What’s On Your Dashboard?

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 05:30:57 -0500
analytics, development

When you speak of analytics, you visualize data presented as numbers, bars, graphs, pie charts and more. I wrote on why every startup needs analytics but with the diversity of available options, what kind of a dashboard you choose can decide where you’re headed.

Monitoring your startup’s progress is quite important but it’s equally important to make sure you’re tracking the right things in the right way.

Information vs. Action: Reading & Using Dashboard Data

Dashboards can be pretty enticing at first. You’re looking at real, fluctuating numbers that indicate traffic, time on site, conversions, comparisons to past performances, number of followers, social signals, results of an A/B test you ran, revenue generated so far, per-user stats etc.

But information can be useful or useless depending on what you do with it.

We’ve come a long way since counting hits to a webpage and how you read and “act” on your data can be game-changing for your startup endeavor. How?

Choosing the Right Dashboard

The internet is inundated with a wide range of analytics services. The diversity is so enormous that you can literally spend years trying to decide on the right one.

Fortunately, though, you select a dashboard that will take you towards your goals.

Choosing the right dashboard ultimately depends on:

what goal you set for yourself/your project

what metrics allow you to track the progress of your project (towards your set goals)

what metrics trigger “actions” that will help you achieve your goals

It would be a waste of time to have a dashboard that shows number of users at a given instance when that data is of no significance to you.

The Two “Kinds”

I tend to think that dashboards are of two kinds.

the ones that do most of the “thinking” for you: the action-oriented dashboard

the ones that let you do most of the “thinking”: the information-oriented dashboard

Nothing explains things better than examples so here we go:

ThinkUp is an action-oriented dashboard. Anil Dash wrote about it (you probably saw it on HN) extolling such dashboards (naturally) and the need for such dashboards. The way it works is it communicates information about the activity around your social profiles in an “actionable” way. Labels connected to data (numbers) tell you where you are headed.

But think of Google Analytics and it’s a whole different ball-game. GA does communicate information to you as charts and numbers but it lets you decide what to track, what to fix as goals, what data to use for triggers etc.

And then think of Geckoboard. It’s a beautiful dash but it’s numbers and graph again which you can configure to a large extent. Ultimately, though, you are in charge of how you “act” on the data or how you are motivated to act upon the same.

It All Depends On You

Conclusively, all of this depends on what you actually need to do. In most cases, you’re looking for data that can help you push your project towards something: more traffic, more engagement, more conversions, more subscribers, more revenue etc.

What I do recommend is this: if you have time to analyze data, filter the fluff out and assign particular triggers/actions to the data by yourself, go for generic and larger dashboards that feed you all the numbers and charts you need.

If you don’t have the time or manpower, you choose dashboards that are “smarter” and get the work done for you. Dashboards that will tell you exactly and explicitly which landing page works better, what time of the day your email has better open rates etc. will fit your bill.

Interesting Read:

Real-time analytics isn’t really good

Image by Flickr user: Jacob Bøtter