Choosing The Right Dashboard Platform For You

It can be sometimes hard enough to complete your day to day operations from email marketing, Social, PPC, etc. Then with the added scope of trying to report out on this in a routine manner that looks "flashy". Over my career, I have done report outs from excel, PowerPoint, and data visualization tools.

There are pros and cons to all of these options. In excel you can use a tool such as Next Analytics which helps automate certain reports but you lose some of the design aspects. PowerPoint provides a lot of flexibility in terms of design but is very manual to update a lot of times (you can excel tables to PowerPoint to update tables automatically however this still does result in some manual processes).

Lastly, there are many tools out there to create custom dashboards. I have used many of these such as Google Data Studio, DashThis, Geckoboard, etc. They each have their own benefits, however, one thing that I have noticed along the way is not one size fits all. All of these integrate with many platforms (in most cases over 50+ platforms). They don’t though carry over all the data.

If most of what you are doing is looking at creating dashboards for Google products I have found that Google Data Studio is probably the best option. It is a free option (which is a great perk), it is also fully customizable. The biggest challenge with this is while within Google Analytics and Google Ads they have 100’s of data points being tracked. Google Data Studio only incorporates so many, there are things missing (e.g. Viewable Impressions for Display Ads). Data Studio does also has a great theme look which helps with the overall design.

As I mentioned there are other paid tools that are also good. DashThis is one that I have used that also has a large number of data points. They provide basic data for many integrations and some advanced metrics for certain platforms. Other tools out there may not carry over all data points but let you custom query or build out additional metrics. This does mean it’s more a challenge to the upfront to get it to where you want.

All in all, there is no one best option but really what is right for you. If budget is a concern, ease of use, and general integrations Google Data Studio might be your best solution to start to dip your toes in the dashboard visualization pool.

If you’re interested in discussing this more or any other topics on digital marketing, feel free to contact me to keep the conversation going!