Microsoft Excel for Marketing offers a wide range of practical insights for any business and helps come up with a strategic solution that is backed by data. From overall charting to implementing complex formulae for the most important metrics, Microsoft Excel Marketing Dashboards can be a great inclusion for your business Marketing strategy. With more and more Dashboard templates being regularly used to strategize businesses, companies do tend to miss out on the basic yet extremely relevant use of Microsoft Excel Marketing Dashboards for Business Analytics.
In this article, you will read about Microsoft Excel features for analytics and their use in Business Dashboarding. You will also learn about some key metrics that you must have in your Microsoft Excel Marketing Dashboard along with the limitations of using Microsoft Excel to create the same.
List of Contents
Introduction to Microsoft Excel Marketing Dashboards
Microsoft Excel has been no alien to the world of Marketing and analytics right from the early days. When not many sophisticated features and tools were used for analytics, Microsoft Excel offered some pretty robust angles for Marketing Analytics, many of which are still relevant to use for business data today.
Using Microsoft Excel Marketing Dashboards can help muster some valuable insights into the significant KPIs of your business in a visual and concise form. Microsoft Excel is easy to learn and use, and helps create simple and easily accessible dashboards which are visually pleasing too.
Introduction to Dashboarding for Marketing Analytics
When all your data can be classified and analyzed anyway, what is the use of Dashboarding for Marketing Analytics? It sure raises the question of why organizations should invest in different Dashboarding techniques when the calculations for usable metrics are readily available to them.
The answer to that is pretty simple. For any organization, members involved serve different roles. Someone working with product development might not necessarily know or even understand some financial specifics, and vice versa. Dashboarding helps bridge this gap to eliminate unnecessary technicalities yet bring accurate and important insights which can be interpreted by all concerned members.
This is not to say that the dashboard in use cannot be made highly technical with the use of specific indicators. What makes dashboards extremely useful is the organization of the same information that can be useful to multiple disciplines within the same organization, thus, helping keep the required teams on the same page.
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Key Metrics to Include in your Microsoft Excel Marketing Dashboard
Some key metrics can be included within your Microsoft Excel Marketing Dashboard to tap onto the best aggregate values from your data. Here are some relevant metrics that you can use in your Microsoft Excel Marketing Dashboard:
1. Goal Completion Rate
The Goal Completion Rate helps understand how fast your Marketing strategy is bringing in results and can be a significant metric to include in your Microsoft Excel Marketing Dashboard. It can be calculated with metrics such as Visits/Sessions and Leads/Successful Conversions.
Goal Completion Rate = Successful Conversions / Total Customer Sessions
2. Cost Per Lead
It is also important for businesses to keep a tab on how much they ended up paying for each lead. Metrics such as Time, Ad Spend and Additional expenses can help compute the Cost per Lead which can help analyze how investments can be fine-tuned to convert each lead better.
Cost Per Lead = Total Marketing Spend / Total New Leads
3. Visitor Retention
One of the key indicators of a successful Marketing strategy is the number of visitors you were able to bring back after an initial visit. Site traffic and re-visits can then be used for effective remarketing that often derives more conversions.
Visitor Retention = Returning Visitors / Total Visitors
4. Marketing ROI
The Return on Investment (ROI) gives you an actual idea of the overall profits in-store with a certain Marketing strategy. A 5:1 ratio in ROI is considered to be good for a successful Marketing strategy. With the gross profits and complete Marketing investment, the ROI can be calculated to indicate the success or failure ratio.
Marketing ROI = Net Profit / Cost of Marketing Investment
5. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
Another metric that can help track the progress of a Marketing strategy is the Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR). With the total monthly customers and the average revenue generated by each, recurring revenue can be computed by using information about how much each customer typically contributes to your revenue.
Monthly Recurring Revenue(MRR) = Average Revenue Per Account * Total Accounts That Month
Best Microsoft Excel Marketing Dashboard Templates for Marketing Analytics
While a wide range of templates can be available as per your analytical requirements, here are some of the best Microsoft Excel Marketing Dashboard templates that can be highly relevant for the Marketing Analytics of most businesses and organizations:
1. Sales KPI Dashboard
One of the most important insights to fine-tune your Marketing strategy is to know how your Sales are going. A Sales KPI Dashboard can be a part of your Marketing Analytics including Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as the Profit Generated, Overall Turnover Rate, Monthly Revenue, and much more.
2. Finance Dashboard
Having a Financial Dashboard is essential for any kind of Business Analytics. For Marketing, you can use a plot of Marketing investment for the ROI as well. KPIs indicating Product and Sales Reps’ performances can help make better Marketing decisions for your business.
3. Management Dashboard
A dashboard dedicated to Sales and Marketing management can be a great idea to keep track of how team members are performing. You can analyze which Marketing plans are better implemented at which geographical locations with the Sales data indicating the maximum and minimum progress.
4. Sales and Marketing Tracker Dashboard
A real-time tracker dashboard for Sales and Marketing can be a quite sophisticated inclusion for any business’ Marketing Analytics. The Sales and Marketing metrics can be analyzed in real-time with the percentage profit and markup visualized with different Marketing and demographic approaches.
5. Expenses vs Revenue Dashboard
Any business sure wants to know if they’re getting the best out of their Marketing investments – which strategies brought in the profits and which were not that beneficial. Expenses vs Revenue Dashboard can help chalk that out with KPIs such as Customer Volume, Average Wait Time, issues faced by departments, and Overall Customer Satisfaction.
Limitations of Using Microsoft Excel Marketing Dashboards
Despite the great capabilities of Microsoft Excel Marketing Dashboards, it might not always be a great idea to create these on Microsoft Excel itself. Microsoft Excel is often great for school-level or quick analytical presentations, however, for a more advanced business-level take on analytics, there are some limitations it offers.
Creating Microsoft Excel Marketing Dashboards often requires the manual compilation of data. The drawbacks with these can be major on a business-scale. Not only are there chances of significant errors creeping into the data, but there is also no real-time update that is much needed in the case of online businesses that have dynamic Marketing and Sales metrics that need constant updates.
The data isn’t the most secure either with open access to anyone who can view the Microsoft Excel Marketing Dashboard. This makes it really difficult to work in collaboration with other people or even integrate with software tools and APIs.
Conclusion
To overcome these obstacles, you can create your Microsoft Excel Marketing Dashboard in collaboration with other tools that automate the process and ensure security, data integrity, and other relevant requirements. This article has explored the key metrics and a few handy templates of Microsoft Excel Marketing Dashboards to help you get started on your Business Analytics journey.
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FAQs
1. Are Excel dashboards suitable for real-time updates?
Limited real-time capabilities exist, but you can automate updates using Excel plugins or data connections.
2. What are the critical metrics in a marketing dashboard?
Metrics include website traffic, conversion rates, ROI, customer acquisition costs, and campaign performance.
3. What are the limitations of Excel for marketing dashboards?
Excel is not scalable for a complex analysis and has more limited collaboration features than what cloud tools provide.
Aman Deep Sharma is a data enthusiast with a flair for writing. He holds a B.Tech degree in Information Technology, and his expertise lies in making data analysis approachable and valuable for everyone, from beginners to seasoned professionals. Aman finds joy in breaking down complex topics related to data engineering and integration to help data practitioners solve their day-to-day problems.
