In blogosphere, I often read about discussions on what could be the best web analytics dashboard, or that one best KPI. In reality, there is no such thing as a perfect dashboard that meets everyone's requirement. The dashboard will be catered to someone who just needs to know the bottom line, who could be the decision maker, most important person in the company or team, etc. With various business units supporting the entire online business, it is pretty much impossible to satisfy everyone with one dashboard.
When a dashboard is shared across different teams, then a specific group with special interests will start to ask more than what is in the dashboard, because their job duty is to support specific tasks within the business life cycle of the online business. In some occasions (probably most of the time), for example, when you create a web analytics dashboard for CEO, you'll always hear from some other team manager saying that that dashboard doesn't help "me" in anyway, and start to go off about what would be a great dashboard for him/her.
In a typical scenario, honest and hard working web analyst will try to make everyone happy, so he/she ends up making either an obese dashboard containing bunch of colorful charts, or bunch of redundant reports catered to every single managers in the company. You think a web site with one goal/objective would have a clear and simple dashboard for all to accept easily created, but it could get tricky. I believe it is important to think of dashboard as a starting point to dive into a pool of data.
The best way to create an effective dashboard, following points should be taken into consideration:
- Understand the bottom line and the desired outcome of the web site.
- Ask, why do each key business units exist in your firm and what is important for them to execute their job?
- Know the kind of decisions your end users or business partners can make based on your dashboard.
Effective dashboards usually include:
- An intuitive graphical display that is thoughtfully laid-out, and easy to navigate.
- Logical structure so information is easy to consume.
- Regular and frequent updates of dashboard for relevance to current conditions.
- Answer fundamental questions about the web site's goal or overall business unit.
- It alerts issues or problems in such areas (error pages, ROAS, revenue, conversion rate, etc.)
- Supports decisions that impact the business or online strategies.
Killing multiple data needs with one dashboard
I am just using this phrase to push the minds to think in an effective way, so that KPIs are reported effectively to reduce redundancy. Check out this image of a scenario where you have multiple business units involved in a web site, and how they could have more data needs than that one Executive Dashboard which was created to make CEO smile and move.
The images may imply that web analyst will need to make 5 dashboards at the end of day. However, if you craft the dashboards effectively, you could potentially consolidate them to fewer reports. How you do that will depend on web analyst's skill to work with those key players and identify them KPIs for an actionable insights.
Here is a basic framework that I crafted to support approaching in creating that awesome web analytics dashboard (Tier 3 is not necessarily a dashboard, but most likely a report or an analysis.). It is intended to demonstrate that your dashboards or reports should be positioned and focused on catering the KPIs to appropriate audience/groups, and show different tiers of audiences which could reflect organizational structure with different focus on reporting needs.
Side note: If you give a web analytics access to each business units and allow one smart and motivated person to do their team's web analytics support, you can build allies of web analytics specialist. This could be a long term strategy to build web analytics culture within your company.
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