Without a centralised way to track what’s working (and what’s not), many small teams end up guessing. Or worse, flying blind. There’s too much at stake. Whether it’s wasted ad spend, missed sales opportunities, or bloated SaaS costs, the lack of a clear marketing performance dashboard hurts. This is why we need a unified marketing reporting dashboard. These dashboards shift the entire trajectory of a business by unifying data, uncovering gaps, and bringing much-needed clarity to decision-making.
Key Metrics to Track in Your Marketing Dashboard
The key metrics you track depend heavily on your specific goals. However, some usual suspects provide a solid foundation for most businesses.
Here are some marketing KPI dashboards you should use:
- Traffic Sources: Where visitors are coming from (organic, paid, social, referral)
- Conversion Rates: Across landing pages, ads, and email campaigns
- Cost per Lead / Acquisition (CPL/CPA): To assess budget efficiency
- Click-Through Rates (CTR): Especially for paid and email campaigns
- Engagement: Time on site, bounce rates, social shares
- Campaign ROI: End-to-end tracking from ad spend to sale
- Customer Journey Data: Funnel drop-offs, lead scoring
- SEO Rankings & Visibility: Keyword growth, backlinks
- Ad Performance: Google Ads impressions, cost-per-click, conversions
- Email Performance: Open rates, click rates, and unsubscribes.
Marketing Dashboard Examples
As you might expect, there is no single dashboard for many functions. This is why different marketing functions benefit from tailored views.
Here are a few common marketing reporting dashboard example types:
- SEO Marketing Dashboard: Tracks keyword positions, traffic from search, and backlink trends
- Social Media Dashboard: Measures engagement across Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and TikTok
- PPC Dashboard: Focused on Google Ads, cost-per-click, conversions
- Email Marketing Dashboard: Monitors open rates, clicks, and delivery
- Marketing Campaign Dashboard: Combines multiple sources (email, ads, web). This dashboard is useful when managing omnichannel marketing strategies
- Marketing KPI Dashboard: Focused on high-level metrics for C-suite or board reporting
- Real-Time Marketing Dashboard: Great for active campaign monitoring, especially during launches
- Google Analytics Dashboard (Custom): For teams already using GA and wanting enhanced visualisation.
5 Best Marketing Reporting Dashboard Tools
Octobits
Octobits stands apart by integrating both marketing performance tracking and SaaS management in one platform. It’s designed for businesses that want to keep spending tight, track what matters, and avoid subscription sprawl.
Octobits is best for Australian SMBs juggling multiple tools and teams that need clarity across campaigns, SaaS usage, and user permissions. What you need to highlight is that you can get Octobits for free until the end of 2025. The key strengths of Octobits are:
- Comprehensive SaaS spending visibility alongside marketing analytics
- Customisable dashboards that adapt to your specific KPIs
- Subscription renewal tracking that prevents wasted spend
- Automated reporting that saves countless hours of manual data compilation
- Locally-supported implementation and customer service
- Integration with a wide range of marketing automation tools.
Google Looker Studio
Looker Studio is Google’s free data visualisation tool. It excels at connecting to Google ecosystem products (Google Analytics, Google Ads, Sheets, BigQuery) but also has connectors for many other data sources. Looker Studio is best for businesses of all sizes, especially those heavily invested in the Google marketing stack.
Typically, you can get Looker Studio at free pricing. However, for advanced features, you can get the Enterprise edition and the Embed platform. Just contact the Looker sales representative for the exact pricing plan. The key strengths of Looker Studio are:
- Zero-cost entry point for basic reporting needs
- Familiar interface for those already using Google products
- Ability to blend data from multiple Google services
- Collaborative features for team reporting
- Customisable templates that reduce setup time.
Klipfolio
Klipfolio is a robust business intelligence and dashboarding platform. Klipfolio is designed for creating detailed and often real-time marketing performance dashboards. This is why Klipfolio is best for teams that want client-ready dashboards. Klipfolio pricing plan starts from $90 per month for 3 dashboards. With that pricing, the key strength of Klipfolio are:
- Pre-built metrics that reduce implementation time
- Extensive integration options beyond just marketing tools
- Flexible visualisation options
- Mobile-friendly interface
- Scalable architecture for growing businesses.
DashThis
DashThis is known for its ease of use in creating automated marketing analytics dashboards. Strong emphasis on pre-built templates and integrations for common marketing channels. DashThis best for businesses needing to quickly generate professional-looking reports without an extensive technical setup. This is why DashThis is popular enough in agencies or freelancers.
DashThis pricing model is refreshingly straightforward. Everything revolves around how many dashboards you need. The Individual plan clocks in at $49 per month and gives access to three fully functional dashboards. It’s a handy entry point for freelancers or consultants who want clarity without overcommitting. The key strengths of DashThis are:
- Agency-friendly pricing structure
- Automated report generation and delivery
- Client-ready presentations
- Marketing-specific metrics and integrations
- Intuitive drag-and-drop interface.
Tableau
Tableau is a leading business intelligence and data visualisation platform. For enterprises requiring sophisticated data analysis, Tableau remains the industry benchmark. Acquired by Salesforce, it integrates well within that ecosystem but stands strongly on its own.
With its powerful capabilities, Tableau is best for large businesses with dedicated analysts who need deep data exploration capabilities. The key strengths of Tableau are:
- Advanced data modeling capabilities
- Exceptional visualisation flexibility
- Enterprise-grade security features
- Robust community and learning resources
- Deep analytical functionality.
How to Create a Marketing Reporting Dashboard?
To create a marketing reporting dashboard starts with a simple but important question: why do you need one in the first place? Yup, you need to define the goals. Once your objectives are clear, choose 5-10 core KPIs that directly reflect those goals. Set a maximum of 10 core KPIs rather than getting lost in a sea of data points that don’t drive decisions.
From there, it’s about finding the right tool. Find something that strikes the right balance between ease of use and integration flexibility. You’ll want to connect your ad platforms, CRM, social accounts, and website analytics so everything flows into one central hub.
The layout matters too. A good dashboard isn’t just functional; it’s clean, readable, and structured with clear visual cues like colour codes and logical headings.
Then, don’t forget the importance of testing. Because, after all, testing is what keeps your dashboard aligned with your marketing automation workflow. And it should serve your daily or weekly check-ins, not become another thing to wrestle with.
Custom Dashboards Tailored to Your Growth Goals
If that setup process feels like too much to handle, Octobits offers a custom dashboard tailored for your growth goals. Why a custom dashboard? Because we believe, every business is unique. A tailored marketing performance dashboard focuses precisely on the KPIs that matter most to your specific strategy.
With Octobits, we create marketing dashboards around your growth stages, roles, and reporting needs. Whether it’s board-level summaries or campaign-level daily snapshots, it’s all custom-fit. And if you’re not sure where to start, we’re happy to walk you through it.
Your Next Steps
Data can either overwhelm or empower; it all depends on how it’s presented. And it all depends on how your marketing reporting dashboards are. For us, the right marketing reporting dashboard should bring peace of mind, clear direction, and measurable results. If you think the same, let’s talk. Let’s identify good dashboards that deliver in your business.
