9 Web Metrics to measure Effectiveness of Business Dashboards

Beyond traditional opens-and-clicks and , provide more insights into usage of business dashboards. Know what’s working and what’s not!

Web-based dashboards have made insights accessible to a large number of business users in the organization. Surprisingly, tracking usage of these dashboards is still limited to just basic metrics like open-and-clicks.

Here is a list of 9 Web analytic metrics that can be applied to Business Dashboards.

1. Visits:

A ‘visit’ is the equivalent to someone opening the dashboard. A user can visit multiple pages during a single visit. Each of these page visits will be called as page views.

Also, you can check for unique visitors. Unique visitors represent the count of individual people that visited your dashboard.

OMG, We got 500 Hits in last week, it’s Working!

These numbers represent the size of the audience that you are reaching. As you expand your training efforts(or even Marking !) , you will want to see if they are effective.

2. Visits by Local time

This metric shows what time it was in the visitors’ time zones during their visits. This helps you plan for production releases and bug fixes without affecting the large user base.

You can also use server timezone to plot this metric. Server time will help you find peak time of usage, so you can manage resources accordingly.

3. Return Visits

This is another great metric to use and is a great indicator of the effectiveness of your dashboard.

4. Pageviews

Pageviews are the total number of pages viewed, including repeat views of a single page.

Help you determine most used pages.

This metric allows you to see if users are viewing pages as per the goals you have defined. Use this to determine if you can offer a better user experience by removing unnecessary pages or consolidating pages if it makes sense.

5. Session Time

You could be receiving tons of visits, but this does not mean users are spending enough time.

The Active session duration will tell you how much time users are spending on the dashboard.

A longer visit duration could indicate that users are highly engaged. Or it could also mean users are not finding what they’re looking for as easily as they had hoped.

Remember, the goal is to quickly represent the meaning of data. So, remove any barriers to that goal and don’t make them wait.

6. Page load speed:

How many of you have left a dashboard because it was taking forever to load?

Everyone in the web world is obsessed with page speed. We all get frustrated if a Webpage page takes longer than a few seconds to load.

Speed improves users experience.

Along with speed, it is also important to know which pages of the dashboard are slower than others, which allows you to try and work out why and fix the issues.

When you measure page load speed, it becomes possible to see the results of the actions you take to optimize the dashboard performance.

7. Audience

The advantage with the business dashboard is that audience attributes (department/function/Geo) are already available to you. These attribute can be grouped together to form user segment.

Discover which user segments are most engaging and the ones which are not.

Audience related metrics allow you to view how certain segments of your users are engaged with your dashboard. How are these segments performing against benchmarks or other segments?

8. Rolling retention:

Rolling retention is useful to understand how often users are accessing the dashboard.

Rolling Retention provides you with a measure of user churn. Of all the users who came in once over a specified period of time, how many are still around three months later?

Understanding value of the dashboard over a period of time.

Rolling Retention becomes even more powerful when filtered by a user segment. Learn more about rolling retention metric here.

9.Device & Browser:

Understanding which devices they use, the input methods they use to interact, and the screen sizes on which they’re viewing lets you fine- tune current versions, and plan upcoming implementations.

This becomes a critical part of testing when custom codes like HTML, CSS and javascript have been used in the dashboard.

Conclusion

These metrics can be analyzed together for a more holistic view of your business dashboard. There are many methods to track and analyze data, but this will surely help you get started.

Always remember to focus on the metrics that are critical to your goal.

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