Beyond Basics: Advanced Dashboard Metrics You're Probably Overlooking

Most marketers are familiar with the standard KPIs, but are there advanced metrics that fly under the radar? 

This article delves into the nuanced world of dashboard analytics, highlighting lesser-known metrics that could provide invaluable insights for campaigns. 

We'll cover areas like Customer Lifetime Value trends, micro-conversion paths, and in-depth referral source analysis, helping professionals squeeze every ounce of information from their dashboards.

• Marketing dashboard analytics: A brief overview
• The importance of a marketing dashboard
• Advanced dashboard metrics you're probably overlooking
• Conclusion

Marketing dashboard analytics: A brief overview

A marketing dashboard is an important business intelligence tool that provides an overview of a business’s vital marketing metrics in a simple and digestible way. 

Dashboards are extremely visual, deploying data visualization techniques to help marketers gain valuable insights to optimize current campaigns and plan new ones. Data visualizations can include graphs, charts, maps, color keys, and more, helping to speed up the data analysis process and highlight the key metrics marketers need. 

This can be applied to both historic and real-time data, making it possible to track performance and rate of growth. Data can also be analyzed in various timeframes, typically weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly. 

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are used to measure marketing performance at various levels, helping marketers fine-tune campaigns so they can keep the elements that work and remove those that are underperforming.

The importance of a marketing dashboard

Tracking metrics effectively is essential to achieving a business’s marketing aims and growth targets. The data and insights provided help organizations to make more informed decisions quickly to provide a better platform for success. 

They can also play a leading role in improving customer experience and increasing customer retention rates. A positive customer experience requires marketing, sales, and operations to be on the same page to create a strong brand and a customer journey that promotes loyalty. 

By utilizing analytics, marketing departments can improve how they interact with customers and create a user experience that leads to more conversions.  

Dashboard analytics can improve the customer experience by:

• Identifying trends using behavioral data to tailor campaigns to cater to user preferences.
• Improving retention by analyzing customer churn data. 
• Boost SEO by optimizing underperforming content.
• Highlight where customers are exiting your website so improvements can be made. 

Selecting the right marketing dashboard can also reduce the amount of software and applications needed to monitor marketing campaigns effectively. This saves time and expenditure, such as cutting down on EC2 and AWS cloud costs and software subscriptions.

Advanced dashboard metrics you're probably overlooking

Unfortunately, many marketers fail to use dashboard analytics to their full potential, missing out on valuable insights that could potentially make or break a new campaign. In this section, we will outline 7 advanced dashboard metrics that could make a world of difference in terms of boosting conversion, driving new traffic to your website, improving customer retention, and more. 

1. Assisted conversions

Assisted conversions are a metric that can be found in almost all dashboards, including Google Analytics, part of the Google Marketing Platform. This is a fantastic metric for tracking marketing activity, showing which channel(s) a conversion (E.G if a user filled out your QR code registration form) has come from. This highlights which channels are yielding the best results.

For example, a user may find your website via a Google search and bounce after viewing one page. A few days later, they may return to the website by clicking a link in an Instagram post. Then a week later they may return to complete a conversion. In this case, both Google and Instagram would be credited with an assist. 

This metric is often overlooked as marketers focus on direct conversions, not the previous activity. Assisted Conversions show the bigger picture and provide an insight into the customer journey. With this information, marketing teams can see which content brings the best ROI and raises the most brand awareness. 

2. Customer lifetime value (CLV)

The Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) metric indicates the total revenue a business could expect from a single customer throughout its relationship. 

This is calculated by comparing a customer’s revenue value with the predicted lifespan of the customer. The longer the predicted lifespan, the higher the customer's lifetime value. 

CLV helps businesses understand the revenue value of each customer which also makes it clear which customer segments are the most valuable. 

This enables businesses to make more strategic decisions based on the type of customer that brings the most money to the business. This could include creating targeted campaigns that improve customer loyalty and reduce churn. 

3. Customer sentiment

Customer Sentiment is an effective metric for measuring public relations, helping to determine the customer’s opinion on marketing content and the business’s products. 

This metric can be found on the monitoring tools provided by social media platforms, and evaluating customer sentiment is often referred to as social listening. 

Using these social media tools, marketers can see what their customers are saying about your brand and products to their followers. 

By tracking mentions of your business, you can get an idea of whether your customer base is happy or dissatisfied with the service. This helps determine if your current branding, content, and product offerings meet the customer’s needs. 

4. Micro-conversion paths

A micro-conversion is an action that is taken by the user that moves them closer to completing a conversion, such as a brochure download or newsletter signup. 

This is part of the overall user journey or path, and a series of micro-conversions is collectively called a macro-conversion, typically aligned to a website/ business goal. Micro-conversions usually fall into two main categories: process milestones and secondary actions. 

A process milestone is a conversion that relates to actions that are part of a user's linear path toward a primary business goal.

Meanwhile, a secondary action refers to desirable goals rather than primary goals which may indicate a potential conversion in the future. 

This is an important metric to consider to help improve conversion rates and to learn more about user behaviors. 

5. Attribution

The attribution metric gives marketers an understanding of which channels have assisted in content delivery, so new content can be created and existing content optimized with a focus on those channels.

As businesses use a wide range of marketing channels, determining the path a user has taken before completing a conversion can get confusing. Attribution makes it much easier to highlight these marketing ‘touchpoints’. 

6. Referral source

Tracking where your web traffic is coming from is a common practice for every marketer, evaluating which sources, such as social media or external websites, send the most users your way. 

However, referral source analysis can be much more in-depth, helping to understand customer behaviors, assess referral sharing rates, and analyze conversion rates. Referral sharing rates show how engaged existing customers are with your brand, and how frequently they share it with their friends and family. 

Customers who actively promote your brand are referred to as business advocates, and analyzing these users can provide valuable insights into where your business has had previous success, 

Pages that receive the most referrals can be made even more effective with A/B testing, comparing which page layouts and elements bring the best results. This process can be streamlined further with the use of AI tools which can automatically make changes based on the optimal configurations highlighted by A/B testing. Likewise, research indicates that businesses are expected to invest $200 billion into AI by 2025, emphasizing a globally-reaching focus on automation. 

7. Page value

Another metric that can be found in Google Analytics and other marketing dashboards is Page Value which calculates the average value of a page that a user visits before making a purchase or completing a business goal. This is measured by dividing the transaction value by unique pageviews.

If your website does not sell products, this can be measured by setting a contact form submission as a goal and giving it a numerical value. This is a simple way of determining which pages have the most value to your business, allowing you to optimize paid (PPC) or organic marketing campaigns to link to higher-value pages, leading to a better ROI.

Conclusion

Marketing dashboard analytics are invaluable to business, uncovering insights that can significantly impact the success of marketing campaigns, customer experience, and sales figures. Many marketers only use a fraction of the insights provided by dashboard analytics, giving them just a glimpse of the precious data collected.

By exploring a little deeper into your chosen marketing dashboard, you can access advanced metrics such as Assisted Conversions and Customer Lifetime Value. Allowing you to optimize marketing campaigns to drive more conversions, boost ROI, and improve customer retention.