Build your marketing dashboard

A marketing dashboard is where your team goes to understand what's working and what's not. Without one, reporting happens in ad-hoc spreadsheets, one-off HubSpot searches, or (worst case) gut feeling.

HubSpot has a dashboard library with pre-built marketing templates that get you 80% of the way there in five minutes. The remaining 20% is customisation: removing reports you don't need and adding ones specific to your business.

I build two marketing dashboards for every client. One is operational: the marketing team checks it weekly to track campaign performance, email metrics, and lead generation. The other is executive: the leadership team checks it monthly for high-level KPIs. Same data, different level of detail.

Create a dashboard from a template

Go to Reporting and Data > Dashboards > Create Dashboard. HubSpot shows a library of templates curated from the most common use cases. Select "Marketing Dashboard" (or whichever template matches your needs).

Before creating, you can uncheck individual reports that aren't relevant. If you don't have a blog, uncheck blog reports. If you don't run ads yet, uncheck ads reports. This saves you cleanup time later.

Give the dashboard a name (e.g. "Marketing: weekly ops" or "Marketing: executive summary"). Set access permissions. During onboarding, I recommend restricting access to the marketing team and leadership. Opening it to everyone too early creates confusion when reports are still being refined.

Click "Create Dashboard". Your dashboard is now populated with pre-built reports.

Customise the layout

The template gives you a starting point. Now refine it:

Resize reports. Click and drag the bottom-right corner of any report card to make it larger or smaller. KPI numbers (total contacts, total sessions) work well as small cards. Charts and tables need more space.

Reorder reports. Drag report cards to new positions. Put the most important metrics at the top. I structure dashboards top-to-bottom as: KPI summary numbers, then channel performance, then individual asset detail.

Remove irrelevant reports. Click the three-dot menu on any report card and remove it from the dashboard. The report still exists in your saved reports; you're just removing it from this view.

What belongs on an operational marketing dashboard

For a weekly operational dashboard, I include:

Traffic overview. Total sessions this week vs. last week, broken down by source (organic, paid, social, direct, referral). This tells you whether your top-of-funnel is growing.

New contacts. Total new contacts created this week, segmented by source. This is your lead generation pulse.

Email performance. Open rate, click rate, and unsubscribe rate for recent sends. Trends matter more than individual numbers.

Landing page conversion. Page views vs. form submissions for your active landing pages. If a page gets traffic but no conversions, something's wrong.

Campaign performance. If you have active campaigns, include their aggregated metrics.

What belongs on an executive dashboard

Executives don't need to see every email's click rate. They need to see whether marketing is generating enough leads, whether those leads are converting, and whether the spend is justified.

An executive dashboard includes: total new contacts this month vs. target. Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) generated. MQL-to-SQL conversion rate. Cost per lead by channel (if you track spend). Pipeline influenced by marketing. Top-performing campaigns.

Keep it to 6-8 reports maximum. Anything more and nobody reads it.

Adding reports from tools

HubSpot's built-in tools (Email, Landing Pages, Forms, Social, Ads) each have their own analytics sections with default reports. You can add any of these to your dashboard.

For example: go to Marketing > Email, click the Analyze tab. Find a report you want on your dashboard (e.g. "Recipient engagement"). Click "Save report", check "Add this report to a dashboard", select your dashboard, and click "Save and Add".

This is the fastest way to populate a dashboard with useful reports without building anything from scratch.

A marketing dashboard is only useful if it gets checked regularly. Build one that your team actually looks at by keeping it focused on the metrics that drive decisions. Start with a template, customise it to your business, and review it weekly.