Building Marketing Analytics at Diversio
During my growth marketing internship at a Toronto-based tech startup, Diversio, I had a lot of freedom to choose the projects that I worked on and help make an impact. With a fairly grassroots digital marketing strategy, there was a really exciting opportunity to draw upon my previous internship experience and build the organization’s marketing visualization capabilities.
The Executive Marketing Dashboard gives a high-level overview for both paid and organic marketing month-over-month.
**Note that all numbers and figures have been changed.
Some Quick Context
Being at a startup usually meant lots of trial and error. With our team constantly running A/B tests and trying to figure out images and messaging that resonates with our audience, it was crucial in building a tool that can help measure our success and streamline decision-making. Furthermore, data was very inaccessible - especially if you didn’t have the credentials to our marketing channels.
As a result, creating a dashboard that presents data in a user-friendly was a priority in helping us quickly understand our data and act accordingly.
Choosing Google Data Studio
With the company primarily storing its documentation on Google Drive, Google Data Studio was a good choice as it already belongs to a very familiar ecosystem. Some other factors that made it a strong candidate (#totallynotsponsored) include …
Ease of connectivity to data connectors already in-use (Google Analytics, Google Adwords)
The free tier already fit our needs plus the costs were very reasonable if we wanted to scale
The learning curve is relatively low compared to Tableau, etc.
Using Data Studio, data (primarily from Google Sheets and Google Analytics) is fed into each page of the dashboard and dynamically updated as Supermetrics refreshes on a set schedule.
Implementation: Communication is Ongoing
Just handing out a dashboard is not enough. Not only do people need to learn how to use Data Studio, but it’s also crucial that everyone is on the same page with respect to …
What we are measuring
How we choose, define, and calculate our KPIs.
A large portion of this project was sitting down with stakeholders, understanding their needs for an executive marketing dashboard, and translating that into relevant KPIs. After prototyping the dashboard, I hosted multiple 1-hour workshops across teams detailing what certain KPIs stood for, where the data comes from, fixes to bugs, etc.
As the dashboard is interactive and can be accessed in a self-serve fashion, everyone needs to know how their work may fit with these metrics and how they could pull numbers from the dashboard. Spending that time is 100% worth it in the long run.
Some Channel-Specific Pages From the Final Executive Dashboard
Apart from a high level overview of all marketing channel data combined, the dashboard is also able to give a granular view of KPIs for each individual channel plus made adjustable by campaign name, time period, etc.
Reflection
Although visualization has barely scratched the surface of analytics, I’m excited to see how the team continues to use the dashboard and take it to the next level. Here are a couple learnings that I’ve taken away from my time at Diversio:
1. Know the “why” behind the metric. Don’t stop at the graph or table - connect it with the business context and tell the story behind the visualization.
2. Drive value outside of your immediate team - how can I support sales, product, etc.? What insights might be interesting to them? It doesn’t hurt to reach out.