Marketing reports help management make a decision and dashboards are the key to assess performance and efforts made to achieve a goal. Choosing the right metrics, design, target audience and graphs are important factors to consider when making reports and dashboards.
When it comes to making decisions and summarizing key performance indicators (KPI), marketing reports and dashboards play a key role. Often bad reports are created when a wrong choice is used in metrics for measuring goals and focus is on the wrong goal. A bad marketing report is not only a waste of time and other resources it leads to pointless meetings that give no end result. As far as marketing dashboards are concerned, it’s all about paying attention to the right goal, the right metrics and a careful selection of key performance indicators.
A Good Marketing Report: How to Create One
Before making a marketing report you need to work backwards and first pick a sensible decision. Gather info for achieving a decision and once decision is reached, list out all data relevant in context to it. Next, assess whether the information influences the decision in any way, can it be grouped with other info or kept segmented, time taken for gathering info, and if it helps rule something out or reach a decision. Laying out a report entails ensuring that the layout fits the goal. You may have to break down the metric into multiple graphs and can repeat graphs through the report, placing them in order of importance. Keep the design simple and focus on content.
Remember, a marketing report should answer questions, like effect of product changes on organic search, main reasons of site slowdown etc.
Marketing Dashboard: How They Work
Marketing dashboards help measure goals and performance over time. They should be easy, quick to grasp, simplify analytics to help answer specific questions and avoid being vague. A dashboard focuses on success, its extent and reasons for success of effort made towards a goal. To create a good dashboard, pick a goal that is sensible and achievable.
The KPIs on a dashboard point at/ defines the decisions/ ideas/ reports created so choose them carefully. The dashboard illustrates progress but doesn’t try to explain why performance was bad. It helps track goals over time, is updated frequently and indicates requirement for further investigation.
Dashboard Layout & Graphs
Dashboard layout should convey info quickly and easily, should fit on single screen. Place the graphs in order of importance from top to bottom or right to left. Focus on content, and keep design, styles and colors simple and unified. Graphs should focus on a goal.
Know/ Inform Your Target Audience
Maintain focus on target audience and priority factors like budget or goals that their jobs centre around. Avoid mixing target audience as each will seek a different goal. You may need to inform or educate them on different aspects, so to correct the focus.
Choosing Good Metrics
The metric refers to all elements like time, number of searches, etc that help measure progress against the goal or end result. Since a dashboard enumerates the goal and its progress, it has to involve metrics. So the metrics chosen also defines the goal. Avoid choosing any metric that can’t be defined or controlled. For instance to assess drop in website visit, you should include metrics that take seasonality, marketing medium and industry status into account. Stick to choosing only one or two specific metrics per goal to avoid confusion and modify them according to available resources.
