One-Page CMO Dashboard: 14 Metrics and How to Present Them

The short answer: a CMO dashboard is one page that shows what marketing contributes to revenue, what it costs and what is coming, instead of how busy the team is. This version has 14 metrics in four pillars: financial impact, pipeline velocity, brand equity and operational efficiency. Each metric gets a written definition, a target, a trend and a red, amber or green status. The pipeline pillar assumes a B2B business with leads and opportunities. If you sell to consumers or through retailers, use the equivalents in the consumer section below.

Disclosure: I sell interim and fractional CMO work, so I am not a neutral party here.

Marketing reports often list activity: impressions, clicks, follower growth. In my view, a page for the CEO, the CFO and the board should answer three questions: what did marketing contribute, what did it cost, and what is coming next. That means revenue sourced this quarter, the cost of the customers won and the pipeline outlook for the next two quarters, not the cost per click of one channel. This is my recommendation, not a finding from a survey of what boards ask for.

The four pillars and 14 metrics

Write each definition down before a metric goes on the page, and name an owner, a target and a data source for it. The tables give a working definition and the main way each metric misleads.

Pillar 1: Financial impact

The 3:1 guideline needs a scope. It comes from SaaS unit economics. David Skok's SaaS Metrics 2.0 says the best SaaS businesses have an LTV to CAC ratio above 3, sometimes 7 or 8, and stresses that these are only guidelines. He does not scope the figure to enterprise software, and the ratio moves with the LTV method: in the enterprise example in the CAC payback and LTV post, one company shows 6.25 on the simple churn formula and 2.6 on a five-year view. Set your own target, print the LTV method beside the ratio, and do not use the ratio for a business without recurring revenue.

Pillar 2: Pipeline velocity (B2B)

Pillar 3: Brand equity

Pillar 4: Operational efficiency

How to measure share of voice, brand search and marketing ROI

Share of voice: choose one measure and label it

Nielsen defines share of voice as a brand's media spending, as a percentage of all media expenditure in the category, in that market, on that channel and at that time (Nielsen). That is the paid-spend measure. Search and social have their own:

Choose the measure that matches where your category is won, keep the competitor set and the keyword or query list fixed, and label it on the page, for example "paid share of voice". Nielsen states the limit: "SOV doesn't measure the impact of a campaign (there are other tools for that), but whether the campaign has the means to be competitive in the first place."

Compare it with share of market. Nielsen writes that a brand whose share of voice is above its share of market has extra share of voice and is likely to grow in the long term, citing a Binet and Field study of 171 campaigns (1980 to 2010) in which share of market typically gained 0.5% for every 10% of extra share of voice. That is an average, not a forecast. Invented illustration: $6M of spend in a category with $50M of media spend is a 12% share of voice. With a 10% share of market, the extra share of voice is 2 points.

Brand search volume

Search Console counts clicks and impressions for your own site (Google). It leaves rare "anonymized" queries out of the table and counts them in chart totals only while no query filter is applied (Google), so a brand-name filter can understate the total. Google Trends scales its figures from 0 to 100 against all searches (Google): a relative index, not a count, useful for comparing movement with a competitor's. Brand queries also include customers looking for a login or support page, so the figure is a proxy for demand, not for awareness.

Marketing ROI: gross profit, incremental, stated

Marketing ROI = (incremental gross profit from marketing minus marketing cost) / marketing cost

• Gross profit, not revenue. Revenue ignores what the product costs to deliver. Net profit after overheads charges marketing for costs it did not cause. Print whichever you use next to the number.
• Incremental means sales that would not have happened without the spend. Estimate it with holdout or geo experiments, or with marketing mix modelling. If you only have conversions reported by ad platforms, call the figure reported ROAS and keep it off the ROI line. Platform reports and attribution tools can disagree on the same period: see marketing attribution in the enterprise. Disclosure: I founded Causality Engine, a causal attribution product.
• Example, invented. Marketing spend is $1.0M. Experiments estimate $4.0M of incremental revenue. At a 60% gross margin that is $2.4M of incremental gross profit. ROI = ($2.4M minus $1.0M) / $1.0M = 1.4, or 140%. Revenue divided by spend is 4.0, a return on ad spend, not ROI.
• What it cannot show. Effects beyond the test window, including brand effects that build over years. Which channel deserves the credit, if you test only in total. And what the same money would have earned elsewhere.

If you sell to consumers or through retailers

MQLs, SQLs, pipeline, CAC and LTV need identified leads and customers. If most of your sales go through retailers, you do not see the buyer, and there is no pipeline to count. A fast-moving consumer goods business, or any consumer brand sold mainly through retail, needs different numbers in pillars 1 and 2. Pillars 3 and 4 carry over.

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute defines mental availability as buyers easily thinking of the brand when buying and recognizing it quickly, and physical availability as buyers being able to buy the brand in a variant, quantity and price that matches their needs. It also says brands mainly grow through penetration (Ehrenberg-Bass Institute). I would measure the first with a brand-tracking survey and the second with distribution data.

How to present it

• One page. If it needs scrolling or a second slide, it is showing detail instead of results.
• One status rule, set in advance. Agree targets and thresholds before the period starts, and print the rule on the page. My starting rule: green is at or better than target, amber is up to 10 percent worse, red is more than 10 percent worse. Adjust it per metric, because a 10 percent miss on budget variance and on revenue are not the same problem.
• Status against target, trend against last period. Show them separately, because a red metric can be improving and a green one can be sliding.
• One sentence on every amber and red metric: the cause, and what is being done by when. For example: "CAC is 7 percent above target because of the launch in a new market. The plan returns it to target by the third quarter."

The values are invented. $2.5M beats the $2.4M target, so green. CAC is 7 percent above target, so amber. 22% is 12 percent below 25%, so red, even though it has improved since last quarter.

Cadence. Review monthly with the leadership team and quarterly with the board. Use the same metrics and definitions every time, so the trend can be read. Review the definitions once a year and log any change on the page.

Why the dashboard is hard to build, and who builds it

A dashboard exposes the state of your data. The usual blockers: nobody agreed what counts as an MQL, an SQL or a customer; marketing and finance cannot reproduce last quarter's CAC from the same inputs; the CRM lead-source field is empty or inconsistent; and spend sits in several tools with no mapping to the finance ledger. My order of work is to agree definitions with the CFO and sales, pick one system of record for pipeline and revenue, map spend to the ledger, then build the page. The martech stack audit covers the tooling side.

A marketing operations lead working with a finance partner can build this, and some teams add an outside analyst. For a limited period, an interim or fractional marketing leader can agree the definitions and run the first review cycles. I sell that option, as the disclosure at the top says, so weigh this paragraph accordingly. What an interim CMO is sets out the role.

Frequently Asked Questions

What should be on a CMO dashboard?

The metrics that tie marketing to revenue, in four pillars: financial impact (sourced and influenced revenue, CAC, LTV to CAC), pipeline velocity (MQLs, SQLs, MQL to SQL conversion, pipeline value sourced), brand equity (share of voice, brand search volume, NPS) and operational efficiency (marketing ROI, budget variance, time to market). Each needs a written definition, a target, an owner and a data source. Consumer and retail-led businesses should swap the pipeline pillar and parts of the financial pillar for the equivalents above.

How many KPIs should a CMO dashboard have?

Fourteen fit on one page in this framework. The rule is the page, not the number: if the reader has to scroll or flip slides, remove metrics until it fits.

What is the difference between a CMO dashboard and a marketing dashboard?

A marketing dashboard serves the team and goes down to channels, campaigns and clicks. A CMO dashboard serves the CEO, the CFO and the board, and stays at revenue, pipeline, brand and efficiency.

How often should the CMO dashboard be reviewed?

Monthly with the leadership team and quarterly with the board, using the same metrics and definitions each time so the trend is visible. Review the definitions themselves once a year.

Is 3:1 the right LTV to CAC target?

It is a SaaS guideline, not a standard for enterprise software or for every business. David Skok's SaaS Metrics 2.0 says the best SaaS businesses are above 3 and calls these guidelines. The result also depends on how LTV is calculated, so set your own target and print the method beside it.

Does this dashboard work for consumer brands?

Pillars 3 and 4 carry over, with the share of voice, brand search and ROI methods above. Pillar 2 and parts of pillar 1 assume leads and identified customers, so retail-led brands should use penetration, distribution, market share and incremental profit instead.