A marketing dashboard aggregates and visualizes multiple types of real-time data when you’re trying to stay on top of various marketing channels. Marketing dashboard templates allow your team to access all of your data from a single display, rather than spending valuable time clicking back and forth between data sources.
Data integration is one of the leading challenges in measuring return on investment (ROI) for marketers worldwide, but you don’t need to design a dashboard from scratch to address this problem. Depending on your business goals, you can start with marketing dashboard templates and fill in pre-formatted charts, graphs, and formulas to track performance.
With real-time insights into what’s working (or what’s not), the right dashboard template can help your team identify your most impactful marketing efforts. In this article, you’ll learn about different types of dashboard templates and how to build useful dashboards with Shopify’s native analytics tools.
What is a marketing dashboard?
A marketing analytics dashboard is a centralized hub for viewing real-time marketing data. Dashboards typically feature data visualization, like pie charts and graphs, to display information in an easy-to-read format. Common metrics include sales growth and campaign performance.
Marketing teams customize dashboard templates to reflect their most important key performance indicators (KPIs). An email marketing team, for example, might focus on open rate and click-through rate data; a content team’s template might include graphs on organic search and social media metrics. The template operates as a baseline, so you can connect your data sources and relevant metrics. Sock Candy founder Mary Gui uses Shopify’s dashboard template to monitor the brand’s sales and traffic sources. “I’m looking at my analytics every single day,” she says on an episode of Shopify Masters. If real-time data indicates she’s trending behind sales goals, for example, her team can reallocate ad budgets to channels with better conversion rates.
Types of ecommerce marketing dashboard templates
- Sales performance dashboard template
- Marketing ROI dashboard template
- Paid ads dashboard template
- SEO dashboard template
- Customer service dashboard template
- Social media dashboard template
A well-built digital marketing dashboard includes all of the key metrics your team needs to track your business goals. Learn about different types of dashboard templates and the information they include.
Sales performance dashboard template
A sales performance dashboard helps teams assess overall funnel performance and identify the factors behind successful purchases. These templates often include metrics like total revenue, order completion rate, average order volume, cart abandonment rate, and top-performing products.
Digital marketers may use a sales performance dashboard to spot purchasing trends, monitor campaign performance, and track progress toward goals.
Marketing ROI dashboard template
A marketing ROI dashboard provides a high-level overview of marketing spend versus revenue. Marketing leaders and media buyers may look for this type of template to compare marketing spend and profits between multiple channels. Common metrics include revenue per marketing dollar, conversion rate, pipeline contribution, total ad spend, total revenue, and customer acquisition cost (also known as cost per acquisition).
Paid ads dashboard template
A paid ads dashboard template focuses on marketing metrics for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns across channels such as Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, and others. This type of template helps marketers track mid-funnel performance, such as cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-lead (CPL), as well as gain insight into total ad spend, impressions, and click-through rate by channel or campaign.
Compared to a marketing ROI dashboard template, which focuses on high-level insights, a paid ads dashboard template offers pre-formatted graphs and detailed views into campaign advertising performance. This helps you identify high-performing marketing channels and reallocate ad spend in real time.
SEO dashboard template
A search engine optimization (SEO) dashboard template is designed with organic search performance in mind. This type of dashboard typically includes metrics like website traffic, top-performing keywords, organic search impressions, top-performing landing pages, and average time on page.
An SEO dashboard pulls data from various web analytics platforms, such as Semrush, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or Matomo. Content managers and SEO specialists can use SEO dashboard templates to understand how users discover a brand’s website and engage with content.
Customer service dashboard template
A customer service dashboard template highlights specific customer relationship management (CRM) data to help teams improve people’s experience across the customer journey. Include key metrics like total number of customer tickets, open tickets, ticket volume by category, average response time, and customer satisfaction score. While customer service teams often use this type of template to keep track of their goals, marketing teams use it to monitor brand health and identify customer pain points. For example, if a dashboard reveals that the majori3ty of customer service complaints mention pricing, it may indicate a problem in how marketing presents information to customers.
Social media dashboard template
Social media marketing dashboard templates track performance across your brand’s social channels. Common metrics include followers, post impressions, engagement rate, and click-through rate broken down by channel, campaign, or specific posts. Social media marketers can use this type of display to compare performance across channels and organic campaigns, while media buyers can use it to track paid social media campaigns.
How to build your ecommerce marketing dashboard
- Identify the audience
- List your key performance indicators
- Select your tools and connect data sources
- Customize display preferences
A great marketing performance dashboard is more than just a collection of metrics. Follow these steps to build a dashboard that supports your team’s needs.
1. Identify the audience
Different audiences need different data and data visualization methods. Thinking about who will use the tools will help you identify the best marketing dashboard template for your team’s needs. For example, an SEO dashboard will look at quarterly themes and monthly traffic, while a paid ads dashboard template will focus on detailed, daily campaign metrics. Ask yourself:
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Who’s using it and for what purpose?
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How often are they checking it?
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Do they need to be able to share it with cross-functional teams?
Consider polling relevant stakeholders to learn what metrics they use regularly and how they access them to select a dashboard template that fits their needs.
2. List your key performance indicators
Consider the overall business goals and KPIs that you need to track on your dashboard. Marketing KPIs vary based on your company’s priorities, so you may need to customize or adjust a template to fully meet your team’s needs. If you’re focused on growth, for example, ensure your dashboard has sections for measuring new customer acquisition and overall revenue. If you’re aiming to improve retention, a template that tracks churn rate, repeat purchases, and customer lifetime value (LTV) may be more useful.
Bluboho founder Natalie Westlake, for example, is primarily interested in sales metrics. She uses a dashboard template with sales figures, revenue by channel, and sales per square foot in stores to evaluate her brand’s success and determine the top revenue-driving products.
As she says on Shopify Masters, she reviews analytics with her marketing team on a weekly basis and course-corrects as needed to meet rapidly changing customer preferences and market conditions in retail.
3. Select your tools and connect data sources
Once you’ve identified the audience and metrics you want to track, select a template. Brands with a Shopify account can use Shopify Analytics to access performance dashboard templates for free and track metrics like average order value, sales by traffic referrer, and sales over time.
Use integrations from the Shopify App Store to sync your store data directly with external marketing data sources, such as Google Analytics and Google Ads.
Ryan Bartlett, the founder of True Classic, says on Shopify Masters that he sees new customer return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) as the company’s “North Star metric.” Since calculating ROAS requires tracking ad spend, revenue, and attribution data, his team uses Triple Whale, a plug-in that integrates data across marketing channels.
4. Customize display preferences
Over time, you can adjust and customize your marketing dashboard template by removing or adding metrics and adjusting the display settings. If you’re working in Shopify, navigate to the analytics tab in an admin view and click the arrow in the upper right-hand corner to customize your analytics dashboard.
Scroll through the available metrics and select the ones that match your goals and team needs. This list includes summary cards for all of Shopify’s automatically generated marketing reports.
Shopify Analytics dashboards also include customizable metrics cards, where you can resize, rearrange, and label these cards to further tailor your display. Once you’ve added your desired data, click and drag the widgets to rearrange the information and place the most important data points at the top to create an intuitive display.
Marketing dashboard templates FAQ
What is a marketing dashboard?
A marketing dashboard is a centralized source of relevant data and performance metrics. Dashboards pull information from other platforms, such as Google Analytics, email management tools, social media platforms, or your CRM platform. A dashboard contains this information on a single display, so that marketing teams can track marketing campaign performance, compare various marketing channels, and monitor progress toward goals in one place.
What should a marketing dashboard include?
Marketing dashboards can track anything from social media impressions to return on ad spend. The best metrics to include depend on your goals and who will use the dashboard.
How do I create a marketing dashboard?
Start by identifying the dashboard’s audience and the core metrics that matter to them. Focus on marketing metrics that support your team’s daily workflow and business goals. Explore free templates, such as a Shopify Analytics dashboard builder, or pay for templates from other dedicated platforms to sync multiple data sources. Customize your dashboard with a mix of data visualizations to present information in a user-friendly fashion.
