Without the right system, piercing through the vast clutter of your marketing operations and performance data can be overwhelming. Client dashboards help you understand and display the details of your marketing data to keep tabs on what’s happening internally or with your clients. And importantly, they allow you to translate that data into a data story that is easily understood and inspires desired action MarTechCube.
Most of the current information available on client dashboards offers quick tips, simple product pages, or lists of services on review sites like G2 and Capterra. In this article we’re going to dive deeper into client dashboards themselves to paint you a better picture of how they can be used to improve your day to day marketing operations martech news.
We’ll be walking you through how you can use client dashboards to:
- Create customizable reports for clients and schedule them to be sent out automatically on a periodic basis.
- Manage permissions and access for viewing your marketing data across different teams, departments, and clients.
- Factor in the buyer’s journey to your dashboard configuration so you can see how audiences are behaving at different points in your funnel.
In addition, we’ll cap things off with specific examples of how some of our customers have benefited from using client dashboards.
Want to test out client dashboards with TapClicks? Try our 14 day free trial today.
The Key Use Cases for Client Dashboards
Juggling the array of factors involved in your marketing operation is simplified through client dashboards, which can put valuable, useful information at your fingertips. These systems allow you to tell data stories to clients with clarity and confidence.
Now let’s dig into the key use cases for client dashboards.
1. Communicating Value to Clients
Dashboards and reports give you the ability to communicate your value on a regular basis. You can use dashboards to:
- Display specific, measurable, relevant, and timely data for clients to see their investment with you is worth it.
- Give clients with less experience a walk through to actually understand how their money is being used and what’s coming out of it.
- Strengthen your relationships that are so valuable in business.
When client dashboards are working at their best, you can use them to unlock conversations that can get you to the next level with a client, whether that’s a bigger budget or a new campaign.
2. Viewing Important Data Across Different Teams and Departments
Managing data across various teams and departments can get messy and difficult to organize. But viewing and sharing live data with your clients is key to building stronger communication and achieving your outlined goals.
Ideally, you want to be able to set permissions and provide different access and viewing levels to different stakeholders (your team, your boss, your client, etc.) — allowing you to provide a custom experience for each individual who engages with your dashboard. If there is white label functionality, the experience can feel even more custom for users.
3. Seeing Data at Different Levels of Granularity
Different stakeholders who engage with a dashboard have different needs in terms of what information is necessary to include.
Sometimes a simple overview of client data is all you need, but the ability to provide increased granularity can help you provide a more in-depth dashboard experience for those who want to get more into the weeds.
Dashboard Capabilities That Help Drive Decision Making
Below are some of the key dashboard capabilities offered in our marketing operations platform (including screenshots to visualize the experience).
Customizable Reports
To create custom reports, you can select from a variety of pre-designed templates, or create your own design from scratch. When you do, you can connect it to a dashboard and have the appropriate data points automatically pulled into defined sections of the report.
From there, you can set date ranges that correspond with the timeframe you’re reporting on. And you can schedule reports to be sent out on a periodic basis.
Connecting Multiple Data Sources
A key thing to know about TapClicks is that we’re a marketing-focused platform, purposely built for the channels that digital agencies, media companies, and brands gravitate towards.
With more than 240+ different marketing-specific data sources (or connectors), TapClicks allows you to run enterprise-scale digital marketing campaigns for your entire operation. Plus an easy to use Smart Connector for bringing in outside data.
Users have access to all of the big PPC advertising channels such as:
- Google Adwords
- LinkedIn Ads
- Facebook Ads
- Snapchat
- Yelp Ads
- Twitter Ads
TapClicks can also help you connect with many other marketing platforms — such as programmatic advertising channels, which are popular among our users.
Sharing Data Across Teams, Departments, and Clients
In the admin section of TapClicks, users have access to a variety of tools to help share data with different stakeholders of a project. Here are several of the options available to help facilitate this:
- Client Groups: Let’s say you have a big client with several sub-accounts within that client (eg. by city). With client groups you can view data by individual sub-accounts, or zoom out and view data for the entire account as a whole.
- Business Units: If you want to break down a client into categories based on business size or other relevant labels, you can use our business units feature to achieve this.
- User Management: User management allows you to set permissions for providing different levels of client access to different stakeholders.
It’s this suite of data sharing options at different levels that gives you the ability to manage large clients at scale and their data needs.
Spotting Trends and Viewing Historical Data
Just like Google Analytics, TapClicks allows you to view different time periods of data (year over year, month over month, etc.) to help users identify trends that lead to valuable insights.
In tandem with this, TapClicks is one of the only platforms that allows you to view a large amount of historical data, going back years in your data for the ultimate big picture dashboard view. So, whereas Google and Facebook may limit you, you can store those previous years of data in TapClicks and use them for even more precise analytical insight.
Being Alerted at the Right Time
Users can set up notifications and alerts at designated campaign times. That way, when certain benchmarks, milestones, or goals are met, you can get that information in a timely manner and communicate it as necessary to your clients.
Factoring in the Buyer’s Journey
With TapClicks you can also structure dashboards to take the buyer’s journey into consideration.
For example, you can include data points from the initial click on your ad through to the desired action you want customers to take (eg. fill out a signup form on a landing page), and then weigh performance in these stages against each other. This can allow you to find insights to improve performance throughout your funnel.
Before we wrap up with examples of how TapClicks customers have benefited from using dashboards, let’s quickly cover some dashboard design best practices.
Utilizing Client Dashboard Design for Maximum Impact
When you’re thinking about designing your client dashboard, keeping these three things in mind is key to displaying data in a user friendly way.
1. Less Can Be More
While there is a lot to say about a specific campaign for a client, too much information can be overwhelming. Instead, keep it specific to your strategic goals, accomplishments, and action items.
2. Know Your Audience
Every client has their own personality, experience level, and desires when it comes to the types of data they want to see. With TapClicks you can design your dashboards with this in mind, and include just the right level of specificity for each client.
3. Leverage Visuals to Tell Your Data Story
Client dashboards are a visual medium, so don’t be afraid to play around with different types of graphs to display your data for clients. With strong visuals you can make it easier to comprehend the data you’re showcasing.
How TapClicks Customers Have Seen Tangible Results From Client Dashboards
Maximizing time and energy can make near-immediate impacts on your day to day business activity. Whether you’re a medium-sized company or a larger brand that is looking to streamline functionality and scale company operations, TapClicks is a platform that you can grow into over time as your needs evolve.
When Molio (a video-first agency that builds, launches, and grows other brands), began using TapClicks, they were using up to seven different tools to manually extract and evaluate their data. By combining TapReports and TapAnalytics to their data procurement process, they were able to scale their company and save upwards of $40,000 a year while creating hundreds of videos for over 30 major brands.
SmartBox, a digital agency that serves healthcare providers, began using TapClicks when they realized they needed a marketing platform that captured and shared data in a secure, one-stop location.
Due to the nature of HIPAA confidentiality, it was important to customize their dashboard operations without compromising compliance requirements. Integrating TapClicks allowed SmartBox to improve their client’s experience by cutting manual reporting time down by 80%, bringing in 9,000 new patient opportunities per month for clients, and improving their level of trust with their client base.
Conclusion
Without customized client dashboards, agencies, brands, and media companies are left with few tools to simplify client reporting and share data. With a unified, all-in-one platform for your marketing operations, you can run enterprise-level campaigns with ease.
Interested in experiencing how TapClicks can revolutionize how you regulate workflow and better leverage and share client data? Try our 14 day free trial today.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Scott Guttenberger
Director of Product Marketing at TapClicks
Scott is a dynamic, entrepreneurial problem-solver, well accomplished senior executive marketer serving in leadership roles focused on innovation and product development. Focused on advising and growing tech start-ups in SaaS, Data Management, Medical, e-Sports, industries.
