You will be able to plan a dashboard by listing the questions it answers before choosing any chart.
Remember the furniture shop from lesson 1.1, where the junior marketer sent the owner a monthly report full of follower counts? Jun, the marketer, took the course's advice, cut the vanity numbers and built a dashboard instead. It had twenty-two charts across three pages: traffic by day, by device, by city, by browser, top pages, top events, social reach, email opens and more. When he shared the link, the owner opened it once, scrolled for a minute, and went back to asking Jun "so, how are we doing?" every Monday.
The dashboard was accurate. It was also built around the data available rather than the person reading it. This lesson is about starting from the other end.
Before choosing any chart, write two things at the top of a blank page: who will read this dashboard, and what decisions they make with it.
The reader is a specific person, or a small group with the same needs. "The business" is not a reader. The owner, the marketing manager and an agency client are. Each wants different things. An owner wants to know whether marketing is paying off and where to put money next. A marketer running ads wants campaign detail day to day. A dashboard that tries to serve both usually serves neither, so if you have two very different readers, plan two short dashboards, or two pages with a clear label on each.
The decisions come from the reader's real job. In lesson 1.1, the furniture shop owner had three: where to put the next S$2,000 of ad money, whether the new sofa range is worth promoting harder, and whether to keep paying the freelancer who runs the newsletter. Jun wrote those three down and turned each into a question the dashboard must answer: Are we on track for this month's sales target? Which channels bring sales, and at what cost? Is the sofa range promotion turning visits into sales?
Three questions is a good number. If you have more than five, some of them belong in a monthly report or an occasional exploration, not on a page someone should read in a minute.
Lay the page out in the order the reader thinks. The top of the page holds the main KPI from your measurement plan and its trend, because the first question any reader asks is "are we doing well?" For the furniture shop, that is sales this month against target, with a line showing the last twelve months.
Below that go the numbers that explain movement in the main KPI. If sales are down, the reader's next question is why, so the next section answers it: sales and enquiries by channel, cost by channel where you have it, and the landing pages or campaigns that changed. These are the supporting numbers from lesson 1.2, From business goal to marketing KPI.
Detail goes last, or on a second page: individual campaigns, product-level numbers, anything the owner looks at only when something above has raised a question.
This order matters because most readers stop early. If the main number is at the bottom, many of them will never reach it.
Every chart on a dashboard competes for attention. Each one you add makes the important ones a little harder to find. So the default answer to "should we add this chart?" is no, unless it answers one of the reader's questions.
Jun went through his twenty-two charts with one test: which of the three questions does this answer? Traffic by browser answered none. Traffic by city answered none, since the shop delivers island-wide and does not plan by area. Social reach answered none. Fourteen charts came off. The eight that remained each sat under one of the three questions.
Keep doing this after launch. If a chart has sat on the dashboard for three months without anyone asking about it or acting on it, take it off, knowing you can bring it back if someone misses it.
A number on its own means very little. "S$48,000 in sales" might be excellent or alarming depending on whether the target was S$40,000 or S$60,000, and whether last month was S$55,000. Every headline number needs something to compare it with.
The usual comparisons are the previous period, the same period last year, and a target. For a seasonal business, the same period last year is often the fairest; furniture sales in the weeks before Chinese New Year are not comparable with a quiet month in the middle of the year. A target is the most useful of all when you have one, because it answers the reader's real question, "are we on track?", directly.
Jun's top row now shows month-to-date sales against target and against the same month last year, with the difference in dollars and percent, and that row is where the owner's eyes go first.
Before opening any tool, Jun sketched the page on paper: a box for each chart, labelled with the question it answers and the data it needs. It took ten minutes and saved him an afternoon of rebuilding. A sketch is easy to change, and the owner can comment on it before anything is built. Yours can be equally rough, as long as the reader, the questions and the chart for each are on it.
Sketch your dashboard on paper with its reader, the three questions it answers and the chart that answers each.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).