Set up Dashboards for Your Business Right Now. The Why & How (Templates Included)
So you would like to learn about dashboards, how they can help you run your business with more focus, and maybe even build one or two right now? You came to the right place.
This article consists of three parts:
- A short introduction to dashboards
- Why you need a dashboard
- How to build one yourself* (relatively easy, free of charge & fast)
*Yes, below you’ll find a step-by-step guide to build your own dashboard.
1. Introductions
Let’s start with the definition of ‘Dashboard’.
Someone obviously nailed it on Wikipedia:
A graphical user interface which provides at-a-glance views of key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to a particular objective or business process.
- Graphical user interface
‘Graphical’ meaning elements like graphs and scorecards which our brains can more easily comprehend than big Excel sheets or databases.
The ‘user interface’ means its a human-computer interaction which from my point of view translates to an easy, efficient, and enjoyable (user-friendly) way to deliver data insights. - At-a-glance views
In other words: super easy to understand. You should be able to glance at a (part of a) dashboard for just a few seconds and understand what is shown. - Key performance indicators
A Key Performance Indicator is a measurable value that shows the progress toward achieving a business objective. They force you to think about what is important for your business goals and then focus on that. They can help you quickly understand the current state and progress towards your goals.
The term dashboard originates from the dashboard in a car. What’s important when you’re driving i.e. what are the KPIs when controlling a moving car? Your current speed, fuel/charge level, lights on/off, and the maintenance indicator are the first to come to my mind.
Modern car dashboards show you a whole lot more, but is all this information really necessary? Doesn’t it interfere with the user’s ability to understand the information ‘at-a-glance’?
Simplicity does it! Think about the dashboard in a Tesla. It’s clean and simple. So… what is most important for your business?
2. Why do you need a dashboard
Well, if you ask me, which you kind of do by reading this article, it’s not just ‘to have or to gain insight into your goals’. There is another, maybe even more important reason to start setting up one or more dashboards right now.
That reason is to force yourself to get a clear view on how to measure your business goals.
Before you can start building a dashboard, you will have to know what to put on it. You will need metrics that reflect the progress toward your goals. This is were many get stuck. It’s one thing to know what your goals are but it‘s another thing entirely to know how to measure them adequately.
If you run a business there’s a good chance your main goal is earning money. Sure, your goal can also be to make the world a better place, you rock! But let’s face it, running a business isn’t free and most of us run it to make (part of) a living.
The way you earn money can be done in many different ways. You can sell products online, run a physical store, offer your services, write on Medium, rent out your spare bedroom, or walk other people’s dogs. The list is endless and all of them could have specific KPIs to monitor their progress.
“What Gets Measured, Gets Improved.”
Peter Drucker
So let’s say your goal is to earn a monthly, second income stream of $500 with walking dogs in your spare time. You could monitor your bank account and track payments. This way you will probably find out if you have achieved your monthly goal, the month after it happened. Not really informative at the time you need it to be. A better way is to have a peek into the future by tracking the number of dogs you walk and your income per dog. Let’s say you charge $12,50 per dog per walk. That means you will have to walk 40 dogs a month or about 10 dogs a week. These are numbers you can easily track using a simple spreadsheet. This way you will know early on if you will hit your goal this month or if you have to distribute some more flyers in the neighborhood.
Now you know the why and hopefully you’re convinced: a dashboard can help you achieve your business goals. In the next chapter, I will take you through defining your KPIs and creating a fully functional dashboard.
3. How to build a dashboard yourself
Building a dashboard yourself isn’t hard. Of course, it will take some time, but keep in mind that it will also save you a ton of time when you could just look at a screen and be instantly in the know about the progress towards your goals.
I have split this part into three sections.
- How to define your KPIs
- Build a dashboard in Google Data Studio
- Great examples and inspiration
If you already have clear KPIs and know how to measure them you can skip to section 2.
3.1 — How to define your KPIs
You have a clear sight of your business goals. Now you only need the right metrics to form your KPIs. They can be just one metric or a combination of multiple metrics. Here are some things you should take into consideration.
- Relate your KPIs directly to your business goals
- Clearly defined and measurable
- Focus on a small number of KPIs
- Able to interpret the past and estimate the future
Every business or aspect of business will have different KPIs. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you which KPIs apply to you. But perhaps the examples below can help you on your way.
Webshop example
You run an online shop selling sweaters & hoodies. One of your business goals for this year is hitting 100K in revenue. In this case, the goal is the first KPI: $100,000 in revenue.
How do you get there? Based on the previous year, you know you sell your products for an average of $50. So 100K in revenue means selling 2,000 sweaters & hoodies. If we assume people only buy 1 item, you will need 2,000 people buying your products. Knowing your website converts about 4% of all people who visit, you will need 50,000 visitors this year.
So there we are, 3 KPIs for the same business goal. In order to be able to monitor these three metrics, we can divide them by the number of months or weeks per year. This helps to keep track of our goals from day-to-day.
- $100,000 in revenue
$8,333 per month or $1,923 per week - 2.000 products
167 per month or 38 per week - 50,000 visitors
4,167 per month or 962 per week
When we visualize these KPIs on a simple dashboard, you might get something like this:
Other examples
- If you run a blog you might want to track unique visitors, page views, shares, or share ratio. If you monetize your blog, with ads for example, you can track income per post or divide it by the number of pageviews and track your average income per pageview. You can also filter your income per visitor source.
- If you ask big guys like Facebook, their main KPI is time spent within their app or ecosystem. If you run a website you can also track something similar like time on page or time on the website.
- If you are responsible for the cross-sales in your company then KPIs like customer lifetime value and retention might be right. If you focus on customer satisfaction then you should probably track your NPS.
- If you run a service-oriented business, you could track contact-forms or phone calls.
3.2 — Build your own dashboard using Google Data Studio
In this section, I will explain how you can set up your own dashboard using Google Data Studio. We will link it to either Google Analytics or a Google Spreadsheet (or both if you like). If you run an online business, chances are you will have Analytics installed on your website and you are able to measure your KPIs. From there, it’s an easy step to Data Studio.
Google Data Studio is a free tool with a drag-and-drop interface to build custom dashboards. It connects with dozens of services out of the box and it could connect to a whole lot more if you are willing to pay for so-called ‘third-party-connectors’. We won’t be needing them for now.
In case you do not have Analytics or if it does not provide you with your business KPIs, we will also connect a Spreadsheet to Data Studio. Anyone with a Google account can create Spreadsheets which can contain all the necessary data.
Let’s commence!
Step 1 — Login & create your first dashboard
Go to Google Data Studio and login using your preferred Google account. It should be the same account that has access to your Analytics property or Spreadsheet.
Create a new ‘Blank report’. If you are new to Data Studio you might have to agree to the terms and conditions at this point.
When the report editor opens you see a blank page with a grid. Data Studio will first ask you to connect to a data source.
Step 2 — Connect data source
You probably see a list of [Sample] data sources. Fun to play around with but we will skip them for now.
All the way down in the right corner you click on ‘Create new data source’.
It will show you a bunch of tiles with possible data sources. The first list contains ‘Google connectors’. These are free to use. If you scroll down you will see many more ‘Partner connectors’ which you can pay for.
First, we will connect to Google Analytics. After you selected this source it will prompt you to authorize Data Studio to connect to Analytics. Follow the steps and you will get a list of all Analytics accounts you have access to. Pick the one you would like to connect to, choose a property, and the correct view within that property.
Now click on ‘Connect’ in the top right corner.
It now shows you a list of all the fields it will be adding to the report. These are all the standard Analytics database fields in which your website data is stored.
Click on ‘Add to report’ and again in the popup.
Shabam! Hypothetical high five! You just connected Analytics to Data Studio and are ready to get creative. Sometimes Data Studio automagically creates a table or chart. You can just delete this.
Sidestep — Connect a Spreadsheet
For those of you who want to connect to a Google Spreadsheet, follow the same steps, only now pick Spreadsheet as a source instead of Analytics. You will get a list of spreadsheets you own or which are shared with you. Within a spreadsheet, you can pick one sheet to connect to. Before connecting you can set which cells and columns to include, leave this empty if you want the whole sheet.
The best way to build a spreadsheet is to organize your dimension values into rows, and metrics into columns. This article provides help if needed.
Step 3 — Think about your design
Next, you need to think about the shape and design of your dashboard. Do you want to display it on a computer screen, TV-screen, or a mobile device? A simple rule of thumb:
- TV/ computer screen > width=1920 pixels / height=1080+ pixels
- Mobile phone > width=830 pixels / height=1920+ pixels
Data Studio can change the size of the dashboard according to the screen size but the basic shape, i.e. vertical or horizontal, needs to be correct for the best result. If you want to be able to check your dashboard on both mobile and a computer I suggest you create two different pages within your dashboard.
You can change the pixel dimensions of the report by clicking somewhere in the gray area outside the page. In the right column, you can pick ‘Layout’ where you can set the width and height in pixels. Setting the dimensions per page is done via de ‘Current page settings’ in the Edit-menu.
Now try to visualize a logical design for your dashboards. There are many ways to skin this cat, so feel free to get creative. If I could give you one more tip: keep it simple. Don’t fill your dashboard with countless charts and graphs, it will lose its function as an ‘at-a-glance’ medium. The KPI example dashboard above might be too crowded already. It’s a thin line and it varies per person, so go and try for yourself ;)
Lacking inspiration? Check out websites like Dribbble.com or Behance.net for great examples of dashboard design.
Another option that lets you hit the ground running is copying a ‘Data Studio Template’. They are designed for specific data-sources like Youtube or Google Ads. You will find them on your account’s start page.
Step 4 — Add graphs, charts, and scorecards
You have set up the basis for an awesome dashboard, now all it needs is data visualizations. This part can be a bit tricky because you have to select and correctly set the dimensions and metrics that contribute to your KPI. But don’t let that scare you. The Data Studio UI is easy enough to understand, just give yourself some time to play around with it. Keep in mind: you can’t break anything (except maybe your ego).
Start by choosing the desired graph, table, chart, or scorecard from the ‘Add a chart’ menu.
Pick one that fits your data. For example, if you have just one number to show, you can pick a scorecard. Numbers which correlate with the dimension time, usually do well in a line- or bar chart. A bullet-chart works well with set targets and a table lets you explore a data-set in more detail.
When you have chosen a chart, you’ll get all kinds of options in the right sidebar. Here you can set the dimension, the metric, the sorting. You can set the date range or filter the data by in- or excluding something. And on the next tab, you can set the style of chart like fonts, colors, and axes. All pretty straight forward.
Step 5 — Complete your dashboard
When your dashboard is complete you can ‘view’ it using the big blue button in the top right corner. You could also share it with other people or even make it publicly available. The latter should only be done with great care because you will be sharing your data with the world.
Now you can put your dashboard to good use. No doubt that you will make some adjustments after using it for a while. This is good, your business is dynamic, so your dashboard should follow suit.
3.3 — Great examples and inspiration
There are many great examples of Data Studio dashboards to be found on the interwebs. Give it a Google search and you will find multiple blogs to showcase even more templates and examples. I will list a few below.
Example I
The dashboard below focuses on recruitment goal progress. It was build by Lime (see article here). I really like the simplicity, yet it visualizes all their KPIs which tell them how they are performing against their hiring goals.
Example II
I created the dashboard below, especially for mobile devices. It consists of multiple pages, each showing data for different sources or categories. You can check out the demo here. Be sure to watch it on your mobile ;)
Example III
The guys at DataStudioTemplates.com offer a few templates for free. They all focus on a specific part of your online business, like email marketing or paid advertising. Maybe one of them will get you started!
Remember! “What Gets Measured, Gets Improved.”
Hi! My name is Mark and thank you for reading my very first article on Medium. I found that creating visually good looking and storytelling dashboards is a great way for me to put all my interests to work simultaneously. Writing about it makes it even more fun :) You can read more on my blog. Let me know if you have any tips or feedback. Thanks!
