Bring Analytics To Life with Dashboards and Visualizations

Depending on the organization, reporting might mean any number of Tableau, Looker Studio, Microsoft Power BI, QlikView, or another platform’s software offerings. Reporting might also mean data and charts built right within Excel spreadsheets or Google Sheets, PowerPoint slides, and even Word documents. Reporting might also just mean file downloads from Google Ads or Microsoft Ads, Facebook (Meta), Instagram, X (Twitter), TikTok, a data management platform (DMP) or a programmatic ad buying platform. If none of those apply to your organization, it might be that your business intelligence or IT group have built their own custom, home-grown solution that acts as the reporting mechanism for your company. If you still cannot relate to any of these scenarios, then it’s quite possible - although rather frightening to consider - that your organization doesn’t have reporting, dashboards, visualizations, or any significant way to report on what is going on with digital marketing, website activity, or mobile app usage.

The team at Analytics Metal have been through every scenario listed above, from working with clientele and within organizations without any reporting or dashboards whatsoever to working in situations with complex, advanced, multi-faceted reporting packages containing several connected data sources and real-time report delivery.

Reports & Dashboards: The “Analytics Metal” Way

We at Analytics Metal believe in the transparency of reporting what happens directly to you. This means that we have built many a dashboard and many visualizations over the last 20 years for the organizations we’ve worked for and the clientele we’ve worked with. Our way of dashboarding and visualizing analytics and marketing data is as follows.

1. Gathering Requirements and Objectives

Analytics Metal team members typically like to have a dashboard kick-off meeting to ascertain the level of effort, scope, and requirements for a report or dashboard. Specifically, we want to know:

• Who is the intended audience for the report / visualization / dashboard?
• Which users need access to the report / dashboard?
• What primary key performance indicators (KPIs) need to be included?
• What date-range / what time period should the report / dashboard reflect?
• What data sources need to be connected to the report / dashboard?
• Are there any static / flat files that need to be integrated or blended in?
• What are the likely insights that can be derived, and what decisions will ultimately be made from the report’s data and trends?

2. Choosing the Best Solution (Platform)

It is likely that your organization already uses a specific visualization and reporting suite, like QlikView or Tableau, and will want to have the next dashboard built in that same environment. If your organization does not have a preference or a system-of-record, Analytics Metal can help determine what the best platform would be. Consideration points typically involve licensing (which varies by vendor), distribution options (emailed reports, software downloads, link sharing, or other methods to share reports), and platform features (real-time updating capabilities, built-in connectors, custom dimension and custom field generators, regular expression support, data freshness and refresh options, and more).

3. Building the Dashboard (Tables, Charts, Filters, Pages, etc…)

We at Analytics Metal have found that folks do not necessarily have a vision for what a report or dashboard will ultimately look like. Organizations typically have a rough idea of the needed metrics and objective(s) for a report or dashboard, but rely on the visualization expert on the analytics team to come up with a design on their own. In today’s dashboard and visualization industry, there are countless options for charts, tables, cards, and design options, making possibilities seemingly endless for dashboards of all sizes and scopes. Our team can follow your precise direction, or, our team can prototype a few design options using your real data for your review. On average, Analytics Metal will work with our clients across two meetings and will collaborate over email or a messaging application like Microsoft Teams or WebEx Teams to get the dashboard built just right.

4. Data Quality Assessment

One of the most important aspects of dashboard and report building is replication. The ability for an analyst or a visualization expert to replicate the data in a report precisely as displayed in the original source system is paramount in building trust and getting organizations to use the new dashboard or report on a regular basis. Similar to how Analytics Metal thoroughly QA’s tags when working in a tag management platform, our team will validate that all of the data shown in a dashboard or report can be replicated in the analytics or digital marketing platform where the data originally came from.

5. Dashboard Publishing and Live Demo / Walk-Through

After validation, our Analytics Metal team will assign the necessary access and permissions for the members of your organization, and publish the dashboard or report live. We typically offer a live demo and walk-through immediately after publishing, although this demonstration can also occur prior to “go-live”.

6. Future-State Changes, Additions, and Editing

We realize that a report or dashboard is a living, breathing, dynamic object, and that it’s not a static, “set it and forget it” device. We will work with your team after “go-live” to tweak, modify, and make changes to the dashboard as needed. Typically these changes will be relatively minor, and will not take very long to complete. Some of the time, there will be additional features, functionality, or whole new pages or entire reports and dashboards whose needs will arise after successful dashboard deployment. This is a good sign that your organization is using the dashboard or report, and that there is a healthy appetite for more visualizations.

The team at Analytics Metal is eager to learn more about your organization’s dashboarding and reporting needs, and we look forward to collaborating with your team on your next dashboard build. We have helped countless teams across several organizations over the last few decades and we are ready to help your organization as well!