A dashboard is a set of visual widgets that are used by specific roles within a data-driven marketing department to run their business and make decisions. Visual widgets can include longitudinal charts, snapshots-in-time breakdown charts, tables, lists, trending or forecast graphs, real-time KPI scoreboards, goal meters and many other innovative mechanisms to visualize numerical data in order to simplify and bubble up insights.
Generally, different members of the marketing organization will want to have organize, assemble and tailor their own dashboards to support their unique role, root-cause analysis methodologies and visual preferences. For instance, the CMO Dashboard will in general be far broader and shallower than the Paid Search Manager or Display Dashboards, which would be channel-specific and far more granular
Dashboards visuals generally fall into a number of major purposes:
* Monitor Performance – High-level mission control views to monitor on general performance on a regular basis to ensure that day-to-day performance is going according to expectation, and there are no major anomalies in the data (e.g. If one of your channel systems goes down, for instance, marketing leadership may immediately notice a drop in delivered impressions)
* KPI and Goal Monitors – A data-driven organization always measures KPIs and tracks it to strategic marketing goals. It’s important that every member of the marketing team keeps close tabs of how they are tracking to their goals, and constantly making the required adjustments to make sure they hit them
* Compare Longitudinally – Time is one of the most important dimensions in marketing analytics, and most growth organizations will want to ensure that certain important metrics (like Attributed Revenue or Return on Ad Spend) are growing month-over-month or year-over-year (particularly for seasonal businesses)
* Root Cause Analysis – These are drill-down widgets that allow you to look at anomalies and dig deeper into what might be causing a particular trend. The ability to get granular is a crucial part in being able to answer “Why?” questions and derive smart insights that can be used to take action and optimize wisely
