Maximize Marketing Department Efficiency with Embedded Analytics
Introduction
A marketing department is an organization where activities such as advertising, brand cultivation, market research, and more are carried out daily to promote a product and increase sales. To better understand this wide range of activities, employees need to collect data from many areas in a short period of time.
Embedded analytics provides relevant information and analytical tools that can help marketing team members work smartly and more efficiently by delivering all important information to one place. In this blog post, I am going to explain important areas in which embedded analytics helps improve marketing departments.
What is embedded analytics?
Embedded analytics is the integration of analytical solutions and data visualization capabilities into a software application’s user interface to improve data comprehension and usability. Bold BI helps you easily embed an analytics solution into your everyday work applications using a JavaScript SDK and server application. It also enables you to reduce dependency on IT teams and delivers all the insights you need to improve organizational and workforce outcomes.
Benefits of embedded analytics in the marketing department
Embedded analytics helps employees and managers in the marketing industry analyze their data within their software applications by embedding their dashboards and reports all in one place, making their data analysis much easier and thus saving time. Let’s see some of the key areas in which embedded analytics can help improve performance in the marketing department.
Improve customer satisfaction
Embedded analytics helps track website visitor count, customer acquisition cost, return on marketing investment, weekly visitors, bounce rates, and more, allowing marketing analysts to determine what areas need improvements to meet their customers’ expectations. Monitoring these metrics helps the managers to advise all team members to work hard in low-performing segments by using innovative solutions to solve the problems related to customer satisfaction. This will also result in improving the performance of the company.
Increase revenue with accurate financial statements
Embedded analytics helps track metrics such as average revenue per customer, bounce rate, monthly recurring revenue, and more, which allow marketing team leads to monitor revenue performance and produce accurate financial statements for the department. By identifying the top performing agents and operational costs, the managers will be able to distribute work appropriately across the agents and encourage them to achieve their targets. Achieving marketing targets in time will help the company increase in revenue.
Increase campaign performance
Embedded analytics helps you track the conversion funnel, conversation rate by campaign, opportunity amount by campaign, opportunity stage by campaign, opportunity amount by source, and more, which help marketing leads monitor their online marketing performance regularly. This sort of monitoring enables marketing leads to know the best-performing and worst-performing regions. With this data, marketing leads can devise strategies like region-based ad campaigns to boost the performance of the worst-performing regions.
Enhance monitoring and decision-making
Embedded analytics helps track metrics such as total leads, converted leads, conversion ratio, and more. These help marketing managers to identify marketing trends quickly and know the total number of lead conversions in a given period of time. With the insights acquired by monitoring these metrics, marketing managers have a comprehensive overview of the performance of marketing strategies and campaigns and are able to make the best decisions that help improve the growth of the company.
How to embed analytical tools into marketing domain apps
Let’s see how analytics can be embedded into marketing web applications. Bold BI can embed your dashboards in more than 18 web platforms, including React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node.js, Vue with Go, and Vue with ASP.NET Core. I am going to provide a walkthrough specifically on embedding dashboards in ASP.NET Core applications.
Suppose your marketing company has a website like the one shown in the following image.
You can embed dashboards easily using Bold BI and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself, saving development time. Follow these steps to embed your dashboard successfully.
Prerequisites
Deploy Bold BI in your local machine and create an enterprise-grade dashboard.
Step 1: Create an ASP.NET Core application.
To successfully embed a dashboard into your application, first you need to create an ASP.NET Core application. Open Microsoft Visual Studio and create a new project. Then, choose ASP.NET Core Web Application, enter the project name, and click OK.
Step 2: Configure embed properties.
After the ASP.NET Core web application is created, you need to create a model class called EmbedProperties under Models and provide the dashboard RootURL, SiteIdentifier, Environment, UserEmail, and EmbedSecret.
RootUrl : Bold BI dashboard server URL. Example : http://localhost:58094/bi.SiteIdentifier : For Bold BI, it should follow the format `site/site1`. For Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, it should be an empty string.Environment : Your Bold BI application environment. If using Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, you should use `cloud`. If using Bold BI, you should use `enterprise.’UserEmail : The Bold BI server will use an email address to authorize the authorization server.
Step 3: Generate embed secret.
You have to set the embed secret for authentication. You can get the embed secret from the Bold BI server. Then, navigate to the Settings icon on the left navigation bar and click the Embed tab. Turn on the Enable embed authentication option, and click the Generate Secret button. On clicking the button, a secret code will be generated. Copy the saved secret key and paste it into the application. To learn how to do this in detail, you can refer to this documentation.
Note: Save the secret key, as it cannot be retrieved again. If it is not saved, you will have to regenerate it using the Reset Secret option.
Step 4: Create authorization server.
You need to implement an authorization server in the ASP.NET Core application to get authenticated before embedding the dashboard from the Bold BI server. You can also configure a single sign-on (SSO)-based authorization server, which is an authentication endpoint that enables users to securely authenticate multiple applications using a unique embed secret. This prevents the need for the user to log in to different applications separately.
Step 5: Create Bold BI instance.
Finally, create a Bold BI instance to load the dashboard using a JavaScript file. Also, reference required script files and CSS files in HTML pages.
Step 6: Run the application for embedding the dashboard.
After successfully creating the ASP.NET Core application, you need to run the ASP.NET Core application. It will be launched with the dashboard details. Finally, you can see the dashboard from the Bold BI server is embedded into your web application.
To learn more about embedding dashboards into your applications, please refer to this blog. You can also download sample code for all the previous steps from our documentation.
Bold BI’s marketing solution dashboard examples
Marketing Performance Dashboard
The Marketing Performance Dashboard helps analysts in the marketing department monitor their online marketing details with important metrics such as customer acquisition cost, weekly visitors, bounce rate, return on marketing investment, and visitor count. It also shows the top five revenue traffic sources and lead conversion rate.
Key metrics and KPIs
Dormancy rate: Shows the number of customers who are not using the product.
Return on marketing investment: Shows the effectiveness of marketing campaigns for the product.
Visitors count: Shows the number of visitors on the website.
Top 5 revenue traffic sources: Shows the most valuable sources that direct traffic to the website.
Lead conversion rate: Helps evaluate the performance of the company’s sales funnel.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the Marketing Performance Dashboard demo.
Ad Campaign Performance Dashboard
The Ad Campaign Performance Dashboard helps business marketers monitor their online marketing performance with opportunity and campaign data by tracking metrics such as conversion funnel, conversion rate by top five campaigns, opportunity amount by top five campaigns, opportunity by source, opportunity stage by campaign, and more.
Key metrics and KPIs
Conversion funnel: Shows the gradual decline of the number of potential customers as they are guided through the conversion path.
Conversion rate: Measures the number of users who converted as a percentage of the total number of users that visited the site.
Opportunity by source: Counts the number of opportunities by source.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard demo, refer to the Ad Campaign Performance Dashboard example.
Website Analytics Dashboard
The Website Analytics Dashboard helps the marketing manager monitor website revenue performance by tracking metrics such as monthly recurring revenue, bounce rate, average revenue per customer, gross volume, lifetime value, and more. These metrics also help the manager identify top-performing areas and invest more in them, helping achieve targets and therefore increase revenue.
Key metrics and KPIs
Lifetime value: Used to show the cost efficiency of acquiring new customers and supporting them over time.
Bounce rate: Shows the behavior of users who visit the website or a page within the website.
Customer churn rate: Shows the percentage of subscribers who have stopped using the product over time.
Average revenue per customer: Shows the amount of money that the company can expect to generate from an individual customer.
Monthly recurring revenue: Shows predictable total revenue generated from all the active subscriptions in a month.
Annual recurring revenue: Shows predictable and recurring revenue generated by customers within a year.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the Website Analytics Dashboard demo.
Email Campaign Performance Dashboard
The Email Campaign Performance Dashboard is created using Mailchimp data to help track emails sent, successful deliveries, opens, unique unsubscribe clicks, abuse reports, total unsubscribed, and more to help gain insights into marketing email data.
Key metrics and KPIs
Opens vs. clicks by campaign: Shows the open and click rate for emails by campaign.
Emails sent: Shows the total number of emails sent in a specific time.
Abuse reports: Shows the total number of abuse reports made in a given time.
Unique unsubscribe clicks: Shows the number of users who have unsubscribed from the emails.
Investment and revenue by campaign type: Shows the total investment and revenue earned by campaign type for the current month.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard demo, refer to the Email Campaign Performance Dashboard example.
Website Traffic Analysis Dashboard
The Website Traffic Analysis Dashboard helps in tracking key metrics such as users, sessions, sessions by country, bounce rate, average session duration, users by channel, and more, which help analyze website traffic.
Key metrics and KPIs
Average session duration: Measures the average time visitors spend interacting with a site before exiting.
Sessions by country: Shows the website sessions based on the country of origin.
Users: Shows the number of people that use or operate the website.
Total users vs. new users: Shows the total number of users during the report period and the total number of users that visited the website for the first time.
Users by channel: Shows the gained users count based on the channels such as Email, organic search, and social media.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to Website Traffic Analysis Dashboard demo.
Email Marketing Dashboard
The Email Marketing Dashboard monitors all email metrics from a SendGrid dashboard by tracking figures such as clicks, opens, delivery percentage, spam reports, and more.
Key metrics and KPIs
Click percentage by browser: Shows the click percentage based on web browser (e.g., Chrome, Safari, Opera).
Opens by country: Shows the total count of emails opened per country over a month.
Device comparison: Shows the comparison between opens and unique opens of emails based on different devices.
Spam reports: Shows the number of spam reports made to an authority.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard demo, refer to Email Marketing Dashboard Example.
Page Performance Dashboard
The Page Performance Dashboard helps in analyzing webpage performance using Google Analytics data by tracking key metrics such as page views, unique page views, average time on page, average pages per sessions, average page load time, unique page views by date, page load time by date, and more.
Key metrics and KPIs
Page views: Shows the total number of pages viewed.
Unique page views: Shows the total number of unique sessions a page is visited more than once.
Average time on page: Shows the average amount of time spent on a single page by all users of a website.
Page load time: Shows the time taken for the webpage to load by date.
Average pages per session: Shows the average number of pages viewed during a session.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the Page Performance Dashboard demo.
Marketing Leads Dashboard
The Marketing Leads Dashboard helps monitor lead conversions and improve team operational efficiency with Salesforce CRM data by tracking metrics such as leads and converted leads trends, leads and converted leads by source, lead distribution by country, leads by industry, conversion ratio, and more.
Key metrics and KPIs
Lead distribution by country: Shows the percentage of leads by country.
Lead conversion: Shows the total amount of leads converted into customer.
Conversion ratio: Shows the number of converted leads vs. the total number of leads.
Leads and converted leads trends: Shows the trends of leads and converted leads over the last six months.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard demo, refer to the Marketing Leads Dashboard example.
Google Ads Performance Dashboard
The Google Ads Performance Dashboard helps track revenue from advertisements with metrics such as conversion rate, click-through rate, revenue per click, cost per conversion, new users, and sessions.
Key metrics and KPIs
Cost per conversion: Shows the amount spent to convert a lead into business.
New users: Shows the number of visitors visiting the website for the first time.
Click-through rate: Shows the ratio of users who click the advertisement of the webpage.
Revenue per click: Shows the average amount of revenue earned based on conversions in a campaign.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the Google Ads Performance Dashboard demo.
Conclusion
Bold BI helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. It will save you time by preventing you from doing unnecessary work. Click this link to explore its features. To learn more about embedding dashboards into your application, refer to this blog and our help documentation.
Now that you have a better understanding of Bold BI and how it can help marketing succeed, we hope you’ll create a dashboard the way you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 130+ data sources.
Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free 15-day trial and create interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact the Bold BI team by submitting questions through the Bold BI websites or log in to your Bold BI account.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on January 25, 2022.
