What is marketing that cannot be measured? A marketing strategy is only as good as the value its effort drives. Marketing leaders are in constant need to understand how their teams are performing, and marketing dashboards are key to enabling this. 

This blog will give you an overview of what marketing dashboards are and how you can create dashboards that are effective in making critical business decisions. 

What is a Marketing Dashboard?

A marketing dashboard is a visual collection of your key SaaS marketing metrics and KPIs. It presents your marketing data in a clear and understandable format, allowing you to. 

• Collate, manage and view real-time data from multiple sources, allowing marketing data to exist in a single place. 
• Track progress toward your marketing goals and ensure stakeholders are looking at the same data as you are. 
• Identify trends and patterns in your marketing performance for fast and efficient decision-making. 
• Better forecasting for future marketing strategies. 

Key Features of a Marketing Dashboard

Marketing dashboards aren’t just about stitching together your marketing data into pretty visualizations – they're strategic tools that can help you uncover interesting insights and trends hiding inside your marketing data. There are several data visualization tools available in the market, and it is important to look for these key features and functionalities in your marketing dashboard software. 

1. Real-time Insights: 

In today’s attribution-driven marketing landscape, you’re losing out if your marketing data isn’t real-time. With so much demand for people’s attention span, it is important that your marketing team is agile and able to respond to trends and patterns quickly. 

2. Deep Customization: 

Every business is unique, and every business leader has a certain method to their madness. With so much diversity, it is essential that your BI marketing solution allows you to customize your reports and dashboards the way you want to view them. You should be able to surface the metrics and KPIs that matter to you at that moment in the business. 

3. Integration: 

A good dashboard software integrates with most of the common tools that marketers use today. Although most marketing tools don’t have the best reporting capabilities, but they still have critical data around your marketing campaigns. Imagine being able to port all that data to your BI tool and getting a singular view of all your marketing data. 

4. Dynamic dashboards: 

Most marketing tools have dashboards that are static and don’t allow too much data analysis. A good BI solution should help you build an interactive dashboard. What this means is that you can play around with your existing dashboard and look for deeper insights without having to go back to your data analyst/engineer to get a new dashboard. 

5. AI-Augmented Analytics: 

Modern dashboards can help democratize data by allowing non-technical users to access and make sense of it. AI in particular can accelerate this process by allowing these business users to ask questions that they otherwise wouldn’t have thought of. It can help unlock hidden insights and trends from your data, giving users better leverage to make business decisions. 

Here's a marketing dashboard that you can play around with. See it in action!

8 Marketing Dashboards Examples & KPIs to measure for your Business

1. CMO Dashboard

A CMO dashboard should prove a high-level view of the marketing numbers, unlike most other marketing dashboards these metrics should be more aligned towards larger business goals than that of the marketing team.

Key metrics include:

• Overall marketing ROI
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
• Customer lifetime value (CLV)
• Market share
• Brand awareness metrics

2. Digital Marketing Dashboard

A digital marketing dashboard should offer a comprehensive view of all the digital marketing metrics & KPIs. It should allow marketers to assess the effectiveness of all their digital channels (advertising, website, email, social media etc.). 

Key metrics often include:

• Website traffic
• Conversion rates
• Cost per lead
• Social media engagement
• Email open and click-through rates

3. Web Analytics Dashboard

A web analytics dashboard should help you understand how users interact with your website, identifying areas for improvement and optimizing user experience.

Key metrics:

• Pageviews
• Bounce rate
• Time on site
• Top performing pages
• Traffic sources

4. Performance Marketing Dashboard

A performance marketing dashboard should focus on the effectiveness of your advertising efforts, helping marketers optimize their ad spend and improve campaign performance.

   Key metrics:

•    Cost per click (CPC)
•    Click-through rate (CTR)
•    Conversion rate by channel
•    Return on ad spend (ROAS)

5. Email Performance Dashboard

An email performance dashboard should allow you to track the success of your email marketing campaigns and identify opportunities to improve engagement and conversions.

Key metrics:

• Open rates
• Click-through rates
• Unsubscribe rates
• List growth rate
• Conversions per email

6. Social Media Dashboard

A social media dashboard allows marketers to track the performance of their content across platforms and measure the impact of social media on overall marketing goals.

Key metrics often include:

• Follower growth
• Engagement rate
• Reach and impressions
• Top performing content
• Social media ROI

7. Google Ads Dashboard

A Google Ads dashboard provides a detailed view of your paid search campaigns, helping you optimize ad spend and improve ad performance.

Key metrics include:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• Quality score
• Conversion rate
• Cost per conversion

8. Marketing Pipeline Dashboard

This dashboard tracks the journey of leads through your sales funnel, helping marketing and sales teams align their efforts and optimize the conversion process.

Key metrics often include:

• Opportunity generated by source
• Lead-to-opportunity conversion rate
• Pipeline velocity
• Win rate
• Average deal size

Build vs. Buy: Should You Create Your Own Dashboard or Use an Embedded Solution?

Are you a PM building a SaaS for marketers? You're bound to eventually hit the reporting question: should you build your own analytics module from scratch, or embed an existing solution?

Building your own dashboard means complete control–you can design the exact features your customers need and integrate deeply with your product. Your reporting will feel truly native, matching your UI and workflows perfectly.

But here's the reality, building analytics is a massive undertaking. What starts as “we just require a few charts” quickly grows into handling different data sources, building visualization tools, managing exports, and dealing with performance at scale. Your engineering team could spend months building features that analytics platforms already offer out of the box.

Embedded analytics platforms let you add sophisticated reporting without the heavy lift. Your customers get professional-grade dashboards and visualizations, while your team stays focused on building the core features that make your product unique. Yes, you'll have some limitations on customization, but you'll get to market faster and can always build custom elements on top of the embedded solution as needed.

Unless your product's main selling point is analytics itself, using an embedded solution usually makes more sense. Your development resources are better spent on features that differentiate your product in the market, not recreating reporting capabilities that already exist.

Harness the Power of Your Marketing Data

In today's data-rich marketing landscape, the ability to quickly understand and act on your metrics is crucial. A well-designed marketing dashboard isn't just a nice-to-have – it's an essential tool for any data-driven marketing team.

By centralizing your key metrics, providing real-time insights, and making data accessible to your entire team, a marketing dashboard can transform how you make decisions and drive your marketing strategy forward.

Ready to take your marketing analytics to the next level? Consider using a platform like DataBrain to create powerful, insightful marketing dashboards. With its robust integration capabilities, customizable templates, and user-friendly interface, DataBrain can help you turn your marketing data into actionable insights – fast.

Don't let your valuable marketing data go to waste. Talk to us and start building your marketing dashboard today and unlock the full potential of your marketing efforts.