Figuratively speaking, what is a dashboard? It is a priority touchstone. You keep what’s most important to you on the dashboard, something that you can quickly check on the go, like the dashboard of your car. You have the speedometer and the fuel indicator but do you have a meter to measure your pulse rate while you drive? No! Because you don’t really need that to check on while you drive your car.
The same line of thinking applies for digital marketing analytics. You have to keep on your wall what you need to look at every now and then. This is very important for success in your ventures. In this post we will take a look at some of the items that you should keep or omit from your analytics dashboard, depending on the perspective of who’s looking at it.
The Decision Makers
Let us start with the people who finance projects and have the first right to know everything about it. The decision makers or the executives come first in the line. What do they want to see on the analytics dashboard? It is always the money that they want to make? The answer is a thumping yes, if you go by statistics! A project, for a decision maker or executive, is a go-ahead only if there are tangible and financial variables up for grabs. You cannot convince a hard-nosed businessperson otherwise. For these eyes, you need to put up sales conversion rates, click-through rates, number of online leads or sales, etc. They are keener on the numbers than they are on the ways to get it. So give them what they want!
The Untapped Market
This item is a must-have on the dashboard for every businessperson, especially entrepreneurs. Map out untapped markets that have potential, even though it looks like a bit of a stretch at that point. You never know when an opportunity will rise up and you can go in for the kill. However, if you do not have this item on the dashboard, you are less likely to do anything about it. Your competitors may be readier to walk right in and seize the first-mover’s advantage. New markets on the dashboard will always remind you that the space you are playing in, no matter how easy to maneuver, is only a slice of the pie.
The Marketing Side
An analytics dashboard for internet marketing sounds ridiculous without a marketing side to it, doesn’t it? That is the next item that you should have on the dashboard: a marketing mix. What you are doing here is developing the board for the CMO or the Chief Marketing Officer. As obvious, you need more than just numbers here. You need to interpret those numbers and make sense out of statistics. The marketing person wants to know what a daily visit of 500 online users will do for the website rather than sound all happy about the number of visitors. Additionally, you need to have filters provided on the dashboard to enable targeted marketing. How do you segregate the database for better reach and ROI?
The Content Side
Finally, you have a website propped up by content in the form of web pages, blogs and articles. You have a couple of writers and web designers, even more, to handle the content side of the business for you. The dashboard highlighting the content side should ask, is the effort worth it? Are people actually reading your words or looking at your pictures? Unless you know these answers, you will continue to bleed without cure. The content side of the dashboard should have, in addition to what posts you are putting up online, a check on what each of these posts is doing for your website. That way, you will know what works and what does not.
The Final Word
Just like in life, a priority list is always what you need to keep surging ahead. Without one, you tend to end up doing things that could have waited, while items that need immediate attention drift away, along with the opportunities that they brought along. Your analytics dashboard is exactly what a priority list is all about: a ready guide to help you get things done and keep only the most immediate items on the table.
What do you have on your analytics dashboard? Chip in with some ideas and thoughts!
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