An Excellent Analytics Dashboard by Antonio Petra, Native

Guest author: Antonio Petra, Head of Insight | Native South Africa

Native is a digital agency based in Johannesburg, South Africa. It is the biggest digital agency in the country servicing clients in a wide spectrum of industries. Visit us at www.Native.co.za.

Analytics data is magical, it’s often the first view a company has into the intricate movements of a consumer through their product interaction. It’s a fascinating journey that is in itself as entertaining to watch as it is to interpret.

However, for the most part much of this interaction is meaningless. Coming from someone who bases most of what they do on Analytics, it’s a pretty shocking statement. That basically most of the data that the really smart analytics tools you use to gather information on your digital customer interaction is effectively a pointless data dump.

There are two critical learning’s we realised needed to be implemented into our reporting when we created the Native Insight Division.

1. The 90/10 Rule. (As defined by Avinash Kaushik)
2. Data is Meaningless without Actionable Insight

With this in mind we decided to create a new way for our customers to view their digital platform data, a way that would cut the clutter; offer as close to pure insight as possible; and show how their digital platforms effected their bottom line performance.

The only method for doing this was to construct dashboards for our clients. Dashboards that would be updatable and give complete transparency over online performance at any stage of the project life-stage.

Dashboards
The concept of a dashboard is nothing new, you can create them in almost any analytics programme. What we have done is to take this a step further and create the dashboards as standalone elements which draw multiple levels of the businesses data and present it in an easy to understand way. So we have reduced hundreds of complex Events on the website into measurable buckets (essentially a measurement framework), which become metrics for consumer interaction and can be tied directly to our clients bottom line.

Basically we’ve given clients a really simple way of evaluating their online performance, and a way to identify issues in the user process.

All of our dashboards are created in Excel, we have found this to be the easiest method. In addition the Excellent Analytics has provided us with a fantastic way to rapidly construct and pull API data. Without Excellent Analytics the process of constructing dashboards would have probably been to drawn out to actually make it a cost effective process.

The dashboards also feature additional elements to help the clients quickly identify issues or opportunities on their websites, as well as the ability to view trends over a period. In the example below we have an overview of traffic sources and geographic regions by province, on the left the client can select and graph any of these metrics.

An example of a trend viewer panel, The overall data for the period is represented on the left, while the graphing component for those metrics is represented on the right.

We utilise this same method to show much more specific client data depending on the requirements. For example for automotive clients we break down range and model, for retail clients we break down pre-purchase interaction types.

One of the most interesting elements to the dashboards is possibly the campaign module. The campaign module assesses campaigns by three major elements:

1. Amount of Visits and Ultimate Website Goal
2. Quality of Traffic as compared to website average
3. How far down the brand funnel were users driven

This table gives our clients a really great understanding of the actual value of their traffic not only in terms of how many registrations or purchases it has drive, but also in terms of how much brand immersion or education it has encouraged.

All of the modules I have shown you form part of a larger set of components that give our clients a complete overview of their digital platforms, many of these components are custom built for Top Level Management, Webmasters, Content and Social Media teams. To give you an idea though, this is a section of the Webmaster Dashboard.