How To Build A Marketing Dashboard, Part 1: Unveiling The Top 6 Metrics for CEOs

The modern marketing landscape is increasingly data-driven. Gut instinct alone is not enough to justify the actions of your marketing team. As a Founder or CEO, one of the first things you should ask your CMO to produce is a marketing metrics dashboard.

A dashboard full of data can be used to do many things- predict consumer behavior or optimize campaigns, for example. But first and foremost, a marketing dashboard should help you understand the marketing team's contribtion to the bottom line. I'm talking about things like revenue and ROI.

The top 6 metrics your marketing dashboard should have

1. All Revenue

2. Marketing-Influenced Revenue ($)

3. Marketing-Influeced Revenue (% of Total)

4. Marketing Dollars Spent

5. Marketing ROI (%)

6. Marketing ROI (Net $)

If your marketing department does not have a dashboard, OR if your team has a dashboard but it does not include these items, I'm gonna be honest with you. THEY NEED STRATEGIC HELP! (Reach out to me if you'd like help getting your marketing dashboard set up.)

Why you need these 6 metrics in your marketing dashboard

1. All Company Revenue: This is how you measure the efforts of your marketing team vs. all other revenue generation avenues (e.g. sales, customer success or retention teams, etc). Without this, you won't be able to calculate Marketing's portion of the revenue pie and thus gauge how valuable their work is to the company.

2. Marketing-Influenced Revenue In Dollars: As a CEO, you'll want to know the bottom line: how many dollars did marketing bring in? Just know: getting to this number requires some work. Your marketing team will need to set up tracking tools for all their work across multiple channels. They will need to choose and implement an attribution model. And as CEO, you and your peers will need to work with marketing to define some important terms. For example, what constitutes "marketing influenced"? Or, how will you assign credit to a sale that multiple departments touched (for example: marketing brought in the lead but sales closed the deal)? Do you let marketing decide these terms, or do you need to bring in other teams, like sales or finance to weigh in? Working cross-functionally to define these terms is what I normally recommend.

3. Marketing Influenced Revenue, Percent of Total: This helps bring context to the raw numbers so you don't have to try to do quick math in your head.

4. Marketing Dollars Spent: This is a critical metric. You cannot calculate ROI without knowing your marketing spend. Marketing will need a process for tracking their spend by time period (week or month) in order to feed this dashboard. As leader of the company, you may need to help define "spend," or assign your head of finance to weigh in. For example, do you need the amount for staff salaries and benefits included in this number? Or just the dollars spent on advertising costs? You must discuss and define this with your head of marketing before they can be expected to report accurate data back to you.

5. Marketing ROI (%): YES! The number you've been waiting for. This number lets you know whether the money allocated toward marketing paid off, and if so, exactly how well.

6. Marketing ROI (Net $): This might be the most important number of all. Again, percentages contextualize the results, but at the end of the day, how many actual dollars did you profit? Here's what I mean: If your dashboard showed 200% ROI it would feel like time to celebrate! Right? But hold on... what if that 200% ROI only translates to a $500 gain? It means you started with a low-dollar marketing budget, so you got a low-dollar return. However, now that you see the marketing team's efforts are paying off, you can increase your marketing budget with a bit more confidence, and start to get a bigger return.

Why it matters

Together, these metrics help CEOs and the rest of their executive team understand whether to make cuts or investments in marketing. They can also help you set new revenue targets and better predict growth.

Sample: Here's what the top of your marketing dashboard could look like

Note: This sample is for a weekly metrics dashboard. A monthly dashboard may work better for some companies

If you put the 6 metrics I outlined at the top of your executive marketing dashboard, here's what it could look like. No matter the size of your company, whether those numbers represent thousands or millions, wouldn't it be nice to see this, to have this level of transparency and accountability, every week or every month?

Why CEOs and CMOs benefit from having this data in their dashboard

Those 6 data points are crucial to the relationship between CEOs and their heads of marketing. I have interacted with multiple CEOs over my career who expressed dissatisfaction with the old marketing regime and wondered what all that money was for. They wanted to cut marketing budgets, freeze marekting hiring, and make the marketing team do more for less.

When it came down to it, the problem was usually that the CEO and CFO felt that they were giving marketing big budgets, yet had no idea what they were getting in return.

Sometimes after I'd look into the data, I'd see they really weren't getting much back, and those feelings were justified. But sometimes they were getting a healthy return and just didn't know to attribute that growth to marketing. Because no one was properly tracking this data. Making cuts then, would actually hurt your bottom line rather than help it, but you'd have no way of knowing that.

Has this been happening to you? Does it feel like the money you give to marketing goes into a bit of a black hole? It's a common trap many companies fall into at some stage.

But you don't have to keep going like this. You can change that situation for yourself right now.

Do You Need Strategic Marketing Help?

If no one on your marketing team knows to help you define and track this data, I will say it again: they need strategic help. Or perhaps I should say you need help.

Before you invest another dollar in marketing growth strategies, you should know whether it's a smart business move.

Are you ready to take the first step toward getting a bottom-line focused marketing metrics dashboard? Reach out to me to discuss setting up dashboard tailored to your company’s needs.

Get Started: Contact Me