There is more buzz today surrounding ROI dashboards today than in the not-so-distant past, when marketers were getting a lot of what they needed data-wise with just one or two tools and keep track of it all on a single screen. Staying on top of multiple data sources across channels is important, so making sure that dashboard tech connectors linking different technology platforms are customizable, easy to use and able to operate in real-time is key.
One dashboard big trend is tied to the fact that marketers are adopting cloud services at an extraordinary rate, along with a trend of more data silos popping up across the marketing landscape. In the past, some marketers had one or two apps that were key to their organization, but now they have anywhere from 10 to 20—which means five or six social apps and all of the advocate marketing apps, automation systems and email, according to Klipfolio cmo Mychelle Mollot.
“Everybody has five or six core platforms, five or six social platforms and new ones that are popping up on
a regular basis,” Mollot says.
New ROI dashboard solutions are providing marketers with real-time updates on their key metrics across channels while maintaining that ease of use, but there are some challenges and potential missteps that marketing teams need to be aware of when leveraging new ROI dashboard tech solutions.
“The biggest thing that kills a dashboard is lack of usage, and the things that make a dashboard stop being useful is when they stop being relevant, because marketing changes so frequently,” Mollot says.
In order to get the most value from ROI from dashboards, marketers need to be able to easily access them and be able to customize and change things around themselves to fit their organization’s needs.
“It’s best to assign a smart analyst or operations person who is going to own it like they own a Marketo or a HubSpot solution for automation and keep it fresh, relevant and useful,” Mollot says.
Marketers also may not know that a lot of the work is now being automated for them within ROI dashboard solutions.
“Let’s say there’s a metric that they want to look at on social platforms—such as their number of followers. Tools today are automating that data for them, it’s one click to add it to a dashboard. I don’t think marketers have been keeping up with the evolution in dashboarding as much as they should be, because it has evolved and gotten so much easier. Now most of the data is coming from external data sources—not just social, but all of the cloud-based solutions,” Mollot says.
But social is the most quickly evolving space for marketing, and leveraging customer information culled from social provided marketers with information that was previously very hard to come about.
“Social is becoming bigger and bigger, and it’s taking marketers some time to learn how to best leverage it. The earlier that people get on the bandwagon the better,” says Mike Onghai, ceo of LookSmart, which owns dashboard specialists Clickable.
Another big dashboard mistake marketers make is trying to house too much information on a dashboard. This can be confusing and hides the high-value information a marketing team needs.
“A good rule of thumb is asking if someone can take an action on the information. If the answer is no, then it doesn’t belong on a dashboard. It might belong on a report or an analysis, but everything on a dashboard should be there because someone is going to take an action on it,” Mollot says.
Keeping the most pertinent, usable information possible on a dashboard is the recipe for success.
“Dashboards that fail include metrics that change only once a quarter. They don’t belong on the same dashboard as something that changes constantly,” Mollot says.
Different roles within a marketing organization require unique dashboard solutions, as well.
“A dashboard should be built for a specific role. You shouldn’t have a dashboard for a web person that is going to be used by the cmo. The cmo may want to look at that detailed web dashboard in a review with the web team, but on a day-to-day basis the web team has a dashboard that they are going to track their success against. When people mix roles in their dashboards, that’s where they fail,” Mollot says.
When planning out a dashboard, think of the audience and the latency of the data the team member using it will need to access.
“I have dashboard that are operational that I look at every day, and then I have dashboards that I look at monthly, so I can see month over month performance,” Mollot says.
Another big trend in the ROI dashboard tech space is posting key dashboard metrics for a team up on a public big screen monitor in the office, so the entire organization has a sense of how certain areas are performing in real time.
“It creates a shared purpose and a shared goal. We are seeing a lot of marketing departments do that. It’s also positive reinforcement—you can have the metrics go red green or yellow based in performance. It creates an extra sense of purpose and it can be extremely motivational,” Mollot says.
Mobile will also impact the marketing ROI dashboard world moving forward.
“I think the future is going to be about the mobile dashboard. Marketers are going to be taking the dashboard with them—a version of their dashboard with the things that are most important to them on their mobile device. Mobile usage has grown quickly, and a lot of marketing teams want to target by device and by operating systems. Conversion in mobile is not as easy as desktop, so a lot of these conversions are intermediate steps, bet we are moving forward,” Mollot says.
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