Building dashboards is a big to-do for any marketing professional. The temptation is to cram it full of juicy data and a novel worth of narrative explaining said data.

Well, you shouldn’t. Trust me. There is such a thing as the perfect dashboard. And I’ve already built it for you.

The Anatomy of the Perfect Dashboard

I get the skepticism, I really do. But hear me out.

A good dashboard should:

Inform on business health quickly,

Make time comparison easy,

and Encourage deeper investigation.

To do this, you’ll need 5 key elements.

1. Bottom-Line First, Always

The amount of Revenue (or Leads) should be the first thing seen. Always.

All for-profit businesses are in this to make money.

2. Path to the Bottom-Line

Under your most important metric, show how you achieved that metric.

To do that, you’ll need to demonstrate:

Customer Engagement

Customer Acquisition & Retention

Customer Volume

Customer Conversion

The funnel above does exactly that. You know you made $394k in Revenue. But how did you get there? This funnel tells you how, precisely.

That Revenue was generated from:

411k Pageviews (Engagement)

during 75k Visits (Acquisition & Retention)

from 57k Visitors (Volume)

leading to 2k Sales (Conversion)

3. Clearly Visualizing Growth

Beyond the key bottom-line metric, you also need a visual timeline to demonstrate growth (or lack thereof).

Aside from being the lone piece of eye-candy in the dashboard, it clearly helps you understand:

How Days of the Week affect traffic and revenue

How Weeks of the Month affect traffic and revenue,

and how Months of the Year affect traffic and revenue.

Understand the timing and seasonality aspects of your business through this timeline.

You can also demonstrate growth in specific channels:

4. Show Detail Sparingly

This is where most people get in trouble with dashboards.

How much detail should I surface to the top?

Knowing which keywords and referrals are most vital to your site is nice, but this isn’t an FBI mission briefing, it’s a dashboard. Show just enough detail to encourage further investigation.

I’ve found 7 to be the magic number here.

A top 5 won’t change much from month-to-month. And a top 10 will lull you into thinking you have more of the big picture than you do.

7 splits the difference nicely: enough consistency to show important trends and enough variance to warrant deeper investigation.

5. A Brief Glimpse at Content

Discovering how good (or bad) your landing pages are can be very beneficial.

It’ll give you a better sense of how folks find you and how sticky the site’s core pages are once they arrive. You can also use this data as part of a content inventory.

I like to exclude homepage here.

Download the Perfect Dashboard

Now that you know the rationale behind the dashboard, give it a shot!

Get the Perfect Dashboard Now:

The Perfect Dashboard for E-Commerce Sites

The Perfect Dashboard for Lead Generation Sites



Configuring the Perfect Dashboard

Despite the simplicity of design, there are a few housekeeping items to attend to when you first load these dashboards in your profile.

Here’s a short tutorial video on configuring the dashboard:

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