How To Measure (And Share) Your Team’s Marketing Performance With A Marketing Scorecard

If your client asks how we are doing on sign-ups this month, can you confidently answer them? Or do you need to fumble through your computer files to pull out the latest report to find the answer? 

Knowing your metrics well communicates credibility and confidence. If you’ve made this mistake before, creating a marketing scorecard can help you memorize your numbers. 

Besides improving communication, marketing scorecards are a powerful tool to guide marketers to what’s working, what needs change, and the next steps. We’ll look at what goes into a marketing scorecard and how to use it to keep your marketing team on track.

• What is a marketing scorecard
• - What to include in a marketing scorecard?
• What are the benefits of using marketing scorecards?
• Elevate your reporting with these marketing scorecard examples
• Create beautiful marketing scorecards with DashThis

What is a marketing scorecard?

A marketing scorecard takes your marketing goals, campaign metrics, and data. It puts data in an easily readable series of charts, widgets, and graphs to have on hand for reference or to send to your client to update them on the latest campaign performance. 

And voila! Now you know how your marketing efforts are doing at a glance. 

Let’s illustrate this with an example. 

Let’s say you’re helping your e-commerce client focus on growing their sales and improving conversion rate while improving return on ad spend for their online store. For that, you'll need to track how effective your marketing and conversion rate optimization efforts are at bringing in qualified leads and sales. 

Get this e-commerce report template with your own data!  

Usually, gathering these metrics needs you to open at least three different platforms:

• Google Ads and/or Facebook for your paid campaigns. 
• An e-commerce platform like Shopify for your sales and revenue figures. 
• Your landing page software tool for your marketing landing pages 

So to create a weekly report, you’ll need to open at least three separate tools, export their data, and format metrics in Excel. It’s tiresome and takes hours out of your day. 

Automated reporting tools are your solution to make this otherwise tedious process simpler. Here’s where you can put all essential metrics in one view to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) in real-time using tools like DashThis.

What to include in a marketing scorecard? 

• Campaign goals and KPIs to measure progress
• How key marketing metrics relate to business objectives 
• Progress indicators for each KPI. You might, for example, include a starting point, how the metric has changed over time, and the goal you’re aiming for.

A simple marketing scorecard made with DashThis. Get a marketing scorecard with your own data! 

With a marketing scorecard, you keep your team and client on the same page as you work towards the same goals. It’s a vital communication tool to keep your marketing plan focused on marketing activities that drive results.

What are the benefits of using marketing scorecards?

Track and evaluate marketing and sales performance

How do you know whether your marketing campaigns are working? 

Well, that’s where scorecards come in. 

Let’s say you’ve been working with a clothing brand that’s just launched a new promotional summer sale campaign with their hottest summer deals. As a peak season campaign, advertising costs and competition are also at their peak, and you want to ensure the campaign is profitable for your client’s sales team. 

Since this campaign is focused on generating sales and bringing in new customers, you might concentrate on these leading indicators in your scorecard: 

• Conversion rate
• Total revenue 
• Abandoned cart rate 

It’s also worth thinking about how you’ll measure change in these KPIs over time, and the goal number you’re aiming for. 

Did you know you can add a goal line to a widget in DashThis? Goal lines help show if you’re on track for your marketing goals. Go to any widget in your DashThis report, click Edit Widget > Data Display, and tick the Show goal line check. From there, input the goal value as you desire. 

Align marketing efforts with business goals

Do these marketing measurement situations sound familiar? 

Celebrating when you double referral traffic from content marketing. Or when you rank on the first page for a hard-to-rank keyword.

While these situations are fantastic, and you’ve probably worked hard to get there, these metrics measure marketing output and activities, not results. 

Hence, when choosing which metrics to measure, it’s crucial to ask yourself this question. How does marketing contribute to the other parts of the business, and how do I measure this? 

It's easy to forget the bigger picture when we’re caught up in day-to-day work.  

A marketing scorecard with the right metrics ensures your marketing activities align with your client, sales team, and management. It’s also easier to build confidence with your client by helping them see the direct impact of your work on their business.

Make better decisions with data by identifying strengths and weaknesses

Suppose your client had an excellent week for inbound marketing, converting twice as many people on a lead generation offer. 

But do you know why this happened? Did you get a mention from an industry influencer about your company? Did a Google algorithm change, affecting search engine results? 

Marketing scorecards track your week-to-week activities and results, so you don't have to rely on guesswork or assumptions for your strategic planning, making it easier to replicate your success in the future. 

It’s also motivating to see numbers go up and know exactly what you did to get there. 

But throwing numbers together on a scorecard doesn’t automatically help you make better decisions. 

You need to establish context to give your data meaning by comparing it to something else.

Let’s look at our revenue metrics, for example. 

This total revenue metric tells me how much we earned in revenue this month. 

But is this number good or bad? It’s difficult to tell on its own. 

However, by comparing them across channels, you better understand which channel brought in more revenue. 

From here, you can sharpen your analysis by comparing them with the cost of the campaign to know how much profit each channel brought in. Or, compare revenue by channel across a time period (between one to six months) to see whether your marketing campaigns are improving or whether there’s any area for improvement. 

Using this data, you better understand your marketing approach's strengths and weaknesses and where to focus your attention to get even better results.

Elevate your reporting with these marketing scorecard examples

Digital marketing report template

Get this digital marketing report template with your own data! 

Being comfortable marketing and analyzing data across multiple channels is necessary for any marketer today, as customer journeys are increasingly non-linear across multiple platforms and devices. Plus, multi-channel marketing campaigns perform 37% better compared to single-channel campaigns. 

Thing is, no matter how much you love spreadsheets, gathering and organizing data from 10 different tools is a pain. 

Thankfully, our report template is here to help you take the tedium of manually creating reports off your shoulders so you can focus on the analysis and recommendations. Monitor your email marketing campaigns, social media engagement, pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, and more in one spot.

Business executive report template

Get this business executive report template with your own data! 

How do you ensure your client's boss reads your scorecard when you know they’re barely at their desk? Ensure your scorecard keeps to the information they care about - nothing more.

Use our executive report template to create the report you need for your executive team, investors, or board members. This report focuses on vital business bottom-line metrics like revenue, total cost, and overall marketing return on investment, so they can quickly get the information they need to review marketing strategy. 

Remember to include analysis and notes about your marketing KPIs within your report for executives. DashThis has several ways you can add your analysis and recommendations within your report without cluttering up your reports 

• A comment box to write a summary of key results 

• Notes on widgets to include more information on a widget like an objective or KPI or recommend the next step

SEO report template 

Get this SEO report template with your own data! 

With many metrics to track and report on for SEO campaigns, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Our SEO report template helps you sort through all the data you have to help you measure your SEO campaign results and keep a scorecard of how you’re performing against your goals. 

Plus, DashThis integrates with popular SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush and more. You just need to connect your SEO tools to DashThis and the report will auto-populate with your data.

Create beautiful marketing scorecards with DashThis

Here’s how to do it with DashThis in 3 easy steps:

1. Connect your favorite marketing tools 
2. Select your metrics from DashThis’ preset widgets 
3. Drag and drop the metrics to create a cohesive look in your report. Feel free to add/remove metrics, switch chart types around and customize your report as you see fit. 

It’s time to automate your reporting 

Marketing scorecards are potent ways to get an overview of your marketing performance. Whether it’s high-level overviews of your sales and marketing funnel or a deep dive into a specific campaign, marketing scorecards are communication tools to tie marketing’s contribution to the business and keep your team on track. 

DashThis saves agencies hours on putting together scorecards and other client reports. Get your time back by investing in reporting automation like DashThis. 

On the fence? Sign up for your free 15-day trial of DashThis today to try us out.