Dashboards are the ultimate weapon for marketers who want to steer their campaigns with precision, without spending hours digging through endless spreadsheets. But they still need to be properly customized to display the right performance indicators and provide a clear, actionable overview.
With HubSpot, you have the opportunity to create a dashboard that brings together all your marketing data and enables you to make decisions based on concrete figures. In this article, we explain how to customize a dashboard on HubSpot, select the right metrics and optimize its display for effective real-time tracking.
Dashboards are the ultimate weapon for marketers who want to steer their campaigns with precision, without spending hours digging through endless spreadsheets. But they still need to be properly customized to display the right performance indicators and provide a clear, actionable overview.
With HubSpot, you have the opportunity to create a dashboard that brings together all your marketing data and enables you to make decisions based on concrete figures. In this article, we explain how to customize a dashboard on HubSpot, select the right metrics and optimize its display for effective real-time tracking.
Having a well-designed dashboard is a bit like having a GPS for your marketing: you see at a glance where you are and where you need to go. No more juggling between different tools, everything is centralized and accessible in real time.
In short, it's your best ally in optimizing your marketing investments and maximizing your ROI.
Not all KPIs are created equal: a good personalized dashboard should focus on the essentials, without drowning you in useless figures.
The Balanced Scorecard: ideal for a long-term vision. It allows you to see the evolution of your campaigns over several months, and to identify key trends.
The operational dashboard: your daily companion. It shows you performance in real time, so you can react quickly and optimize every lever.
And here are the KPIs you can't ignore:
The objective? To have a dashboard that allows you to optimize each lever and adjust your actions in real time.
An effective marketing dashboard is first and foremost a question of data. But beware: too much data kills the data: you need to focus on the essentials.
Identify the data sources you really need:
Classic mistake to avoid: limiting the data displayed to that which is really useful. A dashboard overloaded with information becomes unreadable and counter-productive.
Before you start customizing your dashboard, make sure you have the right permissions on HubSpot. Only administrators or users with access to report management can create and modify dashboards.
To access dashboards :
If you're starting from scratch, HubSpot offers you several options for structuring your dashboard to suit your needs.
Once you've created your dashboard, it's time to customize it to suit your objectives.
Widgets are visual elements that display key performance indicators (KPIs) in the form of dynamic graphs, tables or reports.
To add a widget to your dashboard :
Tip: Customize chart colors and styles for a more pleasing, high-impact reading experience.
A good dashboard should display only really useful data. Too much information kills information!
To apply filters to your data :
If you want a detailed view on a particular KPI, use the advanced options to adjust filters and display the most relevant insights.
Each team needs specific data. A marketer, a salesperson and a CFO will not analyze the same indicators.
To assign access permissions to a dashboard :
Read-only: users can view data without modifying it.
Modification: users can adjust dashboard parameters.
Owner: full access to the dashboard and management of access rights.
Before finalizing your dashboard :
Bonus: Automate your reports! HubSpot lets you automatically send your dashboard to certain teams at a defined frequency (daily, weekly, monthly). A great way to keep everyone informed without any extra effort!
A well-configured dashboard ensures effective monitoring and rapid, informed decision-making. How do you customize your dashboards on HubSpot?
If you want to keep an eye on your current campaigns without wasting time, the operational dashboard is your best ally. Designed for real-time tracking, it gives you an instant view of ongoing marketing actions, ad performance and visitor engagement on your site.
Let's say your Facebook ads show a 40% drop in conversion rate in just one week. Thanks to your dashboard, you can spot this immediately and see that your cost per acquisition (CPA) has risen from €15 to €25. By adjusting your budget and refining your targeting, you can reduce these costs by 20% by reallocating your resources to the best-performing segments, without waiting for the campaign to end.
Strategic dashboards are all about long-term vision. Here, the aim is not just to monitor the execution of actions, but above all to analyze trends, adjust the overall strategy and make informed decisions.
Let's take a case in point: your management dashboard shows a 25% drop in the open rate of your marketing emails in one month, from 30% to 22.5%. By analyzing the data, you identify that one of your email objects was performing at 40%, while another was stagnating at 15%. By adjusting your strategy and testing new subject lines based on trends in high-open rate emails, you managed to raise the average to 28% within two weeks. The result: more engagement and a 15% increase in the click-through rate on your offers.
Customizing the dashboard to display the most important quality indicators is essential to avoid dispersion and focus on the numbers that really count. By analyzing your KPIs over several months, you'll be able to pinpoint which campaigns are generating the most conversions, which have too low an ROI, and proactively adjust your strategy.
If the operational dashboard gives you an instant view, and the strategic dashboard offers you a long-term perspective, then the analytical dashboard is there to identify trends and spot opportunities before they even become obvious.
By cross-referencing data from your CRM, advertising campaigns and social networks, you can highlight hidden trends, such as high-conversion periods or the most profitable acquisition channels.
Let's take an example: if you notice that your organic traffic has doubled over the last three months without any specific action being taken, this could be a sign that your SEO is starting to pay off. Conversely, if your conversion rate is falling while your traffic is rising, it may be time to optimize your landing pages.
A dashboard on HubSpot is a bit like a control room, where every element needs to be well organized to get the most out of it. The trick? Select the right widgets and structure them intelligently.
In HubSpot, you can click on the drop-down menu to add the widgets most relevant to your marketing follow-up. Then you can organize them strategically, putting the most critical indicators at the top, and secondary metrics further down for quick and efficient reading.
And because a well-designed dashboard should also be pleasant to read, consider customizing the colors and layout for a fluid, intuitive user experience. A clear, well-structured dashboard is a monumental time-saver for you and your teams.
An effective marketing dashboard is first and foremost well-filtered information. Too much data, and you'll find yourself overwhelmed by a sea of numbers. Not enough, and you miss out on important trends.
With HubSpot, you can filter the data according to your objectives, be they traffic, conversion, engagement or ROI. If you want a detailed view, simply click on the advanced options to customize your filters and keep only the essentials.
Let's say you want to analyze the effectiveness of your e-mail campaigns: in just a few clicks, you can filter only those contacts who have opened an e-mail AND clicked on a link, to see which content generates the most engagement.
An effective dashboard never works alone. One of the great advantages of HubSpot is that it allows you to integrate your dashboards with all your marketing and CRM tools.
You can connect your management dashboard with your CRM, e-mail and advertising tools, for complete tracking of your marketing funnel. Using workflows, you can even automate updates and receive reports directly to your e-mail inbox.
If you want even more advanced tracking, HubSpot lets you connect your data to Google Analytics, Facebook Ads and many other tools, for an ultra-customized dashboard.
HubSpot goes even further by integrating artificial intelligence to facilitate the creation and analysis of your reports. Thanks to Breeze, HubSpot's AI dedicated to marketing and sales insights, you can generate a report simply by entering a natural language query, such as "Which channel generated the most leads last month?". The AI takes care of extracting the right data, selecting the relevant indicators and proposing an optimized visualization. You can then customize the report before adding it to your dashboard. By automating this step, you save time and ensure constant, accurate monitoring of your campaigns. No more digging through your metrics: HubSpot delivers key insights straight to your desktop.
A well-designed dashboard is a proactive tool, not just a static display of figures. It should help you steer your campaigns and correct any discrepancies between objectives and results before it's too late.
With HubSpot, you can analyze in real time and make decisions based on hard facts. Graphs and visual indicators enable you to immediately identify negative trends and adjust your marketing actions accordingly.
A dashboard is only useful if the right people have access to it. With HubSpot, you can share the dashboard with key users on your team and define access levels according to their needs.
If certain data is sensitive, you can also restrict access with permissions, to protect critical information.
It may be tempting to display as much data as possible in your dashboard, but beware of too much information. A good dashboard should be clear and readable, with only those KPIs that add real value.
A dashboard that displays out-of-date figures is a guaranteed disaster. Remember to update your data sources regularly to avoid analysis errors and make decisions based on reliable data.
A well-designed dashboard is the ultimate ally for effective, responsive marketing. With HubSpot and if/else agency, it's possible to create a customized dashboard, integrate all your data, and track your KPIs in real time to steer your strategy with precision.
Credit : Photo from Creatvise on Unsplash