In today’s highly competitive landscape of digital eCommerce, data analytical dashboards have become vital tools for conveying essential numbers, trends, and metrics to retailers, marketing teams, and clients with ease. 

With eCommerce dashboards, digital marketers can gain comprehensive, data-driven insights for all their marketing campaigns, identify problems, and highlight future opportunities within their target audience. 

eCommerce dashboards showcase where you are in terms of customers and revenue, where you can make improvements, and provide personalized experiences customers expect. 

In this post, we dive deeper into how you can maximize your digital marketing efforts with an automated dashboard, and five strategies you can use to grow your online store through one, including:

• Investing in multi-ad channels
• Finding out what your target audience is interested in
• Planning your media mix based on past data
• Testing your ad creatives
• Tracking ad performance

What is an eCommerce Dashboard?

An eCommerce dashboard is a real-time visual interface that monitors critical metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) related to the sales, revenue, products, and customers of an online business. 

Selecting an online retail platform like Shopify is only the first step to building a successful online business. In today’s ever-changing eCommerce market, having direct access to customized data-driven metrics and insights into your online store is more important than ever. 

This is why businesses use marketing dashboards which rely on business intelligence (BI), analytics, and data integration tools to deliver essential insights that key decision-makers depend on for successful ad campaigns. 

What Should be on an Automated Dashboard? 

As eCommerce becomes an increasingly important part of the global economy, it's crucial that online businesses have a strong grasp of essential eCommerce KPIs.

Automated dashboards allow you to get a detailed view of your business and dive into your most important advertising metrics and KPIs, for example: 

• Average order value (AOV): This is an important eCommerce metric that measures the average dollar spent when a customer places an order on a website or store. 
• Shopping cart abandonment rate: This ​​describes web page visitors who leave before completing a desired action (e.g., adding items to checkout on their cart, but exiting without completing a purchase). According to Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment rate is 69.82%, making it a common hurdle for eCommerce managers. 
• Total revenue: This macro metric lets you keep track of your annual sales goals. 
• Customer lifetime value: The total revenue an eCommerce business earns from an individual customer over time, taking into account each of their orders. 

You can also customize your dashboard according to specified business goals, and highlight sales data that show you the effectiveness of your online presence, web content, product pages, and product offers. Or, to save time, you can see your KPIs right away with this eCommerce dashboard template. 

5 Strategies to Grow your eCommerce Business 

Having an eCommerce dashboard on hand can greatly help your business with optimizing for higher sales. 

With the help of automated tools, here are five strategies you and your team can implement within your digital retail business to increase and fast-track online sales today:

Strategy #1: Invest in Multi-Ad Channels

In 2022, customer journeys are more complex than ever. An average person now interacts with brands across 20 ad channels before making a purchase decision. 

Gone are the days when digital marketers invested in only one or two channels and saw substantial returns on investment. Retailers must target customers across multiple touchpoints, or risk losing out on brand awareness, engagement, and sales.  

In addition, IDFA depreciation meant that marketers lost access to a rich set of clickstreams and granular data on consumer profiles. Previously, these were essential to delivering highly targeted and personalized ads. 

How can eCommerce retailers understand, connect, and reach customers in a future beyond device-based identifiers? Multichannel marketing is the key.

Retailers are now shifting their ad spend away from ad giants like Meta and Google to new-age, unconventional channels to attract new users and retain existing ones. Some examples of these include:

• Retail marketplaces, e.g. Walmart Advertising and Kroger Marketplace 
• Growing social media platforms, e.g. TikTok and Snapchat
• Niche search engines, e.g. Bing and Pinterest
• Programmatic demand-side platforms (DSPs), e.g. The Trade Desk

Adriel’s centralized dashboard aggregates data from all your disparate ad channels on a single user-interface. No matter how many ad campaigns you have, you’ll be able to extract key insights and analyze performance trends to grow your eCommerce business. 

Strategy #2: Define your target audience

Building out a detailed customer persona is the first step to nailing down a multichannel marketing campaign. It’s crucial to determine who your target customers are and where they hang out online so you can establish an overarching presence across those platforms.

However, in a cookieless future, marketers must look for creative ways to obtain first-party data to understand who their customers are. As third-party cookies phase out, brands that know how to collect and use first-party data will have a distinct advantage. 

Some top-of-funnel strategies to collect first-party data include:

• Digital downloads (e.g. product catalogs, size guides, color palettes)
• Product recommendation surveys
• Buzzfeed-type quizzes (e.g. “Which F.R.I.E.N.D character are you?”)

Other common ways of capturing first party data at middle of funnel and bottom of funnel include:

• Discount coupons or free-shipping offers (to collect email addresses)
• Early access to product launches / back in stock popular items
• Tiered discounts
• Chatbots
• Customer service interactions
• Wish lists
• SMS marketing
• Loyalty programs
• Website analytics tools (e.g. Google Analytics)
• Post purchase surveys
• Customer feedback

Strategy #3: Plan Your Media Mix Based on Your Past Data

The next step is figuring out the right media mix that would put your products and services in front of your target audience. eCommerce dashboards display past campaign performance and trends, allowing you to make decisions on which media mix you should invest in the future. 

In general, eight out of ten media planners in the US leverage a mix of organic and paid media. A majority of marketers are switching up their media mix in 2022, but finding the right balance remains the biggest challenge across the board. 

According to HubSpot, email marketing, paid and organic social media content, and organic search are the most leveraged media mix channels with the highest ROI.  

However, the media mix that you invest in will depend on your overall advertising budget and the size of your eCommerce store. But at the very least, you should have:

In terms of media types, video ads were rated as the most effective in achieving business goals and KPIs.  

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Strategy #4: Select the right KPIs

How do you ensure that you’re getting the most bang for your buck from your media mix? In a highly complicated user-generated landscape, defining and tracking a single KPI isn’t enough to accurately measure results from various channels. 

Establishing the right KPI mix is essential for retailers to measure ad spend against business goals, analyze the effectiveness of their ad creatives and copy, and make budgeting and optimization decisions based on past performance.

Common KPIs used by eCommerce retailers include:

• Marketing efficiency rate or estimated ROAS (Total revenue / Total ad spend)
• Cost per lead
• Cost per acquisition
• Click through rate (for traffic-focused campaigns)
• View through rate (for video campaigns)
• Cost per view
• Clicks and online engagement
• Impact on sales
• Increase on website traffic
• Quantity and quality of audience reached
• Number of mentions on social media

Strategy #5: Test your creatives

Testing new messaging and creatives against specific audience groups is an integral part of any advertising and marketing initiative. Set aside a minimum of 10% of your marketing budget for testing purposes but you shouldn’t expect to see return on investment on it. 

The goal of testing is to observe and learn in relatively low-risk environments so you can use proven results to devise better strategies in the future. Continually testing ensures that your advertising efforts are on-par with changes in the industry and that you’re taking advantage of new opportunities and channels. 

A/B testing your ads helps identify the causal impact that a strategic change has on a given success metric:

At Adriel, marketers can conduct creative A/B testing on a single platform. Our marketing dashboard’s Creative Intelligence Suite centralizes all your creative data so you can focus on what’s important – piecing together the elements that drive success. 

With creative intelligence tools like word, emoji, and color clouds, you can uncover new ways to maximize your ROAS and gain data-driven insights on creative elements impacting business performance:

• Word cloud: Get auto-generated social media reports to determine which messaging resonated best with your target audience. 

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• Emoji cloud: Find out which emojis work, and which are a bit of an overkill on Adriel.

• Color cloud: Visualize which colors are easier on the eyes of your target audience.

Use eCommerce dashboards to track ad performance

As multichannel marketing becomes the norm across every industry, all advertisers and chief marketing officers need a single source of truth to streamline creative development, strategic planning, and campaign executive. 

The more platforms involved, the more data there is, and the more time is spent on manually compiling advertising metrics and creating performance reports. Data stitching can often lead to human errors, and manual processes inevitably lead to delays in key decision-making. 

An all-in-one tool that provides a 360-degree view of cross-channel metrics unified under an umbrella model will help retailers navigate and visualize vast oceans of data. From there on, it’s a breeze to adjust the marketing mix based on what worked and what didn’t. 

Leverage marketing automation software like Adriel which integrates with hundreds of data sources (advertising platforms, analytics tools, MMPs, and databases) to centralize real-time data, insights, and teams on a single workspace. Adriel is the only arsenal you need to drive agile growth across every stage of the AdOps lifecycle.

With Adriel’s eCommerce dashboard, retail marketers can automate their monotonous tasks and have more time out of their day to focus on planning, strategizing, and testing for growth. 

Integrate all the data for your eCommerce site in one centralized location, automate reporting; access your data across all channels in real-time, and identify your underperforming and overperforming campaigns. 

Book a 1-on-1 demo call with our product specialist today!