Dashboards are nowadays an inevitable tool for management. Especially for internet projects, where information is easily accessible on a daily basis (even hourly or minutely, but I wasn’t intended to focus specifically on traders in this topic). Managers need a quick and clear access to the stats of their eCommerce or online marketing projects. How is online revenue from the webshop doing today? Which channels are generating the most traffic? How are other defined goal conversions working out? What website-improvements do we need to enhance our online results? Managers should be able to have immediate answers to such questions, hence they need a dashboard to monitor results and make funded decisions.
In this serie about creating an analytics dashboard for your website I will elaborate on the different elements for a customized dashboard. From the database for storing your data, the essential parameters to measure to the design and format of the dashboard. Let’s start of today with some basics: nice visualizations of your information with excel charts.
Because in the end, that’s what a management dashboard is about. It must be simple. By taking a quick look, a manager must be able to view the needed information. But it also should look nice, especially when you face it on a daily basis. Compare it with the dashboard of your car. It easier to follow the speed limits when you’re able to easily and nicely monitor the Miles an Hour you’re driving (but don’t use this as an argument against the police when your fined for exceeding the speed limit).
By keeping it simple, I always use Excel for creating the charts I need. It’s very usable, easy to explain to your employees as most people are used to work with it, and if you want you can use different plugins to style your charts. In excel you easily combine the crucial information of your website to create your own dashboard. Some common data for a webshop will be a table like this:
What’s most important for your webshop is the number of visitors in relation to conversion percentages of orders or new customers that signed up for an account. You can leave the information like the image above; in an excel table. But by “going dashboard” we need to make a nice chart of this with two y-axis: one for the absolute visitor numbers, one for the conversion percentages. Hence, select the total table and go the the insert tab >column and choose the chart type:
I have chosen the Column type chart. Now you have the weeks on the X-axis, and visitors as well as the conversion percentages on the Y-axis. Quite hard to discover them:
What you first need to do now is to make a different chart type for the conversion percentages, as you want to visualize them in one overview with the visitors. Click in the chart below, next to the bars which corresponds to the visitors to select the conversion percentage ‘bars’. This will be highlighted with small bubbles at the end. Right click and choose Change Series Chart Type (you can also select the series in the legend, right click and change the series’ chart type here). I’ve chosen the line option. The legend will now show one bar and two lines (still no clear explanation of the data):
To bring the lines into view, again select them in the chart or the legend, right click and choose Secondary Axis under Series Options:
Now you’ll have two Y-axis in the chart. Above in the excel workmap you can change titles and legend options at the tab Chart Tools > Layout > Axis Titles and Legends. You’ve created an excel dashboard format for your visitors and goal conversion per week. This you can easily extend for every week.
So Excel can be very useful in the first steps of creating a management dashboard. Next week we will go more into detail about the requirements for a more advanced management dashboard. In the meanwhile, feel free to posts your comments :)
