Ever tried presenting your marketing results to executives only to see their eyes glaze over as you scroll through endless analytics reports?

Executives don’t want to see every click and conversion. They want to know one thing. Is marketing driving profitable growth?

Today, I’m going to show you how to create an executive friendly dashboard that showcases your marketing ROI without drowning them in overwhelming detail.

Here’s the challenge: Executives and marketers speak different languages. You care about conversion rates, test results, funnel optimization. They care about revenue growth, profit margins, and whether marketing is a good investment, or just a money pit.

Most analytics dashboards are built for marketers, not executives. They’re packed with dozens of metrics, complex charts, and industry jargon that executives don’t have time to decode. When you present overwhelming information, you lose their attention and their confidence in your marketing efforts.

But when you can distill your marketing efforts into clear business focused metrics that executives actually care about, you become their trusted adviser. That means more budget, more support, and more freedom to execute your marketing vision. The key is to show them exactly what they need to see – marketing’s impact on the bottom line without all the noise.

Let’s create an executive dashboard in Segmetrics that tells a story your leadership team actually wants to hear.

To create a new dashboard, click on dashboards and click on new dashboard. Go ahead and select the option to start from scratch and click “use template.” I’m going to go ahead and rename my dashboard to executive marketing summary and save that.

Next, I’m going to click at the top right of the screen to start adding my dashboard widgets. For this, I’m going to focus on four key metrics that are important to executives.

1. Return on ad spend
2. Customer acquisition cost
3. Revenue from paid ads
4. Revenue by different channels.

Now that I’ve decided on the metrics I’d like to display, I’m going to start adding my widgets to the dashboard. First, I’m going to drag out a gauge widget. This is going to display my return on ad spend.

Next, I’ll drag out a scorecard widget to show customer acquisition cost. I’m also going to pull out a second scorecard to display revenue earned from paid ads.

And lastly, I’m going to pull out a column chart widget to highlight revenue earned from different marketing channels such as organic social, paid ads, email, and other channels.

Now that I’ve got my widgets in play, I want to make the dashboard more visually appealing and easy for my executive team to digest. I’m going to resize my widgets, drag and drop them to display them in a way that makes sense. And once my dashboard is organized the way I want it, I can start editing each individual widget to display the metrics I want to highlight.

I’m going to double click into the gauge widget. I’m going to rename the title to ROAS for return on ad spend. For the data lens, I’m going to select advertising. The data lens specifies which report type the data will be pulled from. I’m going to leave the visualization set to gauge. For the date range, my executive team is more interested in marketing performance on a quarterly basis. So I’m going to set the date range for this widget to quarterly. Lastly, for the metric, I’m going to select return on ad spend. Then click save. And now the widget will display the row as for the current business quarter.

Moving on, I’m going to double click into the first scorecard widget. I’ll change the title to CAC for customer acquisition costs. Set the data lens to advertising. Keep the visualization as a scorecard. I’ll select this quarter as the date range. And for the metric, I’ll choose customer acquisition costs and click save. Now my widget displays this quarter’s customer acquisition cost, which is the total ad spend divided by the total number of customers we’ve earned from our paid ads.

Moving on to the second scorecard widget. I’ll double click to open up the editor. I’m going to title this one revenue from ads. Set the data lens to advertising. Leave the visualization as scorecard. Again I’m going to set the date range to this quarter. And for the metric I’m going to select revenue and click save. Now my widget displays the total amount of revenue earned from paid ads.

For the fourth and final widget I’ll double click into the editor. Title this one revenue by channel. This time for the data lens I’ll select orders. This is the lens that will allow the widget to pull order data from all the various marketing channels we have in play, not just from paid ads. I’ll select the date range to this quarter. I’m going to set the dimension to channel and the metric to revenue. Then I’ll click save. Now we have a bar chart displaying revenue earned from the different marketing channels currently running in the business.

Once you have your dashboard set up the way you want it, you can click the three dots at the top right of the screen. Then click on share to get a sharable dashboard link you can send to anyone you’d like. They don’t even have to have access to the Segmetrics account.

The shared link displays the dashboard and whoever is viewing it can change the date range, but they won’t have the ability to edit any of the widgets.

When executives can see marketing’s direct impact on business growth in under 30 seconds, you’ll find they become your biggest advocate for increased marketing investment.