The Executive dashboard is a powerful marketing tool designed to boost your sales. It combines data from multiple channels and shows you how customers interact with your brand so that you can make smarter decisions.

You can follow the customer's journey from message to conversion as they cycle from awareness to engagement to the brand website experience.

Note: To ensure incoming traffic from Marketing Cloud campaigns is classified correctly in Executive Dashboards, domains used in outgoing messages must be listed as qualified domains. For more information, see the "Add web tracking code to your site" section here.

To learn more about the Executive dashboard, take our Acoustic Academy course.

Customize dashboards and use advanced filters

This article is about the default dashboard and its features. You can, however, copy this dashboard to your personal folder, make customizations, adjust filters, and save it for future use. To find out more about these functionalities, read how to Customize dashboards and use the Advanced filters.

Filters section

At the top of the dashboard, you have the filters section. Depending on what data you want to see, you can change the following:

• Message source - you can choose AMG (Automated Message Group), Campaign or Journey.
  
• Time - you can adjust the dashboard timeframe to display data from the past 7 or 14 days, current month, quarter, or year. All visualizations will show data only for the time range selected in the filters.
• Channel - you can choose to see data for one or all channels: email, push, SMS, and all others.
• Show bot clicks - by default, it excludes bot clicks from the reports, but you can choose to show them.
• Name - you can search for campaign names by simply typing them into the search bar. Suggestions will appear in the dropdown menu as you type. The arrangement of the content is in alphabetical order, starting with numbers, followed by uppercase and lowercase letters.

What are bot clicks?

Bot clicks can refer to the actions or interactions generated by automated programs, commonly known as bots, rather than human users. We identify user activity as bot clicks when 3 or more clicks for the same user (customerID or mailingID) happen within 45 seconds from the first event time on a mailing.

Differentiating between human-generated clicks and bot-generated clicks is crucial when analyzing user engagement on a website.

Bot clicks can also raise security issues. They can be seen as an attempt to exploit vulnerabilities or launch attacks on a website or application. Moreover, artificially inflating website traffic can impact performance or even cause server overload. Therefore, keeping track of bot clicks is extremely important.

Saving your filters

Don't forget to click the Reload button in the right-upper corner to save the changes you’ve made in the filters area.

KPI tiles

Sends

The number of emails, SMS, and mobile messages sent in the period selected in the filter.

Engagements

The number of clicks on links in your email, and SMS messages.

Unsubscribes

The number of recipients who have unsubscribed from future email messages.

Total sessions

The number of times users interact with a website or app within a specific time. By default, 30 minutes of inactivity will cause a new session to begin.

Conversions

The number of order transactions from customers. For companies outside the retail industry, a conversion represents the primary transaction.

Pro-tip: Read our data dictionary to learn more about the different metrics and datatypes.

Period-over-period calculations

The KPI tiles use period-over-period analysis, allowing users to compare important metrics from various time periods and track changes over time.

• The filter labeled 'time' allows you to choose the period of comparison. For example, selecting 'Last 7 days' will compare the past 7 days to the 7-day period preceding it.
• The analysis is displayed as an arrow & percent change in the bottom left corner of KPI tiles.
• Arrows are tied to the change in number - if the number is bigger then the arrow points up, if the number is smaller then the arrow points down.
  • The arrow's color is based on whether the trend is favorable or unfavorable.
  • Example: if 'Unsubscribes' trends up, the arrow will be red because you want to retain subscribers on your list.
  • If there is no change in the data - there will be no arrow or percentage displayed.

Performance summary

A visual breakdown of sent, delivered, clicked and converted messages over a specific timeframe.

Performance summary visualization is a graphical representation of the key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics that summarize the performance over a specific period. It gives you a quick and easy-to-understand overview of the performance, allowing stakeholders to identify areas of concern or improvement quickly.

You can compare the performance by:

• Sent
• Delivered
• Clicked
• Converted

Conversion by source

The number of conversions broken down by source. Here, you can see whether the users access your website by:

• Referral (forms, coupons, etc.)
• Organic search (through a search engine)
• Direct load (directly writing the URL into the browser)
• An email campaign
• An SMS campaign

By tracking conversions by source, you can determine which channels drive the most valuable traffic and generate the highest return on investment (ROI).

Channel engagement section

Channel engagement effectiveness

• The overall channel effectiveness gauge shows a unique click rate across all channels for the selected time period.
• The bars show the unique click rate of all messages divided by channel, including a comparison between the time set in the filter (current) and the past 180 days (average).

Top 5 campaigns by channel

• A comparison of the channels' send counts.
• Displays the top 5 campaigns by send count per channel.
• The size of the boxes corresponds to the number of sends, with larger boxes indicating a higher send count and smaller ones indicating a lower send count.
• The color gradient reflects the click rate.
  • A click rate equal to or below 0.25% is indicated by the color red, while green signifies a rate greater than 5%.
• You won’t see any data in the widget if there are no sends.
  • This is also true if you deselect the channel in the filter section.

Note: The 6-month average doesn't change when the mailing filter is applied because there would be no comparison if you filtered down to a single mailing. Journey type and bot clicks do affect the 6-month average on this chart.

Total conversions and AOV by day

A visualization of the conversion and Average Order Value trend by day and source, where AOV currency is available.

This graph shows the number of conversions (the left axis) and the AOV (right axis). You can follow the daily conversion changes by looking at the dotted line. The average order value is visualized with the bars - each color represents a specific conversion source - direct load, email, organic search, push, referral, and SMS.

Behavior experience (BX) trend

BX trend quantifies end users' experiences with digital applications at a session and page level. Users having more positive experiences likely engage more actively, purchase more, and make more positive referrals. Conversely, more negative experiences will likely disengage the user and make negative referrals.

The BX is a summary of three component scores:

• Engagement Score (0-100, 100 being "good")
  • Engagement is based on the level of "dwell" or "focused interaction" of the user with the application
  • The more a user interacts with the application, the higher the score
• Performance Score (0-100, 100 being "good")
  • Performance is based on two factors: how quickly the contents of the application are returned and how quickly things are rendered for the user
  • The faster an application loads - and the more responsive it is - the higher the score
• Frustration Score (0-100, 100 being "bad")
  • Frustration is based only on "rage clicks"
  • Rage clicks are when a user quickly and repeatedly clicks or taps on an element in an application
  • Frustration has twice the impact on BX Score compared to engagement and performance

  

Note: The behavior experience trend is available only if you have Tealeaf implemented. To implement Tealeaf in your web and mobile applications, see the Quickstart guides, and to capture user behaviors on your web application, see the Event composer Chrome browser extension.

Journey performance report

A table view of metrics by message name.

The Journey performance report shows the breakdown of critical measurements by Campaign/Program/Journey.

Seeing the list of all campaigns within the defined time lets you compare more than two campaigns simultaneously. So, for example, if you wanted to select 20 specific campaigns across all channels, here's where you would filter down and see their comparative performance.

Alerts and tile actions

For each KPI tile and report widget, you can set alerts to be notified when a metric reaches a specific value. To set an alert click on the bell icon. Additionally, next to the alerts icon, there is a tile actions icon with different options available, depending on the type of data and your user type.

Both icons are visible when you hover over a specific tile or widget.

Alerts

To schedule an alert, click on the bell icon in the upper right corner of the KPI tile or a widget to see a popup window.

There, you can type in your title for the alert, set conditions, and frequency, and provide the email address to which you want to send it. Don't forget to save the alert!

When you're done, you can access your alert: edit, duplicate, or delete. Or add a new one, with different conditions.

Note: Widgets with merged results do not allow alerts. Downloading data for that particular widget won’t be available in such a case either. If that is the situation, you will see this message when you hover over the bell icon:

Tile actions

Additional tile actions are available after clicking on the three dots icon in the upper right corner of the KPI tile or a report widget, to expand the menu.

From here, you can:

• Download data for a specific KPI tile or report widget.
• View the expanded dashboard.
• Clear cache & refresh the page.

When selecting the Download data, a popup will appear with format options as well as some advanced data options.

Be sure to check the advanced data options to adjust your results in terms of visualization, data values, and number of rows to include. Click the Download button to finalize.

Want to know what else can you do with the executive dashboard? Read more about how to View and interact with dashboards.