Modern analytics systems are able to track every action of site visitors. But just sending this information to Google Analytics is not enough. In order not to waste resources without any profit and not to miss the possible benefit, the data must be properly interpreted, processed, and analyzed at 100%. And this is where digital dashboards come in handy. In this post, we will look into how to make your dashboard “speak” and what they can do for you.
Key Dashboard Benefits
There is no single category of dashboard users as there are many potential use cases. Such reports will be useful for marketers, developers, content managers, and analysts, helping all to solve the problems of projects in a timely manner. However, in order to make a dashboard work for you, it is necessary to configure it properly and think about dashboard design for analytics.
Of course, you can study beautiful dashboards for other projects for a long time and try to imitate them. However, as practice shows, very often you still get the same tables and uninformative slides, which are far from being effective dashboards. Such reports will hardly help your management. Make reports and presentations visual so that they help you draw conclusions and make decisions quickly. It is important that you work with a visualization like a pro. A properly configured dashboard will allow you to look at the data from top to bottom and easily solve problems of different levels.
What Tasks Should an Ideal Dashboard Perform?
A digital dashboard can be used for a variety of purposes, and it is you who decides what type of info you need to get and in what form it should be represented. Here are some of the most important functions of interactive dashboards.
1. Collect Data
As a rule, data is stored in several sources and needs to be brought together. And indicators should be calculated instantly, correctly, and according to agreed formulas. This is actually what a dashboard does. It retrieves different pieces of information from different places, automatically processes them, and shows them in the most comprehensive way.
2. Turn Data into Understandable & Usable Visualizations
Dashboarding is focused on this feature: the selection of visualizations, the design of graphs and charts so that everything is clear and easy to use. In most cases, 99% of all dashboards solve only these tasks. While an ordinary user is left alone with the numbers and visualizations, wondering what to do, you can be empowered with solid data.
3. Prioritize
When the options for action are ready and the effects are calculated, you just only need to act. And the main thing is to choose where to start. The optimal decision is based on calculations, stats, and data-based predictions. By grouping all the results of what-if impact in one place, you can see which metrics change can give more results in financial parameters. It is clear that there is still the issue of manageability and the complexity of influencing some indicators, but this can be used as a starting point when prioritizing work.
Final Say!
Based on the above, the potential of dashboarding is just limitless – there is something to improve and something to strive for. If dashboards can solve all the described tasks, then they can be even more useful, really save people’s time, and reduce the human factor in interpreting data and making important decisions. Some assumptions may seem unrealistic or extremely difficult to implement. But with the help of technology and standardization of subject areas, we will come to understand that dashboards are more than just an interactive set of visualizations.