Tag: Dashboards

  • Social Media Dashboards

    Are you still using a spreadsheet to collect your social media data? Me too. Here is how I’m trying to automate marketing analytics.

    Every morning I manually calculate metrics like the number of Shopify orders, the number of Facebook likes, and the number of Twitter followers (to name a few). I started to wonder, “How can I view all of my social media stats in one place automatically?” I wondered if there was a program or web site that would provide me the information I was looking for automatically, something like a “social media dashboard”?

    Sprout Social

    Sprout Social

    After hearing a lot of business marketing podcast guests talk about Sprout Social, I decided to check it out. It boasts, “Unlimited reporting & exporting across all of your accounts. Profile, group and roll-up reports for high or low level performance data,” in short, “Integrated analytics across all of your social properties.” While Sprout Social has the social media dashboard functionality I was looking for, at plans that start at $39 a month, I wondered if I could get that functionality elsewhere? Enter Ducksboard and Geckoboard.

    Ducksboard Dashboard

    Ducksboard

    Ducksboards are “Real time Dashboards” to “Visually monitor all your metrics at a glance.” I tested it out by loading in Google Analytics for one site, a Facebook Page, my Trello account, and my Twitter account data. The process was relatively easy and while the displayed data was slightly different than the data I was manually collecting, it did a good job of showing me a real-time “snapshot” view of what was going on. One neat feature of Duckboard dashboards is their “TV mode” feature where the data is meant to be displayed on a flat panel in your office or waiting room. Starting at $16 a month, if all you want is social dashboarding, it’s a nice alternative to Sprout Social.

    geckoboard

    Geckoboard

    Geckoboard is “Your Key Data, In One Place. Stop spending time checking services and start monitoring your business in real-time.” After using Ducksboard, Geckoboard seemed much more granular. It asked many more questions when setting up a “widget” than Ducksboard did. If you want to be more specific, use Geckoboard. Similarly, Geckoboard lets you control how big each widget is displayed, whereas Ducksboard did not. So if you’re anal retentive, use Geckoboard. As far as the dashboard view, I found Geckoboard less appealing and one of the widgets just didn’t work. Pricing is very similar to Ducksboard: it starts at $17 a month, making it a another dashboard alternative to Sprout Social.

    Summary

    One thing both Ducksboard and Geckoboard have in common is a public link to your dashboard so that you can share the information with someone without an account. This makes it easy to share with say, a client. I manage a lot of different client’s marketing campaigns as well as my own sites, so a single dashboard view wouldn’t necessarily work for me, but setting one up for each client might work. It could be a nice upsell that could potentially benefit the client, but like all information, the data is only as good as what you do with it. If you’re looking for a more detailed review, GetApp has a nice Geckoboard vs. Ducksboard review page.

    Update

    I just got an email from Matt at Geckoboard that shows how they can be used on a TV just like Duckboard:

    Hey Erich,

    It’s great to see that you’ve been adding some widgets to your Geckoboard. Now if you haven’t done so already, you should really think about getting your dashboard displayed on a big screen TV for all to see.

    2 in 3 of our customers do this and they tell us that having Geckoboard up on their wall has meant that everyone has access to this important data. It also starts conversations about data – what they’re seeing and why that might be!

    The screen is best placed where people regularly come together (we have one of our own above the water machine) and just focus on the metrics that really matter – you don’t need to display everything.

    Since you’re just starting out, you might want to get creative and add in a few fun widgets – this encourages more people to stop and look at it and as they say, nothing draws a crowd like a crowd. If you’re stuck for how get your dashboard on to a screen, then consider the following options that we blogged about recently.

    As ever, if you have any problems or questions then let me know.

    Thanks,

    Matt at Geckoboard

  • An Introduction to Staffing Models

    Staffing Models is initially a two-step process of identifying the organizational mission, what metrics to track, and what processes there are. The next step is to find out how long it takes to do each task, how much volume they typically have, and then provide the tools to both track and report that information.

    Utilization Reports

    Utilization is a measure of how much work was accomplished with the hours spent. Tasks are determined to take an average amount of time, which is multiplied by task volume and divided by billed hours. The utilization report displays that information to evaluate and track the effectiveness of a department. Utilization is reflected in percent and optimal performance is considered to be between 90% and 100%.

    Excess Capacity

    Excess Capacity is the difference in time between what it should have taken to complete production and what we actually used to complete production. The white bar represents the time needed to complete the reported volume for each day and the red bar represents the excess capacity for that day in hours. Excess Capacity is a complementary metric to use in conjunction with Utilization to help management make staffing decisions in the future.

    Dashboard Views

    Executive dashboards provide an up-to-date snapshot of ongoing performance and trends. Dashboards should deliver clear, visual displays of a large set of data where performance is measured against expectations, goals, and deadlines. Production data is entered into the another tab within Excel for the appropriate date. The result is presented in final form on the “Report” tab, which is seen here to the left. This particular report uses micro-charts called sparklines and is designed to contain a rolling quarter year. This means the report will always have the previous two months data and the current months will be entered real-time at the bottom. Each rolling quarter is then archived for historical reporting at the end of each month.

    Wedding Clocks

    “Wedding Clocks” are a newly developed method for visually representing deadlines using special in-cell charts. In this example, the chart indicates the expectation for branches to have all batches transmitted by 6:30 PM, which is straight up and down on a clock. This chart points straight down (50% filled) at that goal and any result that varies from that (greater or lesser than 50% filled) is a reflection of meeting or exceeding that goal. Wedding Clocks are called this because Erich Stauffer noted that it is good luck to start a wedding at the bottom of the hour to catch the upswing of the second-hand. The range on both sides of 6:30 in this example is 3 hours (from 3:30 to 8:30).