Think of the first 48 hours after launch as a make-it or break-it point for your advertising campaign. You should be keeping close tabs on its performance so you can devise better strategies that lead to a better return on investment.

But if you’re currently using spreadsheets or other manual processes to record marketing data, you might miss out on essential insights.

To make the most out of your paid advertising, you need automated software that tracks your ad campaigns round the clock and alerts you with key updates in real time.

A CMO dashboard is the perfect business intelligence software for you to gather data across all digital platforms quickly. With fresh, up-to-date data at your fingertips, you can be on top of insights and take advantage of opportunities much faster.

In this guide, we unpack what CMO dashboards are and how they help digital marketing leaders make better decisions and cut down wasted ad dollars. 

What is a CMO Dashboard?

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As a chief marketing officer (CMO), your goals for advertising campaigns are to increase brand awareness and generate leads.

Traditionally, you’d go from pillar to post to see how well your campaigns are doing. This takes a lot of time and effort just to paint a vague outline of your marketing activities.

In today’s digital-driven advertising space, however, having an everything-at-one-place view is essential for strategic decision-making and business intelligence.

This is where CMO dashboards come in.

On a digital marketing report dashboard, CMOs can see an in-depth overview of all their marketing efforts, from social media marketing and email marketing campaigns to lead generation and website performance.

These dashboards collect information from all marketing channels and ad platforms and put it in one easy-to-see, all-in-one workspace packed with important KPIs and metrics.

With such an automation tool, your time spent on analyzing data is significantly reduced, and you can easily determine how to extract the most value from your advertising budget.

But what are the components of a CMO dashboard, and how can marketing leaders use them to measure campaign efficacy quickly?

What should be on a CMO dashboard?

An effective CMO dashboard should include key performance indicators (KPIs) from any web analytics service or ad platform your company uses. We compiled 12 KPIs you should track on a marketing attribution dashboard for multichannel success.

In addition to the key metrics like ad impressions, click-through rates, return on investment, and SEO-data like sessions and goal completions, a KPI dashboard should also report:

• Generated revenue
• Customer value metrics
• Pipeline velocity
• Pipeline contribution
• Share of voice
• Customer churn 
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)

An effective dashboard, however, should be more than just a reporting tool. It should be a complete marketing command center that lets you check KPIs, dive deep into your campaigns, reallocate budgets, and create and share reports in just a few clicks.

Here are the features that a truly data-driven dashboard should have:

• Customizable user interface: A marketing dashboard should not display KPIs in a fixed format but allow users to customize any metric they want and compare them against one another.

For example, on Adriel, you can simply drag and drop widgets to look at only the metrics you want, compare performance across different time periods, and visualize any data in multiple graph types. Alternatively, you can see your KPIs right away with our ready-made templates.

• Interactive dashboard: What good is an automation tool if you can only see what’s going on but can’t do anything about it?

On Adriel, you can turn on/off campaigns, ad sets, individual ads, and Google keywords directly from your dashboard with one click. You can also reallocate campaign budgets across platforms and change campaign schedules.

• Ad creative A/B testing: Most other cross-channel platforms do not provide creative thumbnails. But Adriel’s pivot tables show performance data down to the most granular ad creative level. This makes it easier for CMOs to A/B test their ad creatives effectively across separate marketing channels.

• Creative intelligence suite: Need help with writing your ad copies? Adriel’s Creative Intelligence Suite highlights important keywords that your target audiences use to search for products and services. Use these keywords in your ad titles and body to get more audience engagement.

• Real-time alarms: Adriel’s real-time alarm function works around the clock to monitor your KPIs, so you can confidently make the best investments for your brand. Apply alerts to specific data sources, ad sets, ad campaigns, individual ads, and every single metric available on the dashboard - even custom ones. Choose an alert frequency that works for you - real-time, daily, weekly, or monthly, and set up automation flows to turn off underperforming ads immediately.

• Custom reports: You need no less than fully automated marketing reports. Therefore, a flexible tool that will churn out beautiful white-labeled PDFs with just a few clicks will be handy.

Adriel’s CMO dashboard allows you to create tables to group data in any way you’d like – channel, country, daily breakdown, you name it. Add different breakdowns to organize your campaign data in a custom way, and add and remove metrics from the columns of your pivot table. You can also create custom breakdowns with advanced filtering options. When you’re done, just download it directly as a PDF.

27 CMO dashboard templates and examples

If you're looking for quick start CMO dashboard templates, we've got you covered.

We added 27 dashboard templates to our library so you can quickly get all your marketing data unified on one platform. No coding required!

Based on CMOs we've worked with and talked to, here are our top 8 picks that can help you save time and stay on top of your marketing efforts:

1. PPC dashboard

Have paid-per-click ad campaigns on multiple ad platforms? You can aggregate key metrics from 650+ channels onto this one dashboard and track changes in real-time.

Best feature: real-time alarms that notify you instantly when KPIs trend up or down so you can quickly take action

2. GA4 dashboard

Ever since the sunset of Universal Analytics, marketers have been struggling to get the most out of GA4, and for good reason. If you're looking to master the platform, here's a guide to the main differences between GA4 and UA. But if you're looking for a quick start, you can just grab the GA4 dashboard template. No need to figure out the platform itself!

Best feature: drag-and-drop widgets and tables for easier and clearer visualization

3. Social media dashboard

Have paid social campaigns across different channels? Monitor performance in real-time and get ad creative insights on this dashboard.

Best feature: detailed metric breakdowns for each ad creative on each channel so you can find out which ads work better and why

4. Performance dashboard

Track exactly how much you're spending on each ad campaign across multiple channels, and how much ROI you're getting from each. Reallocate budget from cash-drainers to cash-cows and turn on/off campaigns natively from the dashboard.

Best feature: native campaign management across multiple channels 

5. Google Search Console dashboard

Google Search Console is a trustee to monitor your website's organic search performance. With this template, you can ditch spreadsheets and basic Looker Studio dashboards for faster, clearer SEO reporting.

Best feature: goal tracking widget to track actual results against SEO goals

6. Ad Creative dashboard

This dashboard is a must-have for every CMO who wants to improve conversions and engagement on their ads. You get a bird's eye view of how your ad creatives are doing on all your PPC and marketing channels.

You can also A/B test creatives and messaging, and find out exactly which keywords, colors, and emojis resonate best with your target audience.

Best feature: word cloud, emoji cloud, and color cloud that highlights the main elements in your top performing ads

7. LinkedIn Organic dashboard

As more CMOs start to leverage LinkedIn as a brand-building and awareness channel, this LinkedIn dashboard becomes vital to keep close tabs on which posts and creatives perform better and why.

Best feature: dynamic pivot table breaking out metrics by post

8. YouTube channel dashboard

Have a YouTube channel for your brand? Track your channel growth in real-time on this dashboard.

Best feature: pivot table aggregating all your YouTube videos and their metrics

A well-designed, efficient CMO marketing dashboard will save you time and money, as it eliminates the tedious need to collect and process data yourself.

With this in mind, how can CMOs use dashboards to make better long-term decisions for their marketing campaigns?

How can dashboards help CMOs make informed marketing decisions?

Despite growing investment in analytic tools, 62% of chief marketing officers still rely on spreadsheets to obtain insights, according to a survey from business technology news site ZDNet.

But what they really should be doing is adopt automation software to do the job for them. Here are five reasons why:

1. Manage cross-platform data at scale‍

Marketing dashboards pull large volumes of data from hundreds of platforms and centralize them on one user interface. This means you and your marketing team can manage ad campaigns quickly and efficiently without having to learn the ways of different platforms.

Take Sery Box Healthcare – a Korean health and supplement company that advertises across five digital marketing channels: Facebook, Instagram, Kakao, Google, and Naver. The company uses 60 different advertising accounts with hundreds of ad creatives.

For Sery, using the cross-platform data management function on Adriel’s CMO dashboard proved to be an instant game-changer. Now, the team can easily cross-check the status and spending for each marketing channel without hindered communication.

It also meant less time spent on reporting and more time discussing key insights, ideas, and further marketing campaign strategies, which moved projects forward much faster and more effectively.

2. Streamline strategic decision-making based on real-time data

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Having instant access to customer insights and information is critical to determining your company’s strategic direction moving forward and how you can keep stakeholders in the know on the effectiveness of messaging, product-market-fit, and value proposition for each marketing campaign.

With the best executive dashboards, chief marketing officers will find it easier than ever to drive strategic decision-making.

Real-time data is especially useful for startups. Unlike big corporations that can cut some slack, Analogue Plus, a sports technology startup company, was under constant pressure to reduce the time it takes to garner actionable insights from the data they collected.

But when the company started using dashboard software, their marketing executives could access real-time insights and use them to analyze and plan for further growth.

3. Get more insights into omnichannel marketing ROAS

Despite the wide range of tools available for CMOs to generate marketing reports, some may not prove as effective when it comes to tracking return on ad spend (ROAS) at the ad creative level.

Being able to explore marketing ROAS across all channels without building reports and combing through endless data points proved to be game-changers in driving better results for both the brand’s marketing leaders and customers.

For nutraceutical startup Anabolic Health, they found that connecting their data sources to Adriel’s CMO dashboard did the trick.

With Adriel’s platform, the company was able to benefit from cross-channel metrics unified and accessible under a single data model. This helped their team define precisely what worked and didn’t and outline possible strategies for improvement.

4. Manage costs and budget planning through real-time cash flow analysis

With dozens of ad accounts and large advertising budgets, it can be difficult for you to keep track of them accurately without an automation tool. This is exactly what BY4M, an e-commerce company, experienced.

The company’s marketing investments have been steadily growing in proportion to their rising number of ad accounts and campaigns. Bookkeeping became cumbersome, and risks for untimely and inaccurate financial reporting increased. They needed an automation tool to accurately track, measure, and optimize ad spend and results.                      

With a marketing dashboard, BY4M monitored and controlled all its advertising costs in real time and built an in-house database system from this centralized data source.

The software’s automated alerts also helped the team stay on top of performance issues and allowed for an agile response, thereby minimizing wasted ad spend. 

Wrapping Up

We hope this guide has been helpful in understanding:

• What a CMO dashboard is 
• The components of a CMO dashboard
• How dashboards help CMOs make informed, data-driven marketing decisions

Too many channels and different report templates take time to focus on what matters? Need all the data in one place to see the big picture and make plans? Adriel is your ideal solution. 

Use Adriel to integrate all the campaign data in one centralized location, automate reporting; access your data across all channels in real time, and identify your underperforming and overperforming campaigns. 

Book a demo today and make the most of your brand’s advertising dollars with Adriel.