A quick and easy guide on creating your own marketing dashboard. It details what to include, and a few tips of how to present your dashboard.

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Marketing Dashboard
Creating your own
http://kameelvohra.com

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A marketing dashboard provides an easy method of
identifying & measuring key business performance
indicators. I like to break this up into four sections:
1. Sources of Business (Retrospective)
2. Accelerate Growth (Active)
3. Environmental (Passive)
4. Brand Awareness (Active & Passive)
Creating a Marketing Dashboard

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Sources of Business
It’s important to know where your business is
coming from, this helps to direct future effort
and provide visibility on trends (seasonal or
otherwise). You should analyze your last few
years worth of business to establish a baseline.
A lead source is any referrer that a sales lead
may have originated from.

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What sources should I measure?
• Measure your growth accelerators
• Any activity where an increase in effort, skill, funding, etc.
can directly influence the quantity of leads produced
• They are lead generation capabilities that you control,
agents and 3rd party/external sources that operate
independently do not count
• Examples include: cold calling, search engine advertising ,
website (if you have a lead gen/content campaign), emailers,
events, etc.
• Whilst you can’t count leads from agents, you might include
the number of agents registered with you as a metric

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• Include your passive sources
• Sources which generate business for you independent
of any direct action you take
• Uncontrolled or fixed lead source
• Where you can not influence the quantity of leads
generated
• For example: government tenders, agent referrals

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That’s a lot of sources!
• Limit your dashboard to 4 largest, with everything else
coming into a 5th called “Other”
• If all your sources are delivering equally, then cluster
based on another form of commonality, and present
them based on this group
• If your other sources section is a significant portion,
then consider a separate metric or page just to analyse
your lead-source distribution
– A highly dispersed lead source makes it harder to focus
your marketing efforts & budgets
– It does however mean you’re not dependent on just one
source of business

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Presenting your Sources
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
Jan Feb Mar Apr
Agents
Website
Direct Sales
1. Mar - Loss of website leads during web agency switch
2. Feb – Fluctuation in agent leads is within normal tolerances
Percentage DistLeads by Source
Summary graphs for easy
reading & better illustration
of your key points
Bullet points stating key
findings. List any big
gains/events/losses here

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Active & Passive – Setting Metrics
Once you’ve identified your key sources, you can break down key
factors relating to those sources. These will form your marketing KPIs.
Do this for all your sources. Let’s assume emailers are an important
lead source, and start asking questions:
1. How many email campaigns did we run this month?
2. How many addresses do we have in our database?
3. How many leads were generated? (MQL)
4. How many real opportunities were identified from these? (SQL)
5. What was the value of these opportunities?
6. How many were won/realized?
Each of these questions helps to identify a measurable factor that
influences the total amount of business realized.

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Here’s an example of what it might look like. The
time trending is important, and the benchmark
/target values would make it even more
valuable:

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MQL vs. SQL
Identify in every chain of questions at what point
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) are handed over
to Sales for Opportunity identification (Sales
Qualified Lead). Whilst marketing & sales work
closely, quality lead generation is usually a
marketing responsibility, and actual conversion is a
sales responsibility.
Don’t accidentally inherit responsibilities that aren’t
yours.

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What about less tangible measures?
• Brand Awareness is not something you can hide
behind. Your impact on your brand can be
measured.
– Measure any actions or occurrences that raise the
profile of your company, this could include:
• Press Releases, news or article coverage online of offline
• Product placements anywhere
• Workshops, seminars or summits for key influencers/target
groups
• Charitable events or co-branded events
• Number of mentions/shares on social media (do not
measure likes, they’ve been proven to be worthless

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Beware! Metrics can lie
Metrics, like any statistic can tell lies. Be wary of
metrics that are self serving, or that can not be
drilled down to “opportunity value”.
Reasonable efforts should be made to link brand
awareness / intangible campaigns to “new
opportunities”. (Coupons/ref. codes are a great
start)

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Beware! of Client Entertainment
Events that largely accommodate existing clients, should
be tracked separately. If at all. Opportunity value from
such events is hard to measure. This shouldn’t be a core
marketing metric unless you have a team specifically
focused / responsible for client entertainment &
management. Don’t take this too literally, there are lots
of things that aren’t really marketing that you might get
lumped with. Understand your metrics.
This is actually a sales tactic - sometimes it hides under a
marketing budget.

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Presentation is everything
Don’t over complicate this. Make it easy to measure,
update and present. It shouldn’t more than a moment for
anyone to understand what you’ve presented, deep dive
only when there’s a question or something you need to
highlight.
Try making the front page a few key graphs, with specific
findings or actions. Keep the detail for the other sheets.
You can download a sample dashboard here:
http://kameelvohra.com/marketing-resources/