What Is a Dashboard ?
A Data Dashboard can be defined as an information management tool that visually tracks, analyzes, and displays key performance indicators (KPI), metrics, as well as key data points, allowing you to monitor the current state of your business, department, team, or specific process.
The best part is that you can access your data dashboards through smartphones, tablets, and other mobile technology and just as easily share them with your company, team, or clients.
In the world of Big Data, having a dashboard software to help you visualize a large amount of data and easily convey the results is essential. Data visualization is more intuitive and meaningful, and it is very important to use appropriate charts to visualize data.
Simply put, data dashboards can significantly simplify weekly, monthly, and yearly reporting by allowing you to communicate information at any time without hours of preparation and analysis. That way your team, management, and clients can have a clear idea of the progress you have made.
A dashboard is a visual display of all of your data. While it can be used in all kinds of different ways, its primary intention is to provide information at-a-glance, such as KPIs.
A dashboard usually sits on its own page and receives information from a linked database. In many cases it’s configurable, allowing you the ability to choose which data you want to see and whether you want to include charts or graphs to visualize the numbers.
Dashboards allow all kinds of professionals the ability to monitor performance, create reports and set estimates and targets for future work.
“Dashboard” is another name for “progress report” or “report” and considered a form of data visualization. In providing this overview, business owners can save time and improve their decision making by utilizing dashboards.
To properly define dashboards, you need to consider the fact that, without the existence of dashboards and dashboard reporting practices, businesses would need to sift through colossal stacks of unstructured data, which is both inefficient and time-consuming. Alternatively, a business would have to ‘shoot in the dark’ concerning its most critical processes, projects, and internal insights, which is far from ideal in today’s world.
We use different types of data visualization in order to better present and interpret collected data in our dashboards.
Line Graph Visualization -is used to give a more in-depth view of the trend, projection, average, and growth of a metric over time. The benefit of this type of visualization is that it enables you to visualize patterns over a longer period and compare data to a previous period or goal. In addition, this is a common visualization that will be familiar and easy to read by most.
Bar Graph Visualization – is best used to demonstrate comparisons between values. It is especially valuable when you want to compare different Google Analytics Dimensions to each other.
Pie Chart Visualization – is usually used to illustrate numerical proportions through the size of the slices. It is easy to read and ideal for demonstrating distribution.
A dashboard is a type of graphical user interface which often provides at-a-glance views of key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to a particular objective or business process. In other usage, “dashboard” is another name for “progress report” or “report” and considered a form of data visualization. In providing this overview, business owners can save time and improve their decision making by utilizing dashboards.
1. Operational Dashboard
Operational dashboards provide end-users the ability to monitor specific day-to-day business activities, events or processes where data is constantly changing. They enable users to act on any changes they find immediately, and make short-term decisions to optimize performance. The data collected in operational dashboards is more real time, and reflective of what is occurring in the business at the moment of consumption.
2. Strategic Dashboard
Also called executive dashboards, this provides an ‘at-a-glance’ overview of metrics that users require to monitor business performance. Their purpose is to support decision-makers with insight into the challenges or opportunities the business may face by focusing on high level summary reports of performance and forecasting changes in those measures. They are typically built from aggregated data – time aggregations such as weekly, monthly or quarterly views – to highlight longer term trends and patterns.
3. Analytical Dashboard
Analytical dashboards provide end-users the ability to drill into the detail of their data and support root cause analysis. It is typically used by business analysts and line management, as they include more contextual data, comparative analysis and historical trends than other types. Analytical dashboards are useful for manually analyzing changes, though insight discovery is dependent on the user’s skill level. They also support additional advanced analytical capabilities, such as automated business monitoring and augmented analytics.
Other benefits include:
- A visual representation of performance, such as with charts and graphs
- The ability to identify trends
- An easy way of measuring efficiency
- The means to generate detailed reports with a single click
- The capacity to make more informed decisions
- Total visibility of all systems, campaigns, and actions
- Quick identification of data outliers and correlations
The Adjust dashboard provides you with information on various in-app performance metrics, as well as many customizable inclusions and features. Our settings are customizable, and your datasets can be downloaded in a single click.
Dashboards offers a holistic view of the entire business as it gives the manager a bird’s eye view into the performance of sales, data inventory, web traffic, social media analytics and other associated data that is visually presented on a single dashboard. Dashboards lead to better management of marketing/financial strategies as a dashboard for the display of marketing data makes the process of marketing easier and more reliable as compared to doing it manually. Web analytics play a crucial role in shaping the marketing strategy of many businesses. Dashboards also facilitate for better tracking of sales and financial reporting as the data is more precise and in one area. Lastly, dashboards offer for better customer service through monitoring because they keep both the managers and the clients updated on the project progress through automated emails and notifications.
Strategic dashboards support managers at any level in an organization and provide the quick overview that decision-makers need to monitor the health and opportunities of the business. Dashboards of this type focus on high-level measures of performance and forecasts. Strategic dashboards benefit from static snapshots of data (daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly) that are not constantly changing from one moment to the next.
Specialized dashboards may track all corporate functions. Examples include human resources, recruiting, sales, operations, security, information technology, project management, customer relationship management, digital marketing and many more departmental dashboards.