How to Create an Effective Account Based Marketing Dashboard

Building an account-based marketing dashboard is more than just a technical exercise—it’s the backbone of your marketing strategy. Imagine having all your critical KPIs, from customer lifetime value to campaign engagement, right at your fingertips, empowering you to make swift, informed decisions.

Yet, many businesses struggle with dashboards that are either too complex or fail to provide actionable insights. If you’ve ever wrestled with disconnected systems, data gaps, or sluggish reporting, you’re not alone. This guide breaks down the step-by-step process of designing a scalable, user-friendly ABM dashboard that integrates seamlessly with your existing tools and delivers the insights you need to drive real business impact.

 

Key Takeaways
Tailor your dashboard to the needs of its users, ensuring that it’s intuitive while providing the right level of customisation for actionable insights.
Focus on integrating your ABM dashboard with existing platforms to avoid manual data entry and ensure real-time accuracy.
Prioritise the key metrics that matter most for your business, such as customer acquisition costs and lifetime value, to drive informed decisions.
Conduct regular audits to close data gaps and ensure that your dashboards display complete and accurate information.
Use tools like Supermetrics, Whatagraph, and Databox to simplify dashboard management and make your data more actionable.

 

Common Challenges in Creating Effective ABM Dashboards

 

Creating an effective account based marketing dashboard is pivotal in streamlining data organisation and interpretation. These dashboards are designed to connect marketers with real-time, crucial information at a glance, making them indispensable for efficient business operations. Whether accessing sales, marketing, inventory, or finance data, a well-built dashboard provides a single, comprehensive view—accessible across devices, from desktops to mobiles.

A key benefit of an ABM analytics dashboard lies in its ability to visualise key performance indicators (KPIs). These indicators are vital for driving business decisions. However, to truly unlock value, the dashboard’s reporting capabilities must be underpinned by meaningful marketing dashboard metrics. A broad figure, like “net income,” offers little insight without understanding the more granular metrics that influence it. Specific abm metrics like customer lifetime value or campaign engagement offer far more actionable insights.

 

Tailoring Dashboards to the User

One common pitfall businesses face is building dashboards without considering the end user. When a dashboard isn’t designed with a clear user in mind, it often becomes cumbersome. Many business intelligence (BI) platforms require advanced technical knowledge to operate effectively, creating barriers for users outside the IT department. On the other hand, pre-configured dashboards, while more accessible, often fail to provide the customisation required for measuring metrics unique to an organisation’s goals. For example, an off-the-shelf dashboard might not fully capture essential abm analytics dashboard data, rendering it less useful for specific account based marketing initiatives.

 

Compatibility and Integration Issues

The usefulness of a dashboard also heavily depends on its ability to integrate with existing systems. In many cases, dashboards face compatibility challenges. If a dashboard cannot seamlessly connect with critical business systems, it risks providing incomplete or outdated information. This issue can create manual data entry workloads, which not only defeat the purpose of the dashboard but also introduce human error, further undermining the dashboard’s integrity.

 

Scalability and Cost Concerns

The scalability of an account based marketing dashboard also presents challenges, particularly as business needs grow. Some providers require individual licences per user, while others may offer subscription models that increase in cost based on company size. While these pricing models aren’t inherently problematic, it is essential to carefully consider the return on investment (ROI). A clear understanding of both the long-term business objectives and the dashboard’s scalability potential is crucial to justify the investment.

 

Navigating Data Complexity in Marketing

For many marketing teams, becoming data-driven is a daunting task. Beyond tracking basic metrics like email opens and web traffic, teams often struggle to align their marketing dashboard metrics with overarching business goals. Without a defined strategy, the volume of data can be overwhelming, and extracting meaningful insights becomes a significant challenge. Indeed, 81% of marketers report difficulties in implementing a comprehensive data-driven strategy, highlighting this as a widespread pain point.

To tackle these challenges, businesses must first reverse-engineer their approach. Start by identifying core business objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs). Then, determine which marketing data points will drive success in these areas. Crucially, ensure that marketing goals are integrated with other departments, especially sales, to create a unified strategy across the organisation.

By building a dashboard that aligns with these principles, businesses can develop a more effective, scalable account based marketing dashboard that offers actionable insights, streamlines reporting, and supports informed decision-making across the organisation.

 

No Single View of All Your Marketing Metrics

In today’s marketing landscape, teams often find themselves managing multiple platforms—paid advertising, SEO, CRM, marketing automation, email marketing, social media monitoring, web analytics, project management, and more. This complexity can create significant challenges when it comes to having a comprehensive view of all your marketing dashboard metrics.

A typical MarTech stack can include a vast array of tools, and navigating between them to compile performance reports becomes inefficient. You don’t want to find yourself clicking through ten different platforms just to gather data for a single presentation to senior leadership. Worse yet, manually collating this data into PowerPoint presentations can lead to errors, inconsistencies, and delays in reporting.

The solution lies in integrating your MarTech stack into a central account based marketing dashboard. By doing so, you create a unified view of all your abm metrics in one place, allowing senior leadership and sales teams to access critical data quickly and easily. A CRM platform like Salesforce, which is widely used across business departments, is an ideal candidate to host such a dashboard.

Most leading MarTech platforms are built to integrate seamlessly with commonly used tools. For instance, sales intelligence solutions and major marketing automation platforms like Marketo and HubSpot are designed to sync effortlessly with Salesforce. These platforms usually provide user-friendly guides to ensure smooth integration, ensuring that your abm analytics dashboard is set up without a hitch.

 

Addressing Data Gaps in Your Dashboard

Once you’ve consolidated all your core metrics into a single view, a new challenge may arise—your account based marketing dashboard could display broken charts or miss crucial data points. These gaps often occur because of inconsistencies in your CRM or marketing automation platforms, such as missing lead sources or incomplete event tracking.

A major reason for these gaps is poor adherence to processes within your systems. Both sales and marketing teams must follow established protocols in CRM data entry and campaign tracking to prevent these issues. If this isn’t enforced, data inaccuracies can compound over time, diminishing the accuracy of your abm analytics dashboard.

The key to resolving these challenges is to conduct a thorough audit of your CRM and website analytics. Start by pinpointing where the data gaps are occurring. For example, are sales teams only marking follow-ups after a successful sale, leaving gaps in the lead funnel? Or perhaps event tracking hasn’t been properly set up to connect Google Analytics with key website interactions.

After identifying these issues, the next step is to work backwards and close these gaps. Ensuring data is accurate and complete within your systems will drastically improve the reliability of your abm metrics and the overall functionality of your account based marketing dashboard.

 

 

How to Design a ABM Dashboard That Provides Actionable Insights

 

Creating an effective account based marketing dashboard is essential for any marketing professional aiming to hold their team accountable and stay on track. A well-constructed dashboard delivers real-time insights and helps to ensure your strategy is aligned with business goals. To achieve this, your abm analytics dashboard must include the right metrics—those that truly matter to your organisation’s success.

 

What does a marketing dashboard include?

Here are the eight key marketing dashboard metrics that should be included to maximise the impact of your account based marketing dashboard:

1. Cost of Customer Acquisition (CAC)
   Understanding the cost of acquiring new customers is vital for any growth strategy. Calculating your CAC is straightforward: simply divide your monthly marketing budget by the number of new customers acquired in that same period. This figure provides critical insight into how sustainable your current growth plans are. For instance, if you’re aiming to increase your customer base tenfold, but your acquisition costs are soaring, you may need to recalibrate expectations and manage executive ambitions accordingly.
2. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
   Knowing how much each customer is worth over the long term helps determine the return on investment for your marketing efforts. If you’re acquiring customers at a cost of £75 each, but they only make one purchase of £50, you’ve got a problem. To calculate CLV, multiply your average order value by the number of repeat purchases per year, and then by the average customer retention period. This metric is fundamental for your abm metrics and ensures you’re acquiring customers who offer sustainable long-term value.
3. Web Traffic
   Tracking web traffic is essential for understanding how well your online presence is performing. Metrics like sessions, bounce rate, and average session duration provide insight into how effectively your content is engaging visitors. Google Analytics remains a go-to tool for monitoring these statistics, and it’s a must-have in any account based marketing dashboard.
4. Social Media Impact
   Regardless of how you feel about social media, your customers are likely spending time on platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Tracking social media KPIs—such as engagement rates and follower growth—can help justify your investment in these platforms. It’s especially critical for companies with limited budgets, where understanding which channels are delivering the most impact can make or break a campaign.
5. Landing Page Conversion Rates
   Landing pages play a crucial role in converting leads. Knowing which pages are performing well and which ones need optimisation is a key insight that your abm analytics dashboard should provide. For instance, a landing page with high traffic but a low conversion rate indicates a need for immediate attention. Monitoring the traffic-to-conversion ratio helps you pinpoint the areas that require optimisation to drive better results.
6. Leads Generated
   At its core, your website exists to generate leads. Tracking lead generation metrics is not only about monitoring how many leads are coming in, but also about proving the ROI of your marketing efforts. It’s essential to track both first-time visitors and return leads to fully understand the effectiveness of your lead nurturing strategies.
7. Email Conversion Rates
   Email marketing remains one of the most cost-effective channels available. By consistently monitoring metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, you can gain rapid insights into the effectiveness of your email campaigns. These metrics are vital in ensuring that your campaigns continue to perform optimally and help you refine your approach as needed.
8. Organic Search Performance
   Your SEO efforts are a crucial part of driving organic traffic. Monitoring metrics related to organic search will help you evaluate how well your content is performing and where improvements can be made. Google Analytics offers an excellent way to track overall organic traffic and the performance of individual pages, allowing you to fine-tune your strategy and improve results.

 

What Are the Three Essential Elements of a Marketing Dashboard?

To make data-driven decisions that fuel business growth, an account based marketing dashboard must incorporate three core elements: data integration, data analytics, and data visualisation. These components work together to provide actionable insights and help marketing teams streamline their operations.

1. Data Integration
   At the heart of any effective account based marketing dashboard is seamless data integration. This process brings together data from various sources, whether it’s CRM, social media platforms, or paid advertising tools, and consolidates them into a single, unified view. By using APIs (application program interfaces), data integration ensures that information flows automatically between different systems, eliminating manual data entry and the risk of errors. This comprehensive overview is crucial for businesses looking to track all relevant marketing dashboard metrics in one place, streamlining reporting and enhancing visibility across the organisation.
2. Data Analytics
   Data analysis is the backbone of any successful dashboard, and in an abm analytics dashboard, it enables marketers to extract actionable insights from raw data. Automated analytics tools now make this process faster and more efficient, utilising sophisticated algorithms to process vast amounts of data in real-time. By automating data analysis, marketers can quickly identify trends, optimise strategies, and make informed decisions based on the latest abm metrics. This level of insight is invaluable for refining marketing strategies and driving greater efficiency across all campaigns.
3. Data Visualisation
   Data visualisation transforms complex data into digestible, visually appealing formats. Graphs, charts, and diagrams play a vital role in helping marketers understand key insights at a glance. Effective data visualisation simplifies interpretation, allowing teams to see patterns, correlations, and performance metrics without needing to sift through endless rows of raw data. There are multiple types of visualisations—such as time trends, comparisons, and correlations—each serving a distinct purpose in making data-driven decision-making more accessible. For a successful account based marketing dashboard, clear, concise visualisations are essential for communicating performance metrics and enabling swift, evidence-based decisions.

 

How to Build an ABM Dashboard

 

Building an effective account based marketing dashboard requires careful planning to ensure that it delivers actionable insights tailored to your business objectives. By following a structured approach, you can create a dashboard that seamlessly integrates abm analytics and marketing dashboard metrics, offering a clear view of your marketing efforts.

 

Step 1: Identify the Metrics You’ll Track

Before constructing your abm analytics dashboard, it’s crucial to define the specific abm metrics you need to monitor. These metrics will vary depending on your industry and overall business goals. Begin by brainstorming all the metrics you think are relevant—this could include lead generation, customer acquisition costs, or content engagement rates. At this stage, it’s important to ensure that each metric aligns with your business strategy and supports long-term growth.

 

Step 2: Understand Your Audience

When building an account based marketing dashboard, you need to consider who will be using it and the level of detail they require. A dashboard used by a broad group of employees across various roles—such as sales, marketing, and senior leadership—needs to cater to different perspectives. Are there specific data sets that should be highlighted for particular roles? The key is to strike a balance between detailed, actionable information and ensuring that the dashboard remains accessible and intuitive to everyone involved.

 

Step 3: Select the Right Dashboard Software

Choosing the right software is vital to ensure your account based marketing dashboard meets your needs. As data evolves quickly, the software must be robust enough to handle your growing requirements. Here are key features to look for:

• Cloud-Based: Your dashboard should be hosted in the cloud, ensuring minimal IT support and continuous accessibility.
• Social Media Integration: The software should integrate seamlessly with your social media channels, allowing you to track engagement metrics effortlessly.
• Self-Service Capabilities: Opt for a platform that enables users to generate reports, conduct queries, and uncover hidden data patterns without requiring complex setups.
• Device Accessibility: The dashboard should be accessible on all devices, whether it’s a desktop, tablet, or smartphone, ensuring your team can stay connected to key insights anytime, anywhere.
• Embedded Capabilities: Ideally, your dashboard software should allow embedding in other business applications, streamlining workflows and centralising data access.

 

Step 4: Choose Your Data Sources

With modern marketing platforms offering a wealth of data, you’ll want to ensure your account based marketing dashboard pulls from a variety of sources, such as email marketing, social media platforms, and your website. By integrating all these sources into a unified dashboard, you create a holistic view of your marketing efforts. To streamline this process, leverage native integrations supported by your dashboard software to ensure smooth data flow and comprehensive reporting.

 

 

Tools & Tactics That Simplify ABM Dashboard Management

 

To effectively manage an account based marketing dashboard, it’s essential to choose the right tools and platforms that streamline operations across various funnel stages. A well-designed abm analytics dashboard can provide clarity, enhance decision-making, and optimise your entire marketing funnel. Here’s a breakdown of how dashboards can support each stage of the customer journey.

 

What is the best dashboard to visualise your marketing funnel?

Awareness Stage Dashboards
In the awareness stage, the focus is on understanding how well your brand’s voice is resonating across various channels. A comprehensive account based marketing dashboard can track the performance of key content assets—whether it’s social media posts, blogs, or advertisements—in real time. This is not just about counting likes or shares but interpreting how your brand messaging is landing with audiences. By providing actionable insights, the dashboard allows businesses to quickly adapt their campaigns and amplify their reach when it matters most.

Interest & Consideration Stage Dashboards
At this stage, an effective abm analytics dashboard can help pinpoint which content is generating the most interest and engagement. It highlights which lead magnets are proving to be most effective and how email marketing campaigns are nurturing these leads. With insights on content performance, marketers can create tailored strategies that resonate deeply with potential customers, guiding them further down the funnel with precision.

Intent & Evaluation Stage Dashboards
During the intent and evaluation stage, customers are considering whether to make a purchase. Dashboards that monitor shopping cart behaviour, lead form completions, and other key actions offer vital insights. With real-time tracking, an account based marketing dashboard can reveal why customers might hesitate—whether it’s unclear messaging, pricing concerns, or UX issues—and suggest the most effective ways to nudge them towards completing a purchase.

Conversion Stage Dashboards
In the final stretch, your abm analytics dashboard is critical in providing a granular analysis of conversion rates. This data allows businesses to evaluate the effectiveness of specific campaigns, break down return on investment (ROI), and understand the cost of acquiring new customers. Dashboards tracking post-purchase behaviour can unlock invaluable insights into customer loyalty and identify opportunities for repeat business, improving long-term retention strategies.

 

Best ABM Dashboard Platforms & Tools

Choosing the right software for your account based marketing dashboard is a key decision. As you explore different options, consider the following factors to ensure the tool meets your organisation’s needs.

• What problem are you solving?
  Begin by identifying the gaps in your current marketing dashboard metrics. This will help you determine the essential features and functionalities the new platform must provide.
• Who will use the software?
  Consider the range of users, from marketing teams to senior leadership. Determine how many licenses you’ll need and whether the platform should prioritise ease of use or cater to more advanced marketing software power users.
• Which tools need integration?
  Decide whether your dashboard will need to integrate with other tools such as CRM, accounting, or HR systems. This will influence whether you choose a standalone dashboard or one that consolidates multiple tools into one unified platform.
• What outcomes are you aiming for?
  Finally, think about the results you want to achieve. Whether it’s greater visibility into performance, improving specific abm metrics, or refining reporting processes, having a clear set of success criteria will help guide your decision.

Selecting the right tools for managing an account based marketing dashboard is essential to ensure your marketing efforts are streamlined, data-driven, and efficient. Below are four of the top platforms that simplify managing abm analytics dashboards, making it easier to track marketing dashboard metrics and extract meaningful insights.

 

1. Supermetrics

Supermetrics enables marketers to automatically move cross-channel data into their preferred reporting and analytics tools, such as Google Sheets, Excel, Looker Studio, Power BI, and BigQuery. With Supermetrics, you can consolidate and manage data from multiple platforms to gain real-time insights and make informed decisions.

Supermetrics simplifies the process of working with data from numerous sources. This allows marketers to make more effective, real-time decisions and enhance the performance of their campaigns. The platform seamlessly connects with over 150 marketing platforms, including Google Analytics 4, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads, ensuring comprehensive data coverage. By eliminating manual data entry, Supermetrics reduces the risk of errors and saves time. With automated data refreshes, it ensures you always have access to up-to-date information, allowing for continuous, real-time decision-making on your account based marketing dashboard.

 

2. HighLevel

HighLevel is an all-in-one marketing platform designed to streamline business operations and enhance customer engagement. It offers a wide range of tools for lead capture, automated follow-ups, and appointment management, all within a single platform.

HighLevel stands out as a comprehensive solution that consolidates multiple marketing tools into one platform. This includes customer relationship management (CRM), sales automation, and digital product creation. HighLevel also offers unlimited contacts, smart contact lists, and a unified conversation feed, making communication across multiple channels (SMS, email, phone) seamless. With visual workflow automation, multi-channel campaign management, and AI-powered booking tools, HighLevel significantly boosts operational efficiency, making it an ideal platform for managing abm analytics dashboards.

 

3. Whatagraph

Whatagraph is one of the leading platforms for email marketing tracking, offering insights such as click-through rates and subscriber engagement. It provides robust data collection and visualisation features, allowing you to easily monitor and analyse performance.

The platform excels at connecting multiple data sources via ready-made integrations, allowing you to create interactive dashboards that combine key marketing dashboard metrics. Whatagraph’s smart builder tool and its library of pre-built widgets and templates make it easy to get started. You can even share live reports with clients, and for a more professional touch, add custom branding or domains to your dashboards. Whatagraph is suitable for both individual marketers and large enterprises looking to streamline their reporting process.

4. Databox

Databox is a digital marketing reporting tool used by over 20,000 businesses worldwide. It provides quick and easy data connections and report creation, making it an excellent choice for time-poor teams.

This platform is designed to deliver actionable insights from multiple sources within one place. It offers a range of pre-built templates that allow marketing teams to track campaign performance, social media engagement, and more. For quick referencing, Databox’s KPI scorecards track 15 metrics on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, providing immediate insights into marketing performance.

 

Steps to Optimise ABM Dashboards for Better Decision-Making and Reporting

Building a high-performance account based marketing dashboard requires a strategic approach to data management. Effective dashboards streamline reporting, enhance decision-making, and enable businesses to focus on what truly matters. Here are the critical steps to optimise your abm analytics dashboard for improved performance.

Curate Your Data Set

Much like a chef carefully selects ingredients for a refined menu, curating the data for your account based marketing dashboard is crucial. You need to organise and manage your data in a way that ensures its relevance, quality, and usability. By carefully choosing which data sets are included, you make it easier to uncover valuable insights that directly impact business decisions.

Reduce Data Volume

A key aspect of curation is reducing the data volume. By focusing only on relevant data, you not only declutter the dashboard but also improve loading times and responsiveness. This allows real-time data processing to focus on the marketing dashboard metrics that genuinely matter, enhancing both efficiency and user experience.

Optimise Data Structure

Optimising the structure of your data is another crucial step. It involves:

• Data aggregation: Collecting data from various sources into a centralised location.
• Data summarisation: Reducing large data sets into more digestible chunks.
• Data normalisation: Ensuring that all data follows a consistent format or schema.

By structuring your data efficiently, you streamline the retrieval and processing, leading to faster performance from your abm analytics dashboard.

Apply Appropriate Filtering

Applying filters is essential, but they should be used sparingly and strategically. Filters help narrow down the data displayed, ensuring it is relevant and specific to the user’s needs.

• Limit the date range: Instead of loading all available data, filter it by a specific time period. For example, when displaying customer lifetime value, allow users to select the date range, making the analysis more targeted and useful.
• Contextual filters: Give users the ability to filter data by specific campaigns, platforms, or budget allocations. This ensures that the abm metrics shown are always contextually relevant to the task at hand.

Optimise Query Execution

When users apply filters, your account based marketing dashboard needs to generate optimised queries. These refined queries are designed to fetch only the necessary data, speeding up the process and improving the overall dashboard performance. Fast query execution not only enhances user satisfaction but also supports more timely and accurate decision-making.

Simplify Data Visualisation

Use Clear Visuals
Simplicity is key when presenting data. Use clean, concise visual elements such as charts, graphs, and tables to convey information effectively. Overcomplicating the visuals can obscure key insights, so it’s crucial to keep them clear and straightforward.

Maintain Visual Consistency
Consistency across design elements—such as colour palettes, font sizes, and styles—improves readability and helps users quickly grasp the data. An intuitive, visually coherent abm analytics dashboard enhances the overall user experience and makes decision-making easier.

Add Annotations (or Let AI Do It for You)

Dashboards aren’t just about raw data—they must also guide users through that data. Adding annotations such as titles, labels, and legends provides necessary context, while tooltips offer additional information without cluttering the main display. White space, grids, and alignment help create a balanced visual hierarchy, making it easier for users to digest complex data sets at a glance.

Dashboards Should Inspire Action

While beautifully designed dashboards can be appealing, the most important aspect is how they drive action. Focus on presenting the data in a way that makes trends and insights easy to absorb. Simple visualisations, such as bar charts or pie charts, often outperform more complex designs when it comes to clarity and actionable insights.

Always ask yourself: What is the clearest way to communicate this measure? This mindset will help direct your data scientists, BI/IT teams, or external partners to create dashboards that are not just aesthetically pleasing, but deeply functional and impactful for decision-making.