What is an inbound marketing dashboard?
An inbound marketing dashboard is an interface tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., HubSpot, Google Analytics, social media platforms) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., lead generation, conversion rates, website traffic), enabling teams and agencies to monitor inbound marketing efforts and create presentations for clients and executives.
Inbound marketing dashboards are typically built using flexible tools like Google Looker Studio, Power BI, Google Sheets, or platform-specific solutions to enable high customization and integration of multiple data sources.
What to include in an inbound marketing dashboard?
An actionable inbound marketing dashboard balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive inbound marketing dashboards
Executive dashboards for CMOs, CEOs, and clients show inbound marketing's bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Inbound ROI analysis: by channel, using attribution models for large budgets (≈100k/mo).
- Lead funnel analysis: lead generation, conversion rates, and customer acquisition costs
- Cohort analysis: retention, expansion, and LTV by customer cohort (sign-up period, acquisition channel)
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Inbound marketing manager dashboards
Manager dashboards have cross-channel views with drill-downs to see performance by client, brand, region, team member, funnel stage, and campaign. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-channel reporting: overall campaign, product, client, or region reporting across channels
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives
- Content performance analysis: blog posts, landing pages, and social media content
- SEO analysis for keyword and content strategy
- Topic, keyword, content, audience research
Operational Inbound Marketing Dashboards
Operational dashboards for analysts and channel managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Content marketing: blog traffic, engagement, lead generation
- Social media: post metrics, follower growth, engaging topics/hashtags
- Email marketing: delivery, open, conversion rates
- SEO: keyword/page rankings, impressions, clicks, speed, errors, backlinks
Operational inbound marketing dashboards are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating multiple sources.
How to build an inbound marketing dashboard?
To build an inbound marketing dashboard, connect your data sources, choose a template on Looker Studio or Sheets, build your queries by selecting metrics and dimensions, choose charts to visualize your data, customize the dashboard, design and share via link, PDF or email.
Here’s the breakdown:
Connect data sources
Define and connect the data sources to bring to your dashboard. Common sources are HubSpot for CRM and lead data, GA4 for web analytics, and social media platforms for engagement metrics.
To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the data sources to bring to your dashboard.
You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of inbound marketing dashboard templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like lead tracking, content performance, and SEO analysis.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your business or agency. Map your specific metrics, especially custom conversions, CRM contact data, GA4 events, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "conversions" and "revenue".
Depending on your reporting tool—Google Sheets or Google Looker Studio, pick any of the dozens of templates created by our team and customers to solve your inbound marketing reporting use cases, such as lead tracking, content performance, and SEO analysis.
Select metrics, dimensions, and charts
Once your dashboard template is downloaded, you may 1)modify it or 2) create a blank page to build it from scratch. Whatever the case, setting up a query always follows these steps:
- Select the data source and the account connected to it
- Choose metrics (e.g., Leads, website traffic, conversion rates, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g., by date, campaign name, content type, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your dashboards
Design
To make your inbound marketing dashboards truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your inbound marketing dashboards:
Share
Share your inbound marketing dashboards via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in an inbound marketing dashboard?
Inbound marketing dashboards should include a mix of funnel—visibility, engagement, conversion—, efficiency, effectiveness, revenue, and cost metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of inbound marketing efforts towards business goals. They include:
Inbound funnel KPIs measure the buying process (from the marketer perspective), regardless of the channel:
- Visibility metrics: website visits, social media reach, email deliveries
- Engagement metrics: clicks, comments, shares, blog reads, average session duration
- Conversion metrics: leads, MQLs, SQLs, customer acquisitions
Efficiency KPIs compare your marketing outputs to the cost, including:
- Visibility: CPM (Cost per Mille)
- Engagement: CPC (Cost per Click)
- Conversion: CPA (Cost per Acquisition), CPL (Cost per Lead)
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one funnel stage to another
- Visibility: Frequency
- Engagement: CTR, engagement rate
- Conversion: Conversion rate
Sales and cost KPIs show the bottom-line impact of your inbound marketing performance:
- Sales: customers, revenue
- Cost: marketing spend, OPEX, payroll
- Efficiency: ROI, ROAS, CAC
- Effectiveness: AOV, ACV
To analyze these inbound marketing KPIs, segment them by:
- Channel: organic, social, email marketing
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Campaign: funnel stage, objective
- Business: client, branch, region
- Audience: geo, tech, demographics, interests, behavior, placement
- Content: creatives, format, topic, keyword
