What to include in your marketing analytics dashboard, with examples

Eighty-seven percent of marketers report that data is their company’s most under-utilized asset, according to HubSpot. Part of the problem is that marketers sometimes lack the tools and resources to analyze, visualize, and parse that data.

Marketers need to be able to interrogate and analyze their data, without relying on data analysts to interpret it. And they need to do this in a consolidated system that integrates with the wider growth technology stack. The best way to set that up is to use marketing analytics dashboards that provide insights on more than just web traffic or simple CAC results.

Marketing analytics dashboards should be comprehensive and help you monitor all of your user acquisition activity and results—and related product and business behavior around it—in a single place. You shouldn’t need to hop between tools like GA4 and paid platforms like Meta Business Suite for insights.

In this blog post, we’ll talk about the main components of a typical marketing dashboard and then look at a few different use cases to help you get started. We’ll also dive into examples of marketing dashboards you can set up and why they are useful. 

If you already have a Mixpanel account and want to skip straight to building, open our Marketing KPIs template to start building your own marketing dashboard.

Otherwise, let’s jump in.

The exact components of your marketing analytics dashboard vary based on the type of company you work for, as well as your marketing strategy. B2B companies will prioritize different metrics from B2C, an ecommerce operation will have goals different than a SaaS company, and so on.

So it’s important to note that each marketing analytics dashboard will look a little different. To give you an idea of the different reports and metrics a marketing analytics dashboard can include, this section will walk you through the different sections in our Marketing KPIs Board, which we built with demo data in Mixpanel.  

To make marketing analytics and using dashboards (or Boards, as we call them at Mixpanel) easier, we’ve created a few different templates. You can use them as soon as your data is available in Mixpanel. 

Each Board is made up of several reports, organized into one easy-to-understand layout. You can drag and drop elements, choose from different presentation formats (bar charts, pie charts, graphs…), and collaborate with other teams on a single marketing dashboard. 

Our marketing analytics dashboard is broken into several sections. 

Monitoring active users is a high priority for most digital businesses, so we’ve put active new users and overall active users right at the top.

In this board, we’ve defined “completing a purchase” as a valuable event and tracked that by unique visitors. Tracking events that align with marketing goals is one way a marketing dashboard can help monitor growth.

This section is designed to help you understand your users better—where they’re located, the platforms they’re using, and how engaged they are with your product.

Daily, weekly, and monthly active users (also known as DAU, WAU, and MAU) are valuable user engagement metrics, and the DAU/MAU ratio is often used to measure product stickiness.

This section gives us information about new user retention and the most valuable channels for acquiring new users.

You can use custom buckets to group channels together, so you can splice them out in different ways (organic vs. paid, for example). This section also gives you insight into changes in new user retention at a glance so you can see if changes you’ve made to your marketing drive down new user churn.

These reports help you understand session metrics, which track user engagement.

You can see the pages getting the most engagement, average session duration, bounce rate, and the top events performed by users.

Conversions are the cornerstone of any marketing effort. This section will give you insights into what users did before converting, first session conversion rates, and median time to first conversions.

These reports will also tell you more about your conversion funnels. They will help you understand what your step-by-step new user funnel looks like, where users dropped off, and what other paths users took. 

This final section is all about paid performance and optimization. You can see metrics like return on ad spend (ROAS), cost per click (CPC), as well as clicks and impressions by source. You can learn more about tracking ad performance in our help center.

The marketing analytics dashboard that we broke down above is great for tracking overall marketing KPIs and getting a broad overview of your marketing analytics. But you can (and should) also create different marketing dashboards to give you a more granular view of your analytics. Then, you can use nested Boards to organize your teams and analyses. 

Here are a few examples of marketing analytics dashboards you can create, what sort of insights you can get from them, metrics to include, and tools these dashboards could pull data from. 

Web analytics is a core tool in any marketer’s arsenal–if your campaigns can’t drive users to your website, it’s hard to measure their effectiveness, especially in B2B marketing. Marketing teams usually have website KPIs to meet, and web analytics dashboards make it easy to track website performance.

This dashboard should give you easy access to essential website metrics like page views, bounce rate, and traffic source, as well as session data and individual page performance. 

Check out our website analytics demo board or build your own using our web analytics template. All you need to do is sign up for a free Mixpanel account,  paste our one-line JavaScript SDK into your site code, and set up your web analytics Board in two clicks.

Ad spend allows you to keep on top of budgets and calculate metrics like ROAS, which show the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. With the right tracking in place, you see which ones are performing best and allocate budget more effectively. 

Platforms like Google Ads, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook each have their own marketing analytics and ad-spend data. Fortunately, you can integrate them all into Mixpanel to view all of your ad-spend data in one place. 

Lifecycle cohort analysis allows you to segment users into groups based on how—and how often—they use your product. Breaking out users by group based on their engagement level is a great way to understand more about different types of users and uncover growth opportunities.

If you can see what actions your most engaged users are taking, you can influence other cohorts and nudge them in the same direction. 

Check out our Lifecycle cohort example Board and use our Lifecycle Cohort Analysis template to fill out your own.

No marketers want to rely on other people, whether data analysts or engineers, to interpret and visualize their marketing data for them. Marketing analytics dashboards, when they’re set up right, empower marketers to glean insights in real time and monitor the impacts of campaigns on the metrics that matter.

Sign up for a free Mixpanel account today to start creating your own marketing analytics dashboards. Use your data to answer questions sooner, uncover patterns, and share your marketing KPIs easier than ever.