How to Build your Marketing Dashboard with Data Analytics Tools

Marketing has changed massively over the last decade. It’s no longer about just advertising your product and hoping it will sell. Instead, it is about using marketing analytics to understand what your customers want and how to engage with them in a way that will be both meaningful and profitable for your brand.

The rapid growth of the internet has created a new environment for marketing, one in which brands have to be agile and quick. It is not enough to simply have good products if they are not being marketed effectively. To keep up with this pace of change, many businesses are now looking to data analytics tools that offer real-time information on their performance.

What is Data Analytics?

Data analytics is the study of data that is collected for the purpose of analyzing patterns, making predictions, and drawing inferences. By looking at data collected over time, it’s possible to see patterns and make predictions about the future. Analyses of this data can help companies make crucial decisions about how they want to run their business, which are better informed because they take into account all available information about what consumers are interested in and how they behave towards the company’s products.

What’s the use of Data Analytics in Marketing?

Data analytics is a critical component of generating insights for marketers which can help them strategize, understand their customers better, make data-driven decisions, and drive business productivity.

The use of data analytics in marketing has increased tremendously over the years. Marketers are using it to improve customer engagement, increase customer retention/experience and optimize their marketing campaigns.

A marketing campaign is a series of activities with the goal of delivering a core message with the ultimate aim of increasing brand awareness and boosting sales. The success or failure of a campaign is measured by its effectiveness in delivering this message to the targeted audience with the desired effect.

Data analytics is also been used for a variety of purposes in marketing such as:

• Customer Analysis
• Conversion Optimization
• Marketing Campaign Analysis
• Location and Targeting Effectiveness
• Product Advertising Effectiveness
• Strategy Development and Testing

It is important to understand two basic principles of data analytics in marketing. One, that data should be the backbone of any marketing strategy. Two, that data should be collected to inform decisions and not just accumulate for its own sake.

Besides, data analytics can be used to solve the issue of marketing attribution. Marketing attribution is a process of assigning a value to various marketing efforts and establishing their contribution to a sale.

The problem with attribution is that it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact marketing activity that made the sale happen. With all the social media, email, web ads and other marketing activities happening, it can be hard to know what finally prompted a customer to make a purchase.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that different people contribute in different ways at each stage of the process. A customer might have been exposed to some message from one person while another person handled an interaction on social media or on their website. It can be difficult for marketers to figure out who did what and how much they contributed.

This is where data analytics step in as a powerful tool to provide the much-needed clarity needed by marketers to make informed decisions about their online conversions as well as offline sales initiatives. Data analytics and attribution modeling allows marketers and product managers to understand which channels (e.g., social media, email, pay-per-click) drive the most revenue and how much of this is due to specific campaigns or tactics. Using this information, they can alter their marketing strategy accordingly and make sure that their budget is allocated in such a way that it maximizes conversions for their business.

How Data Analytics Tools are Helping out with Marketing Campaigns

Organizing data is not an easy task. This is why marketers are using data analytics tools to get more insights into their marketing performance. Analytics help you understand how your customers interact with your products/services and take into account the context. 

For example, a very popular go-to analytics tool, Google Analytics, is capable of providing insights on how users interact with your site, what they are looking at, how long they spend on certain pages, etc. Google Analytics gives you access to reports that will show you important information like which websites are sending traffic to yours or where people are clicking the most on your site.

These analytic tools combine various marketing channels into one system, bringing all the data together in one place. This helps marketers understand their marketing strategy better and improve it to reach new benchmarks.

Some of the data points that you can find in a marketing analytics tool are:

• The total number of visitors, leads and customers generated by your company
• Conversion percentage from visitor to lead and from lead to customer
• The average order value per customer
• The number of repeat visitors that have converted into a customer

How you can Build Your Own Marketing Dashboard with Popular Analytic Tools

So far, we’ve looked at data analytics and its role in marketing. Now we’re faced with the question of how to actually use these analytic tools to build “marketing dashboards” to get insight into our marketing data.

A marketing dashboard is a useful data visualization tool that helps marketers keep track of their marketing stats. It’s an interactive, real-time representation of a company’s marketing campaigns which displays statistics such as conversion rates, number of impressions, and web traffic from various marketing channels, such as social media or email campaigns. 

A marketing dashboard can help marketers assess the effectiveness of their marketing efforts and how to optimize future campaigns accordingly.  Some examples include monthly marketing reports, marketing campaign progress, content performance reports, landing page performance e.t.c

The perfect dashboard should provide you with information on where your strengths are and where you may want to improve them. It should also tell you if your message is reaching the right audience and what channels are most effective at delivering your message, as well as how much money you’ve spent so far and what ROI those investments will generate.

So, what are some of the features of a marketing dashboard?

• Monitoring the performance of individual marketing campaigns
• Tracking campaign goals
• Comparing campaign performance against goals
• Knowing which campaigns are doing well and which ones are not

Coming around to data analytics software,  we have a couple of them that can be used to create marketing dashboards. They include;

Tableau: Tableau is a data visualization and analysis tool that enables marketers to explore and analyze their data quickly and easily.

Tableau is a user-friendly solution for managing large amounts of data. It can be used to create insightful dashboards, graphs, and charts. The tool creates an intuitive interface where users can drag fields from the database onto the dashboard in order to display relationships between different pieces of data. Tableau’s intuitive interface also allows users to easily interact with their dashboards and graphs by playing around with different filters and colors in order to get more out of their data.

Microsoft Excel: This program allows users to organize data from one or more sources by making tables, graphs, charts, pivot tables, etc.

It is often used by marketing professionals to analyze marketing campaigns and track marketing metrics such as leads, customers, and budgets. Excel makes data analysis simple and easy to use and can be used for a lot of data analysis tasks – from creating a basic spreadsheet to complicated data manipulation tasks.

Power BI –  is a tool that helps individuals and teams to quickly analyze data and share insights. It can be used for different purposes – from analyzing marketing data to evaluating finance performance. It is an advanced data analytic tool that combines data from multiple sources to create a single view of the business. 

Google Sheets –  Google sheets are an excellent tool to organize data in columns and rows. With the use of formulas, charts, pivot tables, and conditional formatting to provide insights into marketing campaigns. Google sheets can also be used to create dashboards with drag-and-drop features. They allow the user to create workbooks with all kinds of charts and graphs which are updated automatically when new data is entered into the cells.

SQL – which is pronounced “sequel”, stands for Structured Query Language. It is an international standard language for relational databases, which are most often used in the field of data analytics. It has become a general-purpose programming language that can be used to query, update and manipulate data in a database. It’s considered very efficient because it can be used to query data without writing complicated code. A SQL statement can be used to retrieve data from one or more tables or views at once, aggregate the information in different ways, joining tables together, and grouping data by certain criteria like demographics.

However, In order to build important marketing dashboards with analytics tools, you need to be familiar with data analysis. AstroLabs offers a Practical Data Analysis for Business course where you get to learn and practice data analytics from scratch in 3 weeks.  You’ll get to learn and apply data analysis tools, the likes of advanced Excel and Google Sheets, APIs, SQL, Google Data Studio, PowerBI, Zapier, Tableau e.t.c