Everyone loves a well-built dashboard. You envision clear, striking visuals with interactive filtering, giving you high-level insight and the ability to dive deep into your data trends. So satisfying! But you might not be ready to make that a reality. Why? You haven’t fixed the foundation yet.
Before you can report on performance, you need to build a system that captures the right data in the right way. Otherwise, your dashboard will act more as a mirror, reflecting confusion, inconsistency and gaps in your reporting.
Here’s what it takes to become dashboard-ready, including a real-life example of how a client went from data chaos to clear, actionable insight.
Building a dashboard starts with a data strategy
At the core of any well-constructed dashboard is a strategy for ensuring you’re collecting reliable and consistent data. To do that, you need to build foundations for that architecture. Start by asking questions that illuminate your priorities and goals:
- What business questions are we looking to answer?
- What data is important to answer that question?
- Where does that data live, and how do we collect it?
- How do we want to categorize visitors to our site?
- How do we want to categorize our web content?
Questions like these are the basis for building out your data strategy and set the direction for your team to answer business-critical questions.
From confusion to clarity: A success story
Asking these types of questions was how we began one of our most impactful data makeovers. A leading consumer packaged goods (CPG) client came to us to build a dashboard that would provide insight into web activity on their content-driven site.
When we looked under the hood of their current measurement infrastructure, we realized we needed to take a step back and restructure their data foundation with a clear, long-term strategy in mind. We worked alongside our client to ensure that traffic from all marketing channels could be consistently organized and tracked. We helped establish a system to classify pages by the product lines and content types they represented. We identified and prioritized key actions users could take on the site. After that, we implemented a flexible measurement system that could adapt as business priorities changed, laying the groundwork for a dashboard that would deliver meaningful insight.
Only at that point were we truly ready to create a dashboard customized specifically to their site and stakeholders’ needs. We built the solution, trained their team and supported them through adoption. Now, the team can confidently see a full picture of how different types of users arrive, engage and convert on their site.
Lessons for any team and key takeaways
Every organization wants a dashboard that provides clarity and allows for confident insight. But the dashboards that work best are first and foremost based on function and strong data foundations, not just good looks.
If you’re planning to build a dashboard, here are five guiding principles to keep in mind:
- Start with business and marketing questions you want to answer. (Save the visuals for later.)
- Create consistency across your data inputs through initiatives like UTM naming conventions.
- Organize and segment your data in meaningful ways, whether that is across audiences, content types, user journeys or user intents.
- Identify the most important user actions you want to achieve on the site and ensure they’re measurable.
- Build out a measurement architecture that can evolve with your business priorities.
The teams that get the most from their dashboards are the ones who approach them with a strong data strategy. Doing the work behind the scenes to capture relevant and actionable data is what makes the dashboard useful long-term.
Master your data first, and your dashboards will masterfully deliver.
