Viper Marketing & Communications Group

Digital Dashboards Reviewed

Author: Neil Wilkins

Neil learnt his marketing with the likes of Orange, NatWest, BP Castrol and Ordnance Survey and now helps individuals and businesses to communicate more effectively. He trains and mentors marketers on professional Chartered Institute of Marketing qualifications through to post-graduate level.

A digital dashboard is a central place where a marketer can see at a glance a range of information that helps them turn data into intelligence to inform their decision making. Good decisions help to grow a business, reduce risk in an organisation and ultimately provide better customer journey and marketing service.

It's very easy to collect data. The skill behind effective dashboards is to be measuring things that help you to learn and improve and turn that data into decision making tools. To do this it's important to blend and integrate not only the hard numbers but softer, subjective measures that can often give a broader context to why the numbers are as they are.

The very best digital dashboards also automate the data collection and reporting process, providing up to the minute, and sometimes real-time, feeds of information to both speed up tactical decision making but also fuel longer term strategic thinking.

Trends are important too. To see a piece of data in isolation and reporting a situation in a fixed point in time is unlikely to give a clear indication of the scenario. A dashboard that reports over set periods, again tied into the decision-making schedule, is far more likely to demonstrate fluctuations and trends from which improvements can be made.

The starting point in digital dashboard planning is to understand your over-arching objectives. Strategic and their supporting tactical goals, will help to identify the kinds of data and information that need to feed into the dashboard. This filtering process in itself helps you to ensure you are only including information that will actually help you. With the proliferation of available data from the likes of the popular Google Analytics, you can literally become swamped by information. In good digital dashboard creation the 'less is more' principle really does apply.

Here are some examples of online Digital Dashboard services that should help you to understand both what's available today but importantly how they are evolving to provide marketers with powerful content feeds in the future.

MarketMeSuite

Positioned as a social media dashboard for small business MarketMeSuite helps to link campaign activity within Facebook and Twitter with email reporting and outcomes. Focuses heavily on the output of information rather than the reporting and integration with other activity.

Price: $5.99/mth to $99 one off purchase
Pros: Twitter and Facebook publishing, ease of use, joined up interface
Cons: Lack of strategic focus, one-size fits all

Google Analytics

World leading website analytics service providing broad ranging insights into website performance and customer journey tracking. Customised reporting and ease of integration into existing websites makes Google highly accessible for all sizes and types of organisation.

Price: Free
Pros: Ease of integration into existing websites, automated reporting
Cons: Focus only on website objective data

iDashboards

Visually inspiring dashboards for a range of industries and functions including marketing and sales. iPhone and iPad integration for real time reports on internal data. Drill down capability on each and every data set with full export facility.

Price: Free 30 day trial, bespoke pricing
Pros: Interactive and responsive interface, link to traditional sales and marketing methods, tactical and strategic integration
Cons: Potential cost of website and social media integration

LoopFuse
Marketing automation through a step by step process, from tracking website visits to conversion. Integration with salesforce.com and Linkedin with varied levels of reporting 

Price: Scalable from Free to $3,000/mth
Pros: Link with existing CRM, integrated email publishing, website analytics
Cons: Set-up, visual reports

PureShare

Enterprise level dashboards and analysis reporting from a business-wide perspective with website to CRM inputs from multiple sources. 

Price: Bespoke pricing
Pros: Range of data feeds
Cons: Set-up, complicated preparation, integration with social media

MetricPulse

Simple and intuitive interface for reporting website and social media activity. Data focused rather than intelligent but allows for some monitoring of competitors in a real time interface.

Price: 14 day Free trial then $22/mth to $198/mth
Pros: Simple web-based interface, Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter integration
Cons: Lack of strategic focus, cost

In the future we expect to see these and many other dashboard services fully embrace a link between digital and traditional marketing and sales activity to measure every step along the entire customer journey. When that happens we will truly be in a position to prove our return on investment. 

** Since publishing this article we have found an interesting new service called Geckboard which begins to integrate analytics and metrics from a wider range of sources.
 

- Posted on Wednesday 08 Jun 2011 at 11:41 by Neil Wilkins

Tags: dashboards (1), digital (41), digital dashboards (2), return on investment (2), roi (7)