Scale ROAS with eCommerce Dashboards

In today’s highly competitive landscape of digital eCommerce, data analytical dashboards have become vital tools for conveying essential numbers, trends, and metrics to retailers, marketing teams, and clients with ease.

With eCommerce dashboards, digital marketers can gain comprehensive, data-driven insights for all their marketing campaigns, identify problems, and highlight future opportunities within their target audience.

eCommerce dashboards showcase where you are in terms of customers and revenue, where you can make improvements, and provide personalized experiences customers expect.

Let's dive deeper into how you can maximize your digital marketing efforts with an automated dashboard, and five strategies you can use to grow your online store through one, including:

• Investing in multi-ad channels
• Finding out what your target audience is interested in
• Planning your media mix based on past data
• Testing your ad creatives
• Tracking ad performance

What is an eCommerce Marketing Dashboard?

An eCommerce dashboard is a real-time visual interface that monitors critical metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) related to the sales, revenue, products, and customers of an online business. Selecting an online retail platform like Shopify is only the first step to building a successful online business.

In today’s ever-changing eCommerce market, having direct access to customized data-driven metrics and insights into your online store is more important than ever.

This is why businesses use eCommerce dashboards which rely on business intelligence (BI), analytics, and data integration tools to deliver essential insights that key decision-makers depend on for successful ad campaigns.

What should be on your eCommerce dashboard?

An eCommerce dashboard displays all the essential KPIs of your ad campaigns and how they contributed to sales and revenue on your online store. Here are some of them:

Ad revenue

Ad revenue is the total amount of money generated directly from a marketing activity, including digital, mobile, print, broadcast, and outdoor advertising.

eCommerce dashboards will show you exactly which advertising campaign has created how much revenue over a set period of time. This makes it easier for you to compare dollars across different campaigns, channels, and against other marketing metrics.

Ad spend

Ad spend is a subset of a larger marketing budget that represents the total amount of money spent on advertising campaigns. Tracking total ad spend is crucial because if you go over the limit, you risk putting your entire marketing budget at stake.

As a general rule of thumb, marketers follow the 70-30 rule, where they devote 70% of their advertising budget to tried-and-true channels and reserve the remaining 30% for testing and experimentation.

Return on ad spend

ROAS measures the amount of revenue a set marketing campaign ropes in for each dollar spent. It shows how well campaigns are performing and what can be done to make the most out of the marketing budget.

Impressions

Impressions are the total number of times any of your ads are seen by users. Impressions alone can’t tell you much about engagements or conversions, but they’re crucial to boosting brand awareness and understanding the total cost of an ad campaign.

Cost-per-click (CPC)

CPC is the price that you will need to pay whenever someone clicks on your ad. The lower the CPC, the better. The ultimate goal of your CPC is to drive sales, so it’s also a good idea to budget CPC according to the profit you want to make.

Click-through rate (CTR)

Click-through rates (CTR) refers to the ratio of the actual clicks on an ad to the number of impressions. A high click-through rate means more clicks as a proportion of impressions, so it's a useful indicator for measuring relative ad performance.

Cost-per-view (CPV)

If you have video ad campaigns, you’d want to track cost-per-view - the price you pay every time someone watches your video ad on any media platform. CPV-based video advertising is popular among marketers because it’s more affordable and arguably more effective than text ads.

Conversions

Conversions occur further down the marketing funnel after a person visits your website and takes a desired action, such as purchasing a product, downloading a whitepaper, or signing up for a newsletter. Discover the conversions generated from marketing activities within minutes on an eCommerce dashboard.

Conversion rates

Conversion rates are calculated by taking the number of total conversions and dividing that by the number of total ad interactions during the same time period. On an eCommerce dashboard, you can compare your CVRs against any other metric, such as ad spend, to better understand your marketing performance.

Link clicks

Link clicks are the total number of times the links in your ad copy, call-to-action, or images have been clicked. These links can be external to the ad platform (e.g. leading to your website), or native on the ad platform (e.g. leading to your social page). This is also a common metric for SEO.

Strategy #1: Invest in Multi-Ad Channels

In 2022, customer journeys are more complex than ever. An average person now interacts with brands across 20 ad channels before making a purchase decision.

Gone are the days when digital marketers invested in only one or two channels and saw substantial returns on investment. Retailers must target customers across multiple touchpoints, or risk losing out on brand awareness, engagement, and sales.

In addition, IDFA depreciation meant that marketers lost access to a rich set of clickstreams and granular data on consumer profiles. Previously, these were essential to delivering highly targeted and personalized ads.

How can eCommerce retailers understand, connect, and reach customers in a future beyond device-based identifiers? Multichannel marketing is the key.

Retailers are now shifting their ad spend away from ad giants like Meta and Google to new-age, unconventional channels to attract new users and retain existing ones. Some examples of these include:

Retail marketplaces (e.g. Walmart Advertising and Kroger Marketplace), Growing social media platforms (e.g. TikTok and Snapchat), Niche search engines (e.g. Bing and Pinterest), Programmatic demand-side platforms (DSPs), e.g. The Trade Desk. Adriel’s eCommerce dashboard aggregates and centralizes data from all your disparate ad channels on a single user-interface. No matter how many ad campaigns you have, you’ll be able to extract key insights and analyze performance trends to grow your eCommerce business.

Strategy #2: Define your target audience

Building out a detailed customer persona is the first step to nailing down a multichannel marketing campaign. It’s crucial to determine who your target customers are and where they hang out online so you can establish an overarching presence across those platforms.

However, in a cookieless future, marketers must look for creative ways to obtain first-party data to understand who their customers are. As third-party cookies phase out, brands that know how to collect and use first-party data will have a distinct advantage.

Some top-of-funnel strategies to collect first-party data include:

• Digital downloads (e.g. product catalogs, size guides, color palettes)
• Product recommendation surveys
• Buzzfeed-type quizzes (e.g. “Which F.R.I.E.N.D character are you?”)

Other common ways of capturing first party data at middle of funnel and bottom of funnel include:

• Discount coupons or free-shipping offers (to collect email addresses)
• Early access to product launches / back in stock popular items
• Tiered discounts
• Chatbots
• Customer service interactions
• Wish lists
• SMS marketing
• Loyalty programs
• Website analytics tools (e.g. Google Analytics)
• Post purchase surveys
• Customer feedback

Strategy #3: Plan Your Media Mix Based on Your Past Data

The next step is figuring out the right media mix that would put your products and services in front of your target audience. eCommerce dashboards display past campaign performance and trends, allowing you to make decisions on which media mix you should invest in the future.

In general, eight out of ten media planners in the US leverage a mix of organic and paid media. A majority of marketers are switching up their media mix in 2022, but finding the right balance remains the biggest challenge across the board.

According to HubSpot, email marketing, paid and organic social media content, and organic search are the most leveraged media mix channels with the highest ROI.

However, the media mix that you invest in will depend on your overall advertising budget and the size of your eCommerce store. But at the very least, you should have:

1. A strong, converting landing page Highlight your strong offer

2. Targeted and segmented email sequence flows

• A strong welcome flow
• Shopping cart abandonment rate sequence
• Purchase thank you sequence
• Cross-selling
• Asking for reviews

3. Paid search campaign Bing, Pinterest, and Google

4. Paid social campaign TikTok and Instagram

In terms of media types, video ads were rated as the most effective in achieving business goals and KPIs:

Strategy #4: Select the right KPIs

How do you ensure that you’re getting the most bang for your buck from your media mix? In a highly complicated user-generated landscape, defining and tracking a single KPI isn’t enough to accurately measure results from various channels.

Establishing the right KPI mix is essential for retailers to measure ad spend against business goals, analyze the effectiveness of their ad creatives and copy, and make budgeting and optimization decisions based on past performance.

Common KPIs used by eCommerce retailers include:

• Marketing efficiency rate or estimated ROAS (Total revenue / Total ad spend)
• Cost per lead
• Cost per acquisition
• Click through rate (for traffic-focused campaigns)
• View through rate (for video campaigns)
• Cost per view
• Clicks and online engagement
• Impact on sales
• Increase on website traffic
• Quantity and quality of audience reached
• Number of mentions on social media

Strategy #5: Test your creatives

Testing new messaging and creatives against specific audience groups is an integral part of any advertising and marketing initiative. Set aside a minimum of 10% of your marketing budget for testing purposes but you shouldn’t expect to see return on investment on it.

The goal of testing is to observe and learn in relatively low-risk environments so you can use proven results to devise better strategies in the future. Continually testing ensures that your advertising efforts are on-par with changes in the industry and that you’re taking advantage of new opportunities and channels.

A/B testing your ads helps identify the causal impact that a strategic change has on a given success metric:

A: VARIABLE

Different versions of ad creatives

B: CONTROL

One quantifiable success KPI that is integral to business goals, e.g. leads generated, online purchases, ROAS, or site traffic

At Adriel, marketers can conduct creative A/B testing on a single platform. Our marketing dashboard’s Creative Intelligence Suite centralizes all your creative data so you can focus on what’s important – piecing together the elements that drive success.

With creative intelligence tools like word, emoji, and color clouds, you can uncover new ways to maximize your ROAS and gain data-driven insights on creative elements impacting business performance:

• Word cloud: Get auto-generated reports across all social media platforms to determine which messaging resonated best with your target audience.
• Emoji cloud: Find out which emojis work, and which are a bit of an overkill on Adriel.
• Color cloud: Visualize which colors are easier on the eyes of your target audience.

Use eCommerce dashboards to track ad performance

As multichannel marketing becomes the norm across every industry, all advertisers and chief marketing officers need a single source of truth to streamline creative development, strategic planning, and campaign executive.

The more platforms involved, the more data there is, and the more time is spent on manually compiling advertising metrics and creating performance reports. Data stitching can often lead to human errors, and manual processes inevitably lead to delays in key decision-making.

An all-in-one tool that provides a 360-degree view of cross-channel metrics unified under an umbrella model will help retailers navigate and visualize vast oceans of data. From there on, it’s a breeze to adjust the marketing mix based on what worked and what didn’t.

Leverage marketing automation software like Adriel which integrates with hundreds of data sources (advertising platforms, analytics tools, MMPs, and databases) to centralize real-time data, insights, and teams on a single workspace. Adriel is the only arsenal you need to drive agile growth across every stage of the AdOps lifecycle.

With Adriel’s marketing dashboard, retail marketers can automate their monotonous tasks and have more time out of their day to focus on planning, strategizing, and testing for growth.

Integrate all the data for your eCommerce site in one centralized location, automate reporting; access your data across all channels in real-time, and identify your underperforming and overperforming campaigns.

Book a 1-on-1 demo call with one of our product specialists or sign up for a free trial!