Analysts spend hours making reports, but what if there is no one to read them? They also put in immense time and efforts to create dashboards. What if there is no one to even look at them? Yes, it is possible! If your reports and dashboards don’t meet certain levels, they won’t even be looked at, let alone making them being considered. Bad reporting and poor dashboards are a result of wrong goals, or a wrong way to measure the right goals. Here, we will help you know some effective ways of creating good quality marketing reports and dashboards. Either hire professional digital marketing services in Bangalore to help you, or use the below guide for assistance – the choice is yours.
Understand the goals
First and foremost, you need to understand the goals of a report versus that of a dashboard.
- Dashboards should measure one goal at a time, and must be easily digestible at a glance. The action you take off a dashboard must be able to answer questions like how you are performing organically, or how fast your site is loading.
- Reports, on the other hand, should help you make a decision, and the questions they should answer must be something like the biggest elements slowing your website, and the product changes that are hurting your organic search.
Understand the audience
You know your goals. Now, you need to understand who this data is for. Obviously, your audience! But remember, every audience is different, so every decision is also to be different. If a single report is made for audiences with different decision levels, you will end up creating something that won’t fulfill the goals. So, you need to split up your reporting into individual reports and dashboards for each audience type. And for this, you need to understand what each audience group cares about.
How to create a good dashboard?
First of all, you need a sensible goal for your dashboard. A good metric is a direct measure of success, which should have no caveats that are outside your control. So, you must choose such a good metric for your dashboard. You also need to ensure that it will create incentives for how people behave. Also remember that, you may have to compromise your metrics depending upon the resources. A dashboard should try to explain why performance was bad, it should instead track a goal over time and say whether further investigation is required or not.
Laying out and styling dashboards – You need to have a dashboard that conveys information as quickly and easily as possible. It should fit on a single screen. Remember that people read from top and left, so lay out your dashboard accordingly. Finally, your design should keep the focus on the content. Also remember to keep the styles and colours unified as much as possible.
How to create a good report?
You need to first pick a sensible decision for your report. You need to be able to understand is there is a decision to be made or are you knowledge-gathering for its own sake. If you don’t have a decision and you are creating a report to dig into things, you are wasting time. It’s better not to make a report. If you have a decision, you need to investigate further and move ahead.
Once you have a decision, make a list of all the data that might be relevant to the decision. Work down the list and ask yourself if there are any odds that the data can cause you to change your mind. Or, is the data better segments or grouped to improve? Also, analyze how long it will take you to add the information to the report.
Laying out and styling reports – Your reports could be large and complex, but you will have to breakdown metrics into multiple graphs. Order them by importance. Make sure each graph digs deeper and makes it useful for the readers. Here also, you need to keep the content focused on the content, with unified styles and colours.
So, what have you learnt? Spend time thinking about the content of reports and what they are being used for. There are a number of good tools out there to help you generate graphs easier. Or, the best thing you could do is hire professional digital marketing services in Bangalore.
