketing. Getting access to tools that can help you better manage and interpret data will set your organization up for future success in this fast-moving landscape. Custom dashboards offer the flexibility, portability, and insights marketers need to optimize their strategy for today’s world.
Data Canvas from Basis Technologies empowers users to create customizable, live dashboards that help tell the stories of their campaigns, simplifying the reporting processes and eliminating errors from manual calculation. Curious? Visit our dashboards page to find out more.