dbt Labs on dbt: How dbt Labs solves marketing challenges with the Campaign 360 Dashboard

We’re big fans of dbt Cloud for our own projects here at dbt Labs. We’re hosting an entire “dbt Labs on dbt” series to showcase how various teams at our company use dbt Cloud for trusted data. This blog is focused on how dbt Labs’ marketing team uses dbt Cloud.

The current macroeconomic conditions have been unfavorable for everyone, including marketing teams. Marketing teams are under pressure to reduce customer acquisition costs, identify and eliminate inefficient channels, and increase average contract values—all while working with reduced headcount and budget. These pressures have caused a shift toward more data-informed decision-making processes. To address these needs, dbt Labs developed the Campaign 360 Dashboard.

Introducing the Campaign 360 Dashboard

The Campaign 360 Dashboard is a comprehensive tool designed to analyze paid media, organic social, email, web, marketing automation, pipeline, and product usage behavior—all in one place.

This dashboard enables marketers to quickly access metrics like campaign performance, engaged contacts, trials, and pre-sourced pipelines, fostering a more data-driven approach to marketing. It's user-friendly and intuitive, enabling every member of the marketing team to derive value from it.

Goals of the Campaign 360 Dashboard

1. Improve accuracy and consistency: Ensure measurement reporting is precise and uniform.
2. Empower marketing teams: Enable marketing team members to engage with and own their reporting.
3. Reduce dependency on data teams: Allow data and operations teams to focus on developing new data products.

Using the Campaign 360 Dashboard

Let's dive into how our marketing team uses this dashboard, following a typical analysis flow.

High-level overview

At the top of the dashboard, users can get a brief campaign overview. For example, a campaign manager can filter by campaign name and see how many campaigns were run last quarter. This simple question, which might stump many campaign managers, is easily answered here.

KPI analysis

Next, users can focus on key performance indicators (KPIs) for these campaigns. Questions like "How many contacts engaged with these campaigns?" or "How many trials and pipeline opportunities were generated?" are answered in specific sections of the dashboard.

Campaign effectiveness

To determine which campaigns were the most effective, users can compare campaigns against one another. By sorting by source pre-pipeline, users can see which campaigns drove the most pre-pipeline opportunities.

Detailed follow-up

For even deeper analysis, users can follow links to accessory dashboards for granular metrics. Users can identify where conversions came from, how many accounts were qualified for the sales team, and how many of these accounts have been followed up.

Operationalizing insights

Users can operationalize this information by identifying the contacts that weren't followed up and prompting the SDR team to reach out to them. This process has transformed the behavior of our campaign team, making them more confident in data conversations and incorporating daily dashboard checks into their routine.

How to implement your own Campaigns 360 Dashboard

Key steps

1. Standardize and optimize: First, standardize your measurement framework by collaborating with marketing, operations, and data teams to define campaign structures, KPIs, and dimensions.
2. Embed business logic: Use dbt to embed this business logic into your data model.
3. Drive self-service enablement: Provide knowledge assets and training to ensure team members can use the dashboard independently.

Leveraging dbt features

• Macros: We use macros to codify our marketing campaign nomenclature, parsing custom dimensions from campaign fields to create multiple columns of useful data.
• Upstream tools with guardrails: We've implemented upstream tools in Notion for stakeholder-controlled mapping of sources and mediums, enabling seamless updates without coding; integrated with our data warehouse for consistent downstream data updates, and ensuring collaborative input with built-in guardrails.
• Packages: Packages like AdReporting, OrganicSocialPosts, and HubSpotEmailSends streamline the process, allowing us to focus on adding business logic to the tail end of these models.
• DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph): Visualizing data relationships to enhance understanding and self-serve capabilities.

Measuring success

Over 94% of dashboard usage for the Campaign 360 Dashboard comes from non-data team members. This shift has allowed our data and operations teams to focus on building new data products while enabling stakeholders to analyze and optimize their campaigns independently.

Streamline data operations and elevate marketing insights with dbt

The Campaign 360 Dashboard has significantly improved our marketing team's efficiency and confidence in data-driven decision-making. By standardizing measurement frameworks, embedding business logic with dbt, and driving self-service enablement, we've empowered our team and reduced dependency on data and operations teams. We hope you can leverage these insights to implement a similar solution in your organization.

Interested in learning more about how dbt Labs uses dbt? Check out our on-demand webinar where we dive into how dbt Labs leverages dbt Cloud—and specifically the dbt Semantic Layer—to automate our business KPI dashboards with real-time, accurate metrics across various BI tools. Find out how we transformed a previously manual, hectic, and error-prone process into a streamlined, efficient workflow.