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Tracking campaign performance across marketing channels can be a tedious and unintuitive process. CMOs often have to rely on individual department reports to gather a summary of how the team is performing – an endeavor that leaves many gaps and relies heavily on guesswork.
In addition to the time it takes to compile reports, derive actionable insights, and chart next-steps, the traditional way of doing things is prone to several manual errors.
The solution? The perfect CMO dashboard that helps streamline your work based on relevant analytics and metrics under one roof.
This article shows how powerful CMO dashboards can be used to drive data-driven business decisions.
A CMO dashboard is a tool that reports and visualizes KPIs and metrics related to a company's marketing activities across demand gen, content, paid, events, and more. It is a centralized, bird’s eye view that helps marketing executives monitor and analyze marketing initiatives and performance in real-time.
There is no hard and fast rule to building a CMO dashboard for your SaaS company. That being said, there are certain elements that are essential for marketing leaders to identify patterns, track progression, and optimize strategies to drive bottom-line business objectives.
We’ll explore these essential ingredients in later sections of this blog.
Here’s a look at the top benefits of using a well-designed CMO dashboard:
When making expensive business decisions, relying on guesswork can cost you heavily. CMO dashboards help marketing leaders make well-informed and accelerated decisions based on data-driven insights.
For example, a CMO dashboard can help you identify which channels and marketing campaigns are not performing if you're making budget-related decisions. It also enables you to identify the reason behind poor campaign performance and the following steps to be taken.
Let's say you have the company blog, paid advertising, and podcasts as key marketing channels. A deep dive into the dashboard will help you uncover how much revenue each channel can generate, the cost of leads from each touchpoint, and how long it typically takes them to convert.
A CMO dashboard lets you save hours of work and wasted resources on collecting and processing raw data from scratch.
CMO dashboards extract and present an accurate overview of essential data from platforms or sources such as LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, articles, Google Ads, and more.
For example, let’s say you’re calculating the number of sessions on your website that come through various channels. A CMO dashboard will gather the data from all the channels, creating an easy visual for you to see which has driven the most sessions.
With all the data condensed onto one dashboard, CMOs and their teams can collectively take note of repetitive patterns in their target audience. This helps them further understand which type of campaigns work well on what channel and when leading to the ability to adapt campaign resources on the go.
For example, the company publishes a blog on the website every Tuesday. But they also post a video on LinkedIn on the same day. Over time, a CMO dashboard can display which content formats perform better on Tuesdays, helping the team double down their focus on that channel alone.
Below are some basic principles to note while building an intuitive CMO dashboard:
Speaking of metrics, let’s look into the key CMO dashboard metrics and KPIs that every SaaS company must track.
A CMO dashboard can include tons of KPIs and metrics depending on what you’re trying to track. However, below are the ones that are of topmost priority:
Top-of-the-funnel metrics are brand awareness metrics like the engagement rate, traffic, and leads generated. Most SaaS marketing executives track these to attract the target audience and turn them into long-term subscribers.
1. Engagement rates are metrics used to measure and track the active involvement of your target audience for the content you produce. The engagement rate formula is:
2. Traffic for SaaS companies is the volume or the total number of visitors their website gets over a certain time period.
3. Leads generated is a mandatory sales KPI every SaaS company must track. Measuring leads lets you uncover issues and nurture prospects further.
Why do these metrics matter?
Top-of-the-funnel metrics help measure the overall exposure of the target audience to your marketing efforts. Tracking and measuring them gives insight into what can help minimize roadblocks that stop prospects from signing up.
1. Conversion rates: measure the number of targeted users who converted from unknown prospects to engaged contacts. The higher the conversion rate, the more impact your marketing strategies have. The formula to calculate the conversion rate is:
2. Efficiency: In marketing, the ROI measures the overall performance of your marketing efforts, and conversion rates directly indicate the performance. That means increasing conversion rates while reducing acquisition costs promises a better ROI and shows better strategy efficiency. The formula to calculate marketing efficiency is:
Why do these metrics matter?
Conversion rates and efficiency directly reflect how well your SaaS marketing activities are executed and determine the overall effectiveness of your business campaigns.
It’s best to track certain KPIs by marketing channels, such as social media, emails, ads, organic search, etc. Calculating the cost of customer acquisition (CAC) for each channel is one such KPI that indicates the marketing expenses spent on obtaining customers.The formula to calculate CAC by channel is:
Why does this metric matter?
Measuring CAC lets you decide whether or not to pursue marketing for a particular channel and demonstrates high-performing marketing channels having low CAC.
Customer retention and churn rates are opposites that indicate the number of customers retained or lost over a time period. The formula to calculate churn rate is:
Why are these metrics important?
Customer churn and retention rates are one of the most important metrics for SaaS CMOs. Measuring churn rate can help shed light on why subscribers are refusing to renew your service, and based on high or low retention rates, you can decide whether to pursue the same strategies or refresh them.
Customer lifetime value, or CLV, indicates the average pay throughout a customer’s relationship with your company. It is a critical SaaS KPI to showcase revenue as it conveys a customer’s worth on average. The formula to calculate CLV is:
Why does this metric matter?
CLV is a critical SaaS business viability measure. It is essential for understanding the business value each customer brings and your SaaS company’s long-term potential.
1. Revenue by channel source tracked by CMOs indicates how well their ads, campaigns, and other marketing efforts perform based on their source. Additionally, it tells you the aggregate revenue earned from successful conversions from each outlet.
2. Pipeline velocity by channel source is a key KPI indicating the speed at which leads move through your sales pipeline for each channel source.
Why do these metrics matter?
A high pipeline velocity means smoother onboarding processes and better conversions. So tracking this and revenue by channel source over various periods lets you improve conversions from each source.
Over the course of this article, we’ve covered what a CMO dashboard is, what its benefits are, and a few common metrics for CMOs to track. But constructing a comprehensive CMO dashboard is easier said than done — unless of course, you leverage a tailor-made dashboarding tool like Factors.
Factors unifies and reports data across complex buyer journeys involving multiple stakeholders, touchpoints, and channels under one roof. What does this mean for you? No more individual tools to analyze campaign performance, website engagement, and pipeline/revenue related metrics.
It’s simply all the metrics you care about as CMO in one, intuitive, customizable dashboard. Here are a few nifty features loved by CMOs:
Curious to see Factors in action? Schedule a personalized demo here!
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