Build Analytics Dashboard: Unlock Data-Driven Growth for Your Clients
Building an analytics dashboard is crucial for agencies aiming to deliver tangible results and demonstrate value to their clients. A well-designed dashboard transforms raw data into actionable insights, enabling clients to make informed decisions and optimize their strategies. If you're looking to build analytics dashboard to help your clients take action on their data, you've come to the right place. The right web analytics dashboard isn't just about presenting numbers; it's about crafting a compelling narrative that showcases the impact of your work.
Rock-solid data analytics dashboards convert sterile data into insightful information, visualizing and presenting data into visual graphs, charts, and tables from different data sources to drive growth. Nearly four in five marketers globally say data quality is key to driving marketing-led growth and the customer experience (Marketing Intelligence Report, Salesforce, 2022). This article will guide you through the process of creating effective dashboards, covering essential steps from understanding client needs to selecting the right metrics and visualizations. You'll also learn how to automate the reporting process, saving time and delivering more valuable insights.
The Power of Analytics Dashboards: A Hidden Growth Method
A solid data analytics dashboard is an essential yet hidden method of growing your agency. It’s not about slapping together a series of dashboards and calling it a day. When preparing a data analytics dashboard, you'll need a structured process, helpful comments, thoughtful visuals, and the right amount of information to support your client's decision-making and show your value in your client reporting.
"Reporting is a massive value proposition for new business pitches. We can demonstrate that we have an integrated dashboard that will show the success of a campaign. Clients are able to see how the campaign is performing, which streams work best in market, and which are not delivering.”
Marketing Intelligence Report, Salesforce (2022)
Analytics tools like dashboards will become even more crucial to drive marketing-led growth. Here’s why:
- Data-Driven Decisions: Dashboards provide a clear, concise overview of key performance indicators (KPIs), enabling clients to make informed decisions based on real-time data.
- Improved Client Communication: Dashboards facilitate transparent communication, showcasing the impact of your agency's efforts and fostering trust.
- Increased Efficiency: Automating data collection and visualization saves time, allowing you to focus on analysis and strategic recommendations.
- Enhanced Client Retention: Demonstrating value through data-driven reports leads to increased client satisfaction and long-term partnerships.
Understanding Client Needs: The Foundation of a Great Dashboard
Understanding client needs helps you tailor your report to meet their needs and understand what business intelligence they need from your report. The first step in building an effective analytics dashboard is to thoroughly understand your client's goals and objectives. Think about:
- Metrics or Business Outcomes: What are the key metrics that matter to your client? (e.g., MQLs, SQLs, customer lifetime value, cost per lead)
- Stakeholders: Who are the stakeholders who will be using the dashboard? (e.g., Sales teams, product marketing teams)
- Stakeholder Needs: What information do these stakeholders need to make informed decisions? (e.g., A consistently filled sales pipeline)
- Decision-Maker Needs: What do decision-makers want to see in the report? (e.g., Impact/progress on new pipeline generation and ROI analysis)
Let’s say your client is the demand generation manager who handles sales pipeline generation and managing marketing budget. Their stakeholders are sales teams and product marketing teams, who want a consistently filled sales pipeline. Decision-makers want to see impact/progress on new pipeline generation and ROI analysis.
Selecting the Right KPIs: Focus on What Matters
Once clear on your dashboard goals, select the metrics that go into your dashboard. It's tempting to include every possible metric, but it's essential to focus on the KPIs that directly align with your client's goals. As a rule of thumb, keep it between 5-8 KPIs, with only 10 KPIs in a dashboard.
If you’re unsure which KPIs to select, review our library of dashboard examples if you’re stuck trying to select the right KPIs for a specific client goal. We’ve also got 100+ KPI examples if you need a refresher on what each metric means.
Here are some common KPIs for different types of clients:
- Marketing Agencies: Website traffic, lead generation, conversion rates, cost per acquisition (CPA), return on ad spend (ROAS).
- E-commerce Businesses: Website traffic, conversion rates, average order value (AOV), customer lifetime value (CLTV), cart abandonment rate.
- SaaS Companies: Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), customer churn rate, customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer satisfaction (CSAT).
- Healthcare Providers: Patient acquisition cost, patient satisfaction scores, appointment scheduling efficiency, claim denial rates.
Setting Clear Expectations: Transparency is Key
Setting clear expectations with your client reduces miscommunication while creating healthy boundaries for both sides. Establishing clear expectations upfront is crucial for a successful dashboard implementation. Consider these areas:
- Reporting Frequency: How often will the dashboard be updated? (e.g., weekly, monthly, quarterly)
- Data Sources: Which data sources will be included in the dashboard? (e.g., Google Analytics, social media platforms, CRM)
- Data Interpretation: How will the data be interpreted and presented? (e.g., trends, comparisons, benchmarks)
- Communication Protocol: How will questions and feedback be addressed? (e.g., regular meetings, email communication)
Read more: How often should you report? We break down the pros and cons of weekly vs. monthly vs. daily reports here.
Preparing Your Data: From Raw to Ready
Marketers handle data across multiple platforms, from SEO to social media to Google Analytics. Once you’ve done the groundwork, you’ll want to prepare your data. But manually cleaning, formatting, and exporting raw data across your tools is tedious. Use a reporting platform like DashThis to connect to our 34+ integrations to automatically pull data from all these different tools into a cohesive whole.
Choosing the Right Visualizations: Tell a Story with Data
Does your client prefer numbers? Or are they more visual? Do they like an executive summary to skim or to pass on the report to others? Dashboard tools like DashThis offer a variety of data visualizations to help you drive home any meaningful insights. The way you present data can significantly impact its understanding and impact. Choose visualizations that effectively communicate the story you want to tell.
- Gauge Charts: Ideal for showing progress towards goals or establishing benchmarks. For example, gauge charts work well when showing progress towards goals or establishing benchmarks for an acceptable click-through rate for an ad campaign.
- Line Graphs/Charts: Best for showing trends over time, such as tracking campaign performance or comparing email open rates. Line graphs, line charts, or area charts work well when you want to show KPI (or two) trends over time to track ongoing campaign performance, like comparing email open rates with the number of unique clicks.
- Bar Charts: Useful for comparing data across different categories or showing changes in a specific metric over time. Bar charts work well for showing the change in a specific metric over time or comparing two related types of data.
- Pie/Doughnut Charts: Effective for breaking down or segmenting a data set, such as segmenting traffic sources. Pie or doughnut charts are effective at breaking down or segmenting a data set, like segmenting the top search engines by browser used.
- Tables with Indicators: Helpful for comparing the performance of multiple campaigns or metrics. Besides visuals, tables also work well with red/green indicators to help people compare the performance of several campaigns.
Adding Context and Explanations: Make Data Accessible
Additional resources:
- Article: More dashboard design tips
- Our report template library with over 40 pre-filled templates, all designed for you.
DashThis offers two features to make explanation seamless; a comment box and adding notes to widgets.
- Comment Boxes: Add high-level insights, explain work done, highlight wins/losses, or propose next steps. To embed a comment box in your DashThis report, go to Static Widget > Comments You can add high-level insights, like explaining work done this month, highlighting quick wins/losses or proposing next steps
- Widget Notes: Explain each chart or add context to individual data points. You can also add a note to a widget to explain each chart or add context. Here’s how.
The added note will appear on the right side of your screen in a separate panel, accessible in view mode.
"While reporting surely brings value, data simplification, analysis, and recommendations are the things that matter the most to our clients. By being simple, DashThis allows us to care less about the technical part and more about the strategic part."
Maxime Bergeron, Associate at Rablab and DashThis customer
Remember, reporting is a means to an end. These numbers and visuals should tell a cohesive story to explain data, identify trends and patterns, and educate your client on what they can do based on the data. Clients who understand what you do, why you do it, and how it benefits them are more satisfied and more likely to stay with you in the next billing cycle. A simple way to explain charts or reports.
Leveraging Pre-Built Templates: Save Time and Effort
No need to create dashboards from scratch with our pre-filled templates. Here are a couple of self-service interactive dashboard templates to help you spend less time designing and more time answering business questions with web analytics tools. Many dashboard platforms offer pre-built templates that can save you time and effort. Here are a few examples:
- Google Analytics Report Template: Track essential web analytics metrics like new vs. returning visitors, site conversions, traffic sources, and goal completions. (Supports Google Analytics 4 (GA4) as a native integration). Do visitors engage with your web content, or do they bounce? Track essential web analytics metrics like new vs. returning visitors, site conversions, traffic sources, and goal completions with this template. We support Google Analytics 4 (GA4) as a native integration.
- SEO Report Template: Present your SEO metrics and efforts in a clear, understandable way. Keep your clients up to date with your SEO strategy. Present your SEO metrics and efforts to your clients in a clear, understandable way. Keep your clients up to date with your SEO strategy and show them this month's performance with this template.
- Executive Report Template: Provide senior executives with a scannable report that highlights key performance indicators and enables quick decision-making. Get this executive report template with your own data Senior executives are busy people, so get to the point quickly when presenting data. This scannable report keeps highlights at the top, ensuring your executive can glance at the report to make quick decisions, or drill down into the details.
- Digital Marketing Report Template: Combine insights from all your marketing campaigns and tools in one easy-to-read dashboard. This beautifully formatted digital marketing report combines insights from all your marketing campaigns and tools in one easy-to-read dashboard. You can pull in numbers from social media, email, and more into the same dashboard to paint a complete picture of the overall strategy, a lifesaver if you run a full-service agency!
Get started in minutes. All you need to do is.
Bonus tip: Personalize your reports and impress your clients by adding company colors and logos to their reports with our white-labeled report functionality.
Automating the Reporting Process: Efficiency and Scalability
Automate the entire reporting process and get your client’s data into a sleek, customizable dashboard in their own branding - all within minutes. With reporting automation, it’s easier to deliver more valuable reports without spending more time exporting data from your analytics platforms - a win-win situation for your team and your clients. Automating the reporting process can significantly increase efficiency and scalability. By integrating your data sources with a dashboard platform, you can automatically collect, clean, and visualize data, saving time and reducing the risk of errors.
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Interactive Dashboards: Empower Users to Explore Data
Bring together charts and questions on live dashboards with interactive tools to let everyone get the info they need. Make it easy and intuitive to learn more from data with a few clicks. Interactive dashboards allow users to explore data and answer their own questions.
- Filters: Allow users to filter data by date ranges, categories, locations, and other parameters. Add filter widgets to quickly tweak results on things like date ranges, categories, locations, and more.
- Drill-Downs: Enable users to zoom in on specific data points and explore underlying details. Zoom in on selected areas of a chart; breakout on categories; and apply X-rays for auto-magic reports.
- Links: Connect dashboards to other resources, such as reports, documents, or external websites. Show the drill-through menu, update filters, or send them to another dashboard, saved question, or URL.
- Sharing & Exporting: Allow users to easily share dashboards with colleagues or export them to PDF for presentations. Link to or embed dashboards. Set up email and Slack subscriptions, or alerts for when something changes. Or export dashboards to PDF for quick and easy reporting.
Optimizing Performance: Keep Load Times Low
Cache answers to questions to keep load times low. You can even get specific about which questions, dashboards, and databases to cache on Metabase Pro and Enterprise. To ensure a smooth user experience, it's crucial to optimize the performance of your dashboards. This includes caching data, minimizing the number of widgets, and using efficient data queries.
Write-Back Capabilities: Act on Insights Directly
Write back to your database from your dashboards with Actions buttons for basic CRUD actions, like logging a new request, or editing a customer profile. Some advanced dashboard platforms offer write-back capabilities, allowing users to directly update data in the underlying database. This can be useful for tasks such as logging new requests, updating customer profiles, or managing inventory.
In Action: Analytics Dashboard Examples
Here are a few examples of how analytics dashboards can be used in different industries:
- E-commerce: An e-commerce business uses a dashboard to track website traffic, conversion rates, and average order value (AOV). In 2022, they noticed a significant drop in AOV for mobile users. By analyzing the dashboard, they identified that the mobile checkout process was not optimized. They implemented a streamlined checkout process, resulting in a 15% increase in mobile AOV by 2023.
- Marketing Agency: A marketing agency uses a dashboard to track the performance of its client's social media campaigns. In Q3 2023, they observed that engagement rates were low for video content. By analyzing the dashboard, they discovered that videos were not optimized for mobile viewing. They optimized their videos for mobile, resulting in a 25% increase in engagement rates by Q4 2023.
- SaaS Company: A SaaS company uses a dashboard to track customer churn rate. In 2021, they noticed a spike in churn rate for customers who had been using the platform for less than three months. By analyzing the dashboard, they identified that new users were struggling to understand the platform's core features. They implemented a new onboarding program, resulting in a 10% decrease in churn rate by 2022. By 2024, they were able to reduce the Churn by 21% via this web analytics dashboard.
What is an Analytics Dashboard?
Originally Published on June 10, 2022. An analytics dashboard is a data collection focused on critical metrics presented neatly on a user interface. It enables analysts to easily monitor the performance of a digital product or website by tracking various metrics like online conversions, engagement, retention, and more.
- An analytics dashboard shows an assortment of metrics that give you a picture of the status of your digital product or website. It enables you to see overall performance in only a few moments.
- Dashboards enable you to view analytics data at a glance, collaborate with others in your company by sharing the dashboard, and act on current and accessible data.
- Many people use analytics dashboards, such as C-suite executives, sales executives, product managers, marketers, etc. Dashboards are built with key design principles to help their audience make quick decisions.
- There are different types of analytics dashboards, such as product analytics, web analytics, digital marketing, ecommerce, social media, and content dashboards—all serving different purposes.
What is an analytics dashboard? An analytics dashboard is any setup that visualizes important metrics and KPIs in real-time. They can be used for multiple purposes and track any number and array of metrics.
Typically, these dashboards include data from multiple sources and are curated to help audiences quickly understand how a product, website, or campaign is performing. Well-designed analytics dashboards help you quickly make strategic decisions and track their impact.
Why Use Analytics Dashboards?
There are multiple reasons why analytics dashboards should be used. For example, analytics dashboards can:
- Help you act on current and accessible information. They report, analyze, and present data in real-time, enabling analysts to act on this current, reliable data. Since these dashboards are cloud-based, users can access them on any internet-enabled device.
- Give you a bird’s-eye view of all analytics data. Dashboards make it easy to collect and organize relevant data into a single, convenient view. They improve the overall efficiency of business analytics by making it easy to analyze information visually, in whatever format you like (e.g., bar chart, pie chart, etc.).
- Deloitte recently surveyed Chief Data Officers (CDOs) across multiple industries and found that want to refine how they use insights and analytics—with three in 10 specifically mentioning dashboards and reporting as a key area of focus.
- Enable you to share your data with people across your company. Sharing the dashboard with multiple people in your company enables cross-functional collaboration and brings everyone on the same page. You can add comments around your analysis alongside the charts on a dashboard or use annotations to share additional context and key takeaways. You can mention team members in your comments or even integrate the dashboard into a team communication tool like Slack. This collaboration is helpful for teams to discuss and iterate on their findings and ultimately make great product decisions.
5 Questions to Shape Your Analytics Dashboard
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to what an analytics dashboard should contain. A useful dashboard is custom-built to fulfill a certain purpose. When building a dashboard, work from the user backward and ask the following questions to determine what to include.
1. Who is the dashboard being created for?
Start by establishing who the audience is for the dashboard. For example, if you’re creating a marketing dashboard, your dashboard might contain metrics like conversion rates, campaign ROI, and more. Adopting a human-centered approach will help you build dashboards that serve their audiences’ core purposes.
2. What questions should your dashboard answer?
Consider your dashboard’s audience's questions when deciding which reports to include. If the dashboard is being built for an ecommerce product manager, they might want the answers to questions like: What is the total sales revenue? What are the most popular product categories contributing to the total revenue?
On the other hand, a marketing manager might have questions like, which channels are bringing the most people to our website? What demographic or audience segment converts most often?
3. What are your data sources?
Analytics dashboards promise to bring together data from multiple places, but more data is not always better. It’s important only to include reliable and trustworthy data. Otherwise, there’s no guarantee your “informed” decisions will be the right ones for your business. Primary sources (like Amplitude) are more reliable than secondary sources for data.
4. Does the dashboard tell a story?
When an analytics manager views their dashboard, it should provide a narrative about their progress or efforts. You can tell a story from your data by ordering reports so they provide a clear, logical flow from top to bottom. This enables audiences to extract more meaningful insights from your dashboard.
Storytellers also consider what isn’t necessary to communicate their point. Avoid unnecessary information and be minimalistic in your selection of data for your dashboard.
5. Have you chosen the right type of data visualization?
Choosing the right type of visualization to include in your dashboard enables your audience to digest the data that’s presented to them easily. A bar chart or column chart might be best if you're comparing values. If you’re visualizing hierarchies or relationships, you might opt for a tree map. Percentages of a total make sense when displayed in pie chart form, whereas any metrics that include dates will be easier to read when displayed in a time series. Aesthetics matter, but functionality is a more important consideration when choosing visuals.
How to Create an Analytics Dashboard
Tools like Amplitude make it easy to assemble an analytics dashboard, but they can’t do all the work for you. Follow these steps to create an analytics dashboard:
- Define your goals and set KPIs: A clear purpose will guide you throughout the process, so make sure you know why you’re building a dashboard before you start. The questions you need answered, as well as the KPIs you choose, will determine the type and amount of data you include.
- Choose the right metrics: Only relevant metrics have a place in an analytics dashboard. It’s tempting to pull in all sorts of data just because you can, but including unnecessary information makes a dashboard harder to use.
- Choose your data sources and integrate them into your dashboard: Your company likely uses multiple sources of data—from site or product analytics to social media metrics to customer or sales data that lives in your CRM. Make sure your dashboard pulls in important and relevant data from every source. (On a related note, you’ll want to use a tool—like Amplitude—that offers a variety of integrations.)
- Clean your data: Not every source provides complete data, and bringing together multiple sources may result in duplicate data or inconsistent formatting. Data cleaning is boring and takes time, but you won’t get useful insights until you have quality data to base them on. Using a tool like Amplitude with built-in data governance is helpful so you don’t have to validate everything manually.
- Design your dashboard: Now it’s time to put together the visualizations. Focus on clarity—data that’s easy to read is easy to act on. Also, keep in mind that your users may not be as technically savvy as you, so simplicity is better than a setup that asks users to do extra work.
- Add interactive elements: Sometimes, teams want to dig deeper into the data to look for more (or better) answers. Make it easy for audiences to sort and filter data, zoom in on datasets, or compare metrics so they can get the answers they’re looking for.
- Be ready to iterate: The way companies use data is always evolving, and as your teams become more data literate, they may think of additional questions that will help them perform better (or think about existing questions in a different way). Updating your analytics dashboard to keep up with changing needs will help your team stay on top of its process and continue to make smart, data-driven decisions.
Common Challenges When Creating an Analytics Dashboard
Ultimately, an analytics dashboard is only as useful as the insights you can glean from it. Avoid these issues that can get in the way of an effective dashboard build.
No Defined Objective
Without a goal to drive it, an analytics dashboard is just a fancy collection of stats. If your dashboard isn’t organized around a specific question or aim, it won’t be able to provide any useful answers. The context surrounding the metrics is as important as the metrics themselves if you want to make data-driven decisions.
Too Much Data
If a metric or dataset doesn’t further the efforts an analytics dashboard was built to guide, it doesn’t belong on the dashboard. Any extra data you include risks muddying the decision-making process.
Teams with a wall of metrics may stall rather than make any decisions because they’re unsure what to tackle first. Focusing your dashboard on key metrics makes it easy for teams to stay on mission.
Another complication of a too-full dashboard is teams focusing on the wrong things. Improving a KPI may mean sacrificing less important metrics—for example, decreasing your customer acquisition cost (CAC) by improving your ad targeting may bring in fewer but better prospects. Teams that see the “total visitors” metric decrease may pull back on their efforts even when they’re returning the results you’re after.
Inaccurate or Low-Quality Data
It’s important for teams to trust that the data they’re looking at will lead them in the right direction. They need accurate and high-quality data to guide their important decisions.
First-party data is typically more accurate (and provides more context) and typically leads to more helpful insights. A useful dataset is also complete and consistent: all its fields (including metadata) are filled out to the same standard.
For example, say you’re trying to learn how to increase your ecommerce sales. A dataset that only includes the item(s) bought, the purchase price, and your company’s profits won’t be very helpful. Quality data would include metadata like the date, time, and device your customer used to make the purchase, plus relevant demographic information. It would also include details like whether the customer has shopped with you before, what brought them to your site, how many pages they visited and in what order, and whether they removed anything from their cart at the last minute or responded to in-cart offers or upsells.
Lack of Audience Awareness
If your users don't understand how to use a dashboard, they won’t get many insights from even the best metrics. Effective dashboards do most of the work for the audience. Carefully curate your metrics, layout reports logically, and make visualization choices that make the data as clear as possible.
7 Examples of Analytics Dashboards and Their Uses
Analytics dashboards are used by a wide range of stakeholders, from manufacturing managers to customer service executives. Each role requires different data and a different type of analytics dashboard.
- CEOs and Senior Management Executives: Use management dashboards to make strategic decisions and convert complex data into actionable insights. They mainly want to know who their customers are and what their revenue is compared to the same time last year. Revenue dashboards give this information by providing data on total revenue, average revenue per customer, customer retention rate, the number of new customers, and customer acquisition cost (CAC).
- CMOs and Marketing Executives: Use digital marketing dashboards to track important marketing KPIs through data visualization, with the goal of boosting overall marketing performance. They use information like the cost of acquiring each lead, conversion rates, and more to set targets for the future and monitor campaign performance.
- CFOs and Finance Executives: Use finance dashboards to gather information like operational expense (OPEX) ratio, gross profit margin, net profit margin, and earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT). They get an overview of all the money the company is earning (and spending).
- Sales Executives: Use customer dashboards to focus on high-level sales metrics, such as the number of sales, sales revenue, most popular products, high-value customers, etc. This information helps them create and implement an effective sales strategy to increase revenue and profits.
- Product Managers: Use product or user analytics dashboards to assess the success of their product. They use a combination of acquisition, activation, engagement, retention, and revenue metrics to know who’s using the product, how engaged they are, and how much money the product is generating.
- Marketers: Use product analytics, web analytics, SEO, and social media dashboards to track both top- and bottom-of-funnel metrics like conversions, traffic from different sources, the number and quality of leads, ROI on ad spend, content and campaign performance, and more.
Let’s look closer at some of the dashboards you can build and share with Amplitude.
Build Analytics Dashboard: Types of Dashboards
1. Product analytics dashboard
A product analytics dashboard helps product managers gauge how successful a product or feature is by presenting specific KPIs. Some common product management metrics include:
- Reach or acquisition metrics: Paid subscribers, three-month active users, page or ad impressions
- Activation metrics: Percentage of activated users, number of activations
- Demographic metrics: User device type, user location
- Engagement metrics: Retention rate, time spent on site or app, pages viewed, event frequency, shopping cart or checkout abandonment
- User behavior metrics: Time to first value, feature adoption rate, or net promoter score
- Transaction or monetization metrics: Conversion rate, average order value, or
- Monthly recurring revenue: Average revenue per daily active user, customer lifetime value.
Product managers can use cohort analysis to do customer segmentation or user segmentation. Both analyses are done on user groups with shared characteristics, such as users who use mobile to access the product versus those who use a laptop to access the product. Data comparisons between user groups are helpful in putting things into perspective so that product managers can focus on the segments or cohorts that matter.
2. Web Analytics Dashboard
A web analytics dashboard gathers all the important metrics about your website traffic into a single custom dashboard. This dashboard shows you KPIs like:
- Page views, bounce rate, pages per session, session length
- Goal completions, such as form fills, lead generation, or sales conversions
- Performance by traffic channel and traffic source
- Website or landing page visits, bounce rates, and conversion rates
- Statistics for which browser or device the user is using
- Campaign performance data like campaign costs or campaign ROI
Accessing these KPIs on a central dashboard enables you to analyze what’s working and what isn’t, so you can drop your less effective marketing efforts and scale up the ones that are most profitable.
3. Digital Marketing Dashboard
This dashboard allows you to track the results of all your digital marketing campaigns from one place. You can see information like organic search traffic volume, PPC metrics, your email campaigns' performance, and even social media metrics all in one dashboard. A digital marketing dashboard has KPIs like:
- Campaign performance data like cost-per-click, click-through rate, and conversion rate
- Session length, user paths, page depth, and other behavioral analytics
- Bounce rates to know how long users stay on your web pages before they go somewhere else
- Traffic source performance (search engines, social media, paid ads, etc.)
- Conversion rates (sales, email newsletter sign-ups, etc.)
Digital marketing dashboards give a bird’s-eye view of your full marketing funnel to show what’s working and what’s not.
4. SEO Dashboard
SEO is a long-term marketing strategy, and small changes can bring big results, so it’s important to know your metrics. This dashboard example gives you a lot of insights into your company’s overall SEO strategy. KPIs included in this SEO dashboard example are:
- Visitor sessions (number of organic visits, bounce rate, page load times, etc.)
- Organic landing pages (how many visits by channel and device, new vs. returning visits, etc.)
- Conversion rates (new conversions, new revenue, and transaction data strictly from organic traffic)
- Top-performing keywords that generate traffic
Seeing this information makes it much easier to pick the best SEO and content marketing efforts so you can focus on doing more of the same.
5. E-commerce Dashboard
If you sell products or services on your website, the ecommerce dashboard helps provide data on every stage of the sales process. The ecommerce dashboard includes KPIs like:
- Traffic numbers and source
- Number of ecommerce transactions and ecommerce trends
- Total ecommerce sales revenue
- Product-specific sales (exact quantity sold and revenue generated for each product)
- Product conversion rates by marketing channel and device type
Viewing broad trends with this custom dashboard will make it easy to see which products are the most successful, which channels lead to the most sales, and which onsite behaviors correlate with conversion. With this information, you can scale up your most successful ecommerce campaigns and drive more revenue.
6. Social Media Dashboard
This example dashboard enables you to track your important social media KPIs. A social media reporting dashboard includes metrics like:
- Number of likes and followers
- Number of impressions to assess your content’s reach
- Social engagement metrics (shares, comments, clicks, etc.)
- Popular posts (social engagement metrics on a per-post basis)
Each social platform has its own unique reporting method, so tracking all this information across multiple social media sites is a lot of work if done manually. Aggregating it all into one single dashboard makes it much easier to see which sites are giving you the best return on your efforts.
7. User Analytics Dashboard
Track your users’ activity and engagement to guide your product decisions with a user analytics dashboard. These dashboards are useful for teams looking to improve the customer experience or understand how specific audience segments interact with their product.
A user analytics dashboard includes:
- Activity charts (active users, new users, returning users, the average period between sessions)
- Behavioral data (session length)
- Demographic data (device type, country, platform)
A first-party data source like Amplitude enables you to gather this information in real-time and build a user analytics dashboard that shows how customers are interacting with your product. Behavioral data makes it easy to identify points where your users are dropping off and test UX tweaks to bump your retention.
Data-Driven Growth is Easy with Analytics Dashboards
Digital products make gathering a lot of data easy, but it’s not always easy to organize and use. An analytics dashboard helps cut through the noise so you and your team can track the metrics and KPIs that matter. With that data at your fingertips, it’s much easier to make product decisions that address your users’ wants and needs.
Analytics dashboards are a flexible medium that can be customized to answer almost any question. And, with a tool like Amplitude, it’s easy to get started with a simple visualization of key metrics. Lead your company to the next level of data-driven decision-making by creating your first one today.
Ready to create an analytics dashboard? Try our demo, or explore your own data with a free trial.
Simple web analytics
This type of dashboard, similar to a Google Analytics dashboard, typically includes information such as:
- Traffic Sources: This section outlines where the website's visitors are coming from. It may break down sources into categories like organic search, direct traffic, referrals, and social media.
- Page Views and Sessions: These metrics indicate how many pages visitors view and how many separate visits (or sessions) are recorded on the website.
- Bounce Rate: This is the percentage of visitors who leave the website after viewing only one page, which can indicate how engaging or relevant the content is.
- Conversion Rate: This measures the percentage of visitors who complete a specific action, such as making a purchase or filling out a contact form.
- User Behavior: Information on how users navigate the site, including popular paths, landing pages, exit pages, and time spent on each page.
- Demographic and Geographic Data: This can include information about the location, age, gender, and interests of the website's visitors.
- Goal Completions: This feature allows businesses to track specific objectives, such as form submissions, downloads, or purchases.
Explore a Simple Web Analytics Dashboard
Sophisticated web analytics
This type of custom dashboard, available in a modern data analytics or business intelligence platform, brings together data from multiple systems to let you close the loop between marketing campaigns and revenue. This helps you to optimize your digital marketing budget and efforts, such as Google Ads and SEO, based on what’s actually driving revenue, not just activity on your website.
FAQs: People Also Ask
Q: How do I choose the right KPIs for my analytics dashboard?
A: The right KPIs will vary depending on your client's goals and objectives. Start by identifying the key metrics that directly impact their business outcomes. Focus on KPIs that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
Q: What are the benefits of automating the reporting process?
A: Automating the reporting process saves time, reduces the risk of errors, and allows you to focus on analysis and strategic recommendations. It also enables you to deliver more frequent and timely reports to your clients.
Q: What are some common mistakes to avoid when building an analytics dashboard?
A: Common mistakes include including too much data, using inaccurate or low-quality data, and failing to tailor the dashboard to the needs of the audience.
Q: What are the best tools for building analytics dashboards?
A: There are many tools available for building analytics dashboards, including DashThis, Google Data Studio, Tableau, and Power BI. The best tool will depend on your specific needs and budget.
Q: How do I make my analytics dashboard more engaging?
A: To make your analytics dashboard more engaging, use clear and concise visualizations, add context and explanations, and incorporate interactive elements that allow users to explore the data.
Conclusion: Transforming Data into Actionable Insights
Building an analytics dashboard is an investment that can yield significant returns for your agency and your clients. By following the steps outlined in this article, you can create effective dashboards that transform raw data into actionable insights, driving growth and fostering long-term partnerships. Embrace