If you are not familiar with creating dashboards, it can be a little overwhelming trying to figure out how to bring all your data together to build a full 360-degree view of your business.
ReportPlus is a self-service data visualization, business intelligence software that enables you to visualize your significant business metrics, like marketing performance, monitoring operational trends, visualizing KPIs, and optimizing customer portfolios, in one centralized location. To show you how we are going to walk you through the creation of the email marketing campaign dashboard below using data from a sample excel file.
When you first come into the application you are present with a screen directing you where to go to begin creating your first dashboard:
After selecting empty dashboard you able to pick the data source that you want to start with. ReportPlus offers connections to a number of data sources like Excel, SharePoint, CRM, Salesforce, Microsoft Analysis Services and many more:
Once you select your data source you will be brought into the widget editor. Our excel file pulls in fields surrounding the marketing campaign:
After you select your data source you can begin to drag and drop your populated fields into your pivot panel to create visualizations. In our first visualization, we want to show the number of emails received vs the number of emails that were then opened. So, we drag the dates field to rows, the recipients and the opened fields to the values and then select your visualization type. In this case, comparing them in a bar chart gives you an insight how the emails are performing.
Once you complete your first visualization click done and you will be brought back out to the dashboard view. Here you can press and hold your visualization (on iOS) or left click (on desktop) and adjust the size and when there is more than one visualization can move them around.
Next step is to add a new visualization, by clicking the blue plus button on in the bottom right corner. This is when you can choose to add more visualizations from the existing data source or choose a new one. There is great value in being able to bring multiple data sources into one location provide deeper insights into the full story of your business! For quick easy access to the data that you have been working with already we provide you with a quick “data in dashboard” section, that we will use for the purpose of this example:
We will continue to with the same email marketing campaign data we will create our next visualization. We want to show the percentage of opened emails by category. We will use a pie chart to show this so we want to drag the category to be our rows (our values that will become our variable in the legend) and opened to the rows.
Showing bounce rate progression by month can be done similarly to the bar chart we created, but instead we are going to use a line chart. By clicking on the date field after you bring it over you can click on that field to bring up different options for displaying your data. You can filter by rule (that include this year, this month, custom date range, etc.), aggregation by day, month or year, etc.
Next to show the number of unsubscribed emails by categories we again have a similar process dragging the category to rows and unsubscribed to values. This time we are going to bring the date over to filters so that when we expand the visualization in dashboard mode we have a quick easy way to filter by date.
Creating the average bounce rate gauges requires you to drag over the value field you would like to show. It automatically populates the sum of the values, but you have the choice to change that to the max, average, min, and more, by clicking on the field.
To create the last two gauges we can simply duplicate the current one and then edit it inside the editor to change out the bounce rate for open rate
After you exchange the bounce rate for click right we need to select the value column to read the new field on the right:
These gauges are designed to be fully customized so that you can present your data in the appropriate colors. Since a low click-through is bad we would want lowers numbers to be presented with red instead of green by clicking on the bounds field in the Gauge Settings
Inside each band configuration allows us to choose a color for representation, a symbol, and the values between they get set. For the click-through rate we will design gauge bounds to be the following:
After you click done on your final visualization one of the last steps in finishing your dashboards is choosing which, if any, themes you would like to pick for your dashboard:
This dashboard is now ready to be analyzed or shared with other members of your team to collaborate together!
Interested in building your own dashboards? Download a free trial of any of our ReportPlus platforms now, or contact us to see the wonders it can do for your team’s productivity!
