Effective decision-making is crucial for any successful business. The right dashboards can make all the difference, providing clear and accessible data that can be quickly turned into actionable tasks.
By identifying and tracking the most critical metrics to your company in your dashboards, you can precisely determine where to allocate resources and how to measure success.
You can set your business up for success with the right tools. The most effective metrics will vary depending on the industry and business model. As such, it is essential to carefully select the ones that will provide the most valuable insights for your company.
We asked eight business leaders to share what dashboards are essential in their companies and what metrics they track to inform where to focus next.
Use Ahrefs for Website Quality Metrics
Ahrefs is a "one-stop" when it comes to all things related to SEO. Since we are pro bloggers, we need to boost our online visibility. The Ahrefs dashboard shows us our website's metrics. We see important Key Performance Indicators such as keyword ranking and link profile. We also see our site's Domain Rating, Ahrefs metric for a quality website. You can't beat Ahrefs when it comes to seeing your online business metrics. These are the metrics we work to improve.
Janice Wald, Mostly Blogging
View Traffic Sources With Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful tool, allowing us to measure all kinds of data. The Google Analytics dashboard provides us with a clear overview of all the traffic sources, which enables us to optimize our online presence and reach our target audience. We track important metrics such as organic search traffic, mobile traffic, average time on website, bounce rate, and many more. For us, the Google Analytics dashboard is a core tool for all our online business decisions.
Matthew Ramirez, Paraphrase Tool
Bounce Rate as Crucial Performance Indicator
Bounce rate is a crucial dashboard metric that is essential to our business as a digital marketing agency focused on search engine optimization. We want to ensure that we are creating content that is resonating with our client's audiences. The longer that their target audience is engaging with their websites, the better. Because bounce rate is a great indicator of how long individuals are spending on a particular page, it helps inform us of how we can strategize our approach most effectively.
Jonathan Zacharias, GR0
Track ROI and NIM in Finance
Within the finance industry, one of the most important dashboard metrics is the "return on investment" (ROI). This measures the profitability of an investment and is a key factor in deciding whether to make a particular financial decision. The ROI dashboard gives a clear and concise overview of how an investment has performed and is essential in helping to make informed business decisions.
Another important metric for the finance industry is "net interest margin" (NIM). This measures the difference between the interest earned on loans and the interest paid on deposits and is used to assess the profitability of a financial institution. The NIM dashboard provides a detailed view of how a financial institution is performing and can be used to make decisions about where to invest funds.
Lorien Strydom, Financer.com
Track Customer Satisfaction Score
The Customer Satisfaction Score is one of the most important dashboards that inform our business decisions. This score is based on a survey we send out to every customer that receives a service from us. The survey asks three questions: 1) How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague? 2) On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied were you with your experience? 3) What did we do well?
This metric is crucial because it informs us how our customers feel about our business. It helps us make decisions about what we can do to improve our customer experience. We also use this data in our marketing efforts, as it gives us insight into what customers value most about our business so that we can align our messaging with what customers want.
Tiffany Homan, Texas Divorce Laws
Use DashThis to Track Ecommerce Goals
As a fashion executive, it is essential to have a strategic dashboard that can monitor the progress we are making as an e-commerce company to reach our set strategic goals. DashThis is a great option to steer decision-making based on product detail views, the performance of your business website and paid advertising, checkout totals, and other important eCommerce metrics. While most often used by senior marketing professionals, its features can also be beneficial to C-level leaders looking to identify KPIs and relevant data points that help paint a bigger picture and guide informed business decisions.
Jason McNary, Brandon Blackwood
View SaaS Subscription Retention With Analytical Dashboards
SaaS companies are loaded with real-time data, to take care of their clients or monitor their own performance as well. So, for us, an Analytical dashboard comes really handy. This dashboard easily reveals our real-time crucial KPIs like customer acquisition, upgrades/downgrades, and more importantly, subscription retention. It’s a lot helpful when you’ve so much to monitor and analyze — this Analytical dashboard puts every critical metric together in a group. We can easily optimize our performance, and make key business decisions just through this simple yet effective dashboard.
Robert Warner, Virtual Valley
View Target Costs per Lead With Zoho
Zoho Lead Management dashboard is very helpful when it comes to analyzing performance and taking important business decisions, specifically related to lead management in my company. It gives comprehensive leads insights, including leads added, converted, not-hired and so much more. It also lets you know of lead generation and conversion quality over time, forecasts about potential value gain from referral sources as well as sources already under practice area.
This real-time data has been a game changer for us in having a realistic idea of business performance. Zoho's dashboard will get you valuable insight on metrics like Target Cost Per Client, Target Cost Per Lead, Target Return on Investment, Target Return on Ad Spend, etc.
Shaun Connell, Writing Tips Institute