Dashboards are the New Black

You often see me blogging about website trends. There was my State of the Internet series, including The State of Website Design and there were Web Trends in 2015 that I’m LOVING and NOT LOVING, to name just a few. Hey, some people are into fashion. I’m into websites. There is a fashion I am seeing right now that I love!

I’m LOVING dashboards. Let me explain.

Like most marketers of a certain age (meaning over 40), I started my career working with companies using traditional print marketing tools. Because websites have become such a cornerstone of our lives, it is easy to forget that as recently as 2000, more then 50% of Americans did not use the Internet.

When I switched over to Internet marketing, I did so completely. Spring Insight eschews print work, even for existing clients. Why do I love online marketing so much more then print? There are a bunch of reasons, but perhaps the biggest reason is the difference in measurability. There is no comparison between how much more information you can measure in a digital campaign than in a traditional print campaign. You just can’t see and track “clicks” when you send a brochure.

Yet, we find that many business owners don’t take advantage of all this lovely data they have access to!

What’s going on? There are a few reasons for this:

The data is all over the place. Got a website? Off you go to Google Analytics to see your site metrics. Send out an email? Well, then you need to go to MailChimp to see how things performed. What about social media? Now you are going to two or three more places to get metrics. This is all before getting to the big ones… the financials.

It can be confusing. Once you finally locate the numbers on all these tools, labeled something like “Site Stats,” you might not know what exactly you’re looking at. What is a “referrer?” What is the difference between sessions and users? Where can you find data about what pages people land on? It seems like you need a compass to find all the data and a degree in marketing analysis to make sense of it.

Who has the time?—You’re thinking to yourself. Exactly.

The answer? Dashboards. 

Dashboards take all of the data generated by your users and put it into easily digestible tables, graphs, and pie charts. You can track everything from the length of time the average user views your website to how many of your users are returning visitors. You can set website or business goals and monitor your team’s progress.

There’s no doubt that dashboards make your data easier to decipher, but to get the most mileage out of your website numbers, consider hiring a marketing team who can help you figure out what the data tell you about your business and what strategies work to boost those numbers.

Spring Insight is now offering the service to our on-going marketing clients. The response I’ve received from clients has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic.

Are you ready to take the pilot’s seat behind your business’s dashboard?