Dashboards are everywhere. You see them in cars, on smartphones, across watch faces and even smuggled into entertainment like video games. They also form an integral part of the business intelligence tools that guide companies around the globe. Business analytics dashboards put vital metrics at your fingertips alongside valuable business performance visibility.

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This Guide Covers:

• What Are Business Analytics Dashboards?
• Features
• Benefits
• Examples
• Best Dashboard Practices

What Are Business Analytics Dashboards?

Business analytics dashboards are information management and data visualization tools that analyze and explore data. You can use elements like filters and drill-throughs to facilitate data interaction and uncover valuable insights. Dashboards are popular business intelligence capabilities because they offer robust data analysis, customization, collaboration and forecasts.

They empower you to analyze data from various sources to strengthen decisions. Instead of compiling spreadsheets and presentations manually, modern BI platforms can access, analyze, display and share data via web-based dashboards.

Key Features

Let’s look at the essential features:

Data Sources Connection

Business analytics dashboards facilitate connections to sources like data lakes, warehouses and marts.

Data Visualizations

You can configure dashboards to include different visualization types to display performance metrics, KPIs, stats and other information. They support basic visualizations like bar, line, and pie charts or complex visuals such as heat maps, bubble charts and more.

Data Tables

Business analytics dashboards can incorporate data tables for quick looks at relevant values. Color-coding tabular data can highlight specific trends or patterns, such as declining year-over-year sales in a particular geographical region.

Drill-Down Capabilities

Analyze data at a deeper level by shifting from top-level to granular views in a click and discover hidden insights.

Data Filters

Apply data filters to customize geographic settings, dates and time ranges while comparing regional sales and other parameters to obtain a focused view of important information.

Text Boxes and Tooltips

Dashboards include text boxes and tooltips that explain data and offer additional information or context about analytical results.

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Primary Benefits

Well-designed dashboards offer major benefits such as:

• Enable informed decision-making and strategic planning.
• Make number-intensive data and business analytics metrics understandable for end users.
• Identify business trends to capitalize on opportunities and address issues.
• Support collaborative data analysis.
• Provide various visualization options to display data in the best possible manner.
• Predict accurate outcomes by analyzing historical data. For instance, you can forecast product demand and align your production processes and strategies accordingly.

Dashboard Examples

Common types of enterprise dashboards include:

Sales and Marketing

Executives, managers, sales groups and marketing teams use dashboards that display total sales, lead conversion rate, sales by region, average purchase value, lead response time and more.

A sales dashboard displaying different sales metrics.

Customer

View, explore and analyze data about your customers. Track metrics including volume, churn and retention rates, revenue per customer, lifetime value and more. Use them to plan marketing campaigns to drive sales.

A dashboard displaying eCommerce customer metrics. Source

Finance

Finance dashboards display KPIs for CFOs, executives and managers in the finance department. These dashboards constitute revenue, operating expenses, profit margins, working capital and more to monitor business performance and conduct financial planning and analysis.

A financial KPI display. Source

Human Resources

HR dashboards track employee data like the total number of employees, salary statistics, demographics, turnover and retention rate, time-to-hire, and more. Monitor other things like employee satisfaction and time to productivity to improve talent management and drive employee experience initiatives.

Employee statistics from an HR dashboard.

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Best Dashboard Practices

While designing a dashboard, you have to keep your audience in mind. You should know who’s going to use it and why. For example, if you create a dashboard for decision-makers, you should present vital KPIs and metrics on scorecards or matrices for immediate action.

Let’s look at some dashboard best practices:

Prioritize Communication

Your ultimate goal is to speed up fact-based decision making, and making a dashboard visually appealing can ensure faster adoption.

How do you make it communicative? Design a dashboard that offers a bird’s eye view of business performance and answers relevant questions. Each KPI should provide critical information to prompt immediate action.

Use Web-Based Dashboards

Web-based dashboards allow you to collaborate with team members while securing, centralizing and governing your data. They facilitate real-time information access to boost insight sharing and speed up decisions.

Put Important Information Above the Fold

Try adopting the journalistic inverted pyramid model and place your necessary content in your opening lines. This method speeds up data inspection and helps readers grasp information faster.

It’s easier for end users to compare chart types and identify trends and relationships when you place interrelated data sources together.

Placing critical metrics within the screen section you can see without scrolling can help highlight unnoticed insights.

Start With the Big Picture

Display information in high-level summary reports that provide an overview of business performance. If you want to know why something happened or what factors contributed to sales in specific regions, you can drill down into the details for more information.

Ensure Visuals Follow a Logical Order

Randomly positioning your reports on a dashboard without a logical flow is bad design that can add needless complexity to your data.

Create practical and sensible dashboard designs by:

• Putting visualizations in a proper sequence.
• Placing information in order of importance from left to right and top to bottom.
• Minimizing scrolling.
• Keeping relevant charts aligned horizontally.
• Adjusting chart sizes for readability.

Customize

Customize dashboards to suit users’ needs and demands. Each dashboard should help make relevant and timely decisions to boost performance and efficiency. For example, people from the marketing department need ROI data for their marketing campaigns, while HR initiative information is irrelevant to them.

Create Exceptions and Alerts

Access real-time data by setting up exceptions and alerts that trigger based on pre-defined measures. Sales managers can set up alert notifications when sales fall below a specific threshold to take immediate action to boost sales and achieve targets.

Use Colors Sparingly

Color can enhance visibility by drawing attention to specific changes, trends and measures. Higher contrasts between background and foreground colors lead to faster information processing. Keep data points separate while ensuring the overall aesthetic is elegant and straightforward.

Add Context

Adding context to visuals helps people interpret data correctly. The following can positively affect readability:

• Label axes, columns and rows.
• Ensure the scale starts at zero and reference points are evenly distributed to avoid misinterpretation.
• Put headers on reports, so the reader knows what they represent.
• Portray clear metric comparisons.
• Add tooltips to incorporate textual information about the visualization.

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Conclusion

Dashboards should be elegant, concise, intuitive and customized for the target audience. Following these best practices can help you design robust business analytics dashboards that accelerate business performance, drive innovation and pass on competitive advantages.

What would you add to make your business analytics dashboards compelling and robust? Let us know in the comments below.