Guacamole Dashboard

Every day, the world generates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. That’s a lot of information to sift through to find the insights you need to optimize your advertising budgets. Gone are the days of solely using spreadsheets and pivot tables. We’re in the days of Big Data and Data Visualization. Here we’ll outline and showcase some of the benefits you can experience from leveraging a dashboarding platform. To help illustrate things for you, we’ve created a database based off of the latest office order from Chipotle.

Multiple Data Sources, One Login

Dashboards utilize backend connectors to bring in data from a variety of sources (if a platform doesn’t give many options to connect data, it’s worth looking into different platforms). While the Chipotle dashboard shows data connected to an Excel spreadsheet, a good platform will allow utilization of social sites, Google Analytics, AdWords, ad servers, csv files, Google Spreadsheets, and just about any other pathway. When evaluating dashboard platforms, make sure you’ve written down all possible data sources so you can ensure you’re selecting the best platform.  If two data sources share a common field, they can be linked. An in-practice example: Google Analytics from any date could be matched with a date field out of Facebook, where a query could be built to show details of a major paid campaign versus website traffic.

Visualize Your Data

Slice and Dice Your Data

Filters add another layer of customization to view and segment data to fit client needs.  On the example dashboard, alongside Guac, there’s a filter to indicate the type of food ordered (burrito, bowl, etc.), as well as the main ingredient of the meal (chicken, carnitas, steak, etc.). In more practical applications, this could be date ranges, campaigns, product line, or any other attribute that fits client needs.  Filters within a dashboard allow you to begin getting more granular with your data and see how the removal or addition of data points impacts the overall trend.

Alerts

Another dashboard feature to be on the lookout for is some sort of alert system. As with all other aspects, these can be tailored to a client. For instance, an alert could be set up to send an email out if the average price of a Chipotle Meal were to reach over $8 each (if additional data was being added each time an order was made).

With visualization in place, dashboards provide a support mechanism between a marketing team and client and allow you to more easily sift through your mountains of data for the proverbial needle in the haystack. Peace of mind is gained not only by clients who can watch their data in real-time and share with those they wish, but it also provides a manner of monitoring from an agency perspective.

Want help analyzing your own data? We’re here to help.