Data-Driven Marketing Success, Part 3: Effective Reports and Dashboards

Most popular digital reporting tools offer custom reports and dashboards that summarize raw data – key to helping businesses understand their digital reality so they can make strong decisions moving forward.

Before we lay out additional ways to access reports and dashboards, though, it’s important to know the difference between those two things:

• Dashboards – built to organize and present data in real-time, dashboards are animated and dynamic. Their graphs and charts illustrate trends within and across all key performance indicators (KPIs) your business is tracking. For many (but not all) businesses looking to improve digital marketing ROI, those KPIs might include website traffic, cost per lead, conversion rate, and SEO keyword ranking.

• Reports – static and less interactive than dashboards, reports often take form as PDFs offering broad, historic data. They’re typically specific to a category of business and/or a category of KPIs, such as a performance report or trend analysis report.

Barrier to Entry for Small- and Mid-Sized Businesses

As touched on above, reports and dashboards aren’t technically hard to come by. They’re available, after all, within most popular reporting tools. Google Analytics 4, Repsly, 123FormBuilder, Fulcrum, ContentSnare and other leading platforms all give users the option to see their metrics displayed within dashboards and reports.

But here’s where things get tricky: These tools’ reports and dashboards only provide insights on data collection on that specific platform. If you’re like most businesses, you use more than one – and want to synthesize data from all for a comprehensive view of your business’s digital reality.  

The million-dollar question, then: How does your business get around this issue, i.e. how does your business get data analysis for all reporting tools in one place?

For larger corporations, the answer is easy: They invest in custom dashboards that integrate and make sense of data from all relevant inputs. Unsurprisingly, these are cost-prohibitive and out of reach for most small- and mid-sized businesses.

It’s why most small- and mid-sized businesses often turn to analytics apps. Sounds good, right? Lean on an app that shows you it all? The challenge here – going back to part 2 of this series – is that analytics apps vary in terms of customizability. Not all let you customize data points, meaning these apps often show a fixed set of KPIs that aren’t necessarily relevant to your business.  

Luckily, we have a few more suggestions for small- and mid-sized businesses looking to leverage data across all of their reporting tools.

Tools That Can Help

A number of consumer-facing reports and dashboard builders exist in reach of smaller businesses, albeit with various pros and cons that we’ll outline below.

First, though, a friendly reminder on the rules of thumb for using any analysis tool:  

Clarity – do you and your team understand what you’re looking at, i.e. do you understand exactly what the metrics within the report or dashboard mean? This is where many small businesses and non-marketing professionals go awry. They have reports and dashboards in front of them but aren’t entirely clear on what the various graphs and charts represent.

Relevance – remember what we talked about in part 2 : the KPIs you see in your dashboards and reports must tie back to your business’s specific goals. If your reports and dashboards are synthesizing irrelevant information, they can block progress or even take your marketing budget in the wrong direction.

Accuracy – make sure data being collected and shown in reports and dashboards is clean and therefore paints a true picture of your KPIs.

Tools to consider:

• Semrush – a Hammer Marketing favorite, Semrush’s Project Dashboard is described by the SEO toolkit software as a “small-scale analytics report that provides quick insights into what’s currently going on with your project.” Project Dashboard allows for multiple data sources, so you can compare metrics across all of reporting tools your business uses. This is by far the most user-friendly DIY solution for small- and mid-sized businesses looking for a cost-efficient solution they can manage in-house, on their own. Just keep in mind: User-friendly is relative. Semrush Project Dashboard, while easier than the rest, nonetheless requires a designated internal resource with an understanding of data analysis.
• Tableau – more costly than Semrush, Tableau is another visual analytics option that lets you create interactive dashboards and reports from data across numerous tools without coding knowledge.
• Looker Studio – have a developer in house, or someone with extensive related experience? Consider Looker Studio reports. They’re similar to the two options above, but offer deeper insights. However, the depth comes at a cost: Looker Studio’s learning curve is much steeper than Semrush’s.

Hammer Marketing’s digital marketing expertise – Hammer Marketing’s digital marketing strategists and developers spend all day, every day handling analytics on behalf of small- and mid-sized businesses like yours. Often our team expertly leverages the tools mentioned above; sometimes we even add to them via relatively cost-efficient custom solutions.

Take this dashboard, designed by Hammer Marketing for a New England chemical supplier:

The highly-visual dashboard reports on nuanced metrics that are important to the company’s leadership and its sales team. Like most dashboards, it lets users change the date range to compare results. The  company’s sales team leans heavily on this dashboard to determine whether products are gaining visibility in respective global markets as intended, as reflected by KPIs measuring company website traffic by region and user behavior specifics (for example, are site visitors looking at job opportunities…or are they looking to buy product?). As company needs change, Hammer Marketing retools the dashboard at an investment in reach of the business.

Want to skip learning curves by putting dashboards and reports in the hands of Hammer Marketing pros focused on your marketing ROI? Contact Hammer Marketing today for a free consultation.