We don’t just come up with great ideas or creative copy while marketing in the world we live in today with so much continual change in the digital marketing landscape, it all comes down to the data. Marketers must know what is and is not working and make changes on the fly if needed. That’s where Microsoft’s powerful business analytics service Power BI comes in. Better than using a hundred reporting dashboards and spreadsheets to piece together the data across a dispersed set of marketing data into an easily digestible data dashboard of insights.
Why should you be using Power BI?
It is often the case that marketing needs multiple platforms to measure the results of its efforts – Google Ads, Meta, email marketing, CRM, websites. Each of these systems generates performance data but measuring and then making sense of all of the data collectively can be daunting. Power BI will allow marketers to centralize the data and see patterns and visualize ROI in ways that are impossible to do with a basic spreadsheet or in a native dashboard.
Step 1: Data Gathering and Data Cleaning
The first step in building your campaign performance dashboard is to pull the data sources together. Think about pulling the obvious data sources like Google Ads impressions, Mailchimp email opens, or how many leads converted in HubSpot.
Step 2: Building a Data Model
A solid data model is the first step to a great dashboard. By data model I mean establishing relationships between tables: campaign table to your spend table and a conversions table etc. In addition to establishing relationships, you will also use DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) to define calculated fields.
There are a number of fairly common marketing metrics you can define:
- Cost per Click (CPC)
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
- Conversion Rate
Once you have a proper model, Power BI will be able to calculate, all of these metrics across platforms and periods of time.
Step 3: Build the Dashboard
Now the fun part is building your dashboard for visualisation! Power BI has a whole host of visuals to choose from, bar charts, pie charts, KPI’s, funnel charts, and even the ability to create custom visuals such as a Sankey chart.
Your marketing performance dashboard should be:
- Clear: Start at a summary level with KPI’s such as total spend, total conversions and total ROAS.
- Interactive: allow the user to filter by date, campaign, channel or region.
- Scalable: Allow the user to drill down from campaigns to ad sets or landing pages.
This way not only are marketing managers able to see what is happening, but also why it is happening.
Step 4: Automation and Sharing
You have created your dashboard and can publish it to Power BI Service and set it up so that refreshes are automated! Now your team is accessing the most up-to-date information without exporting it.
You can share dashboards across departments, provide scheduled summaries in email, or have the dashboard embedded in Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, etc…
Real Business Value
Let’s take a relatively simple use case. A marketing team had three campaigns: LinkedIn, Google Ads, and email. When the team used Power BI to measure performance, they found that they had tons of buyers coming through Google Ads, but they weren’t converting. High traffic, low conversion can be a curse. The team’s email campaigns were giving them a much better ROI. They were able to adjust budgets based on more clearly defined data rather than just assumptions, and as a direct result, the team was able to report a 30% higher lead quality the next month!
Final Thoughts
Great dashboards aren’t just a pile of charts and graphs—they are a decision-making machine. With Power BI, marketers can optimize raw data into a viable strategy, response time, and alignment of teams to performance targets. If you’re a marketer, the process—from setting up campaigns to returning on investment, generating actionable insights from the data available to you—is easier than ever.
