Dashboards...

I am sure people in marketing have been hearing this term -"Dashboard" and a lot of time people wonder what is it?

As I see - A dashboard is a graphical representation of the key success and diagnostic metrics used to measure the performance of the campaigns.

I was browsing the internet and found this great site which talks about Dashboards - http://chiefmarketer.com/crm_loop/roi/marketing_dashboard/

Personally, I have built a lot of them for various types of campaings - Direct Marketing, Branding, Channel Performance (email vs. phone vs. display vs. DRTV), Site Performance, Product Performance (product A vs. product B)

As an example the table below shows all the key metrics week over week but it is like staring at 100s of numbers and it is hard to make business sense out of these. What exactly is going on...

Now, looking at the dashboard below (same data as the above table) helps understand all the key metrics in a clear and consise way thus helping make better business decisions and also come up with questions - why did a particular metric drop or rise.

Data Trending

I just realized a few weeks ago the importance of trending data. I had always set up dashboards to show trends, so it was always second nature to me - looking at trends.

Just imagine looking at a dashboard which does not show any week over week trends. Just a weekly refresh showing the previous week's results.

It would be obvious to me why the final recipients of the dashboard would not be happy, what is missing? I would not be able to get the answers to questions like - how was this metric 3 weeks ago, make me realized a ah! Week over Week trending is missing.

Just imagine this data shown in 5 separate charts, how will you derive any business insights out of this? But looking at the chart above you can clearly see that there was a clear upward trend until week 3. WHY? Probably seasonality or launch of campaign ...Why sudden drop in week 4 and then again an upward trend in week 5. Was week 4 just an anomaly or was there really a reason for this drop?

All these questions are sparked looking at week over week trends.