- Welcome back.
In this lesson we are gonna talk about
the preparational steps
that you need to undertake in order to build
an effective dashboard.
We'll go through some questions
you need to ask your audience,
assemble all the different metrics and dimensions
you want to pull from your tool
and sketch out your different visualizations
that you later want to implement in Google Data Studio.
All and more coming up right after this.
Alright.
In this course we're gonna go through a three-step process
in order to build our effective dashboard.
First of all, we go through the preparation steps
which we'll do in a second here in this lesson.
In the next lesson we're gonna talk about the data setup
and get our data sources ready
so we can then in the last lesson visualize our data
in Google Data Studio.
But for now we are just gonna go through
the preparational steps
and these are very important.
What does this actually entail?
Well, before you begin implementing anything
into different tools,
you might want to ask yourself a few questions
and this really goes into the exploration phase,
what kind of dashboard are you trying to build,
talk to your target audience,
look into how they are analyzing their data maybe nowadays
and what your dashboard will bring to the table.
Then we'll go into the definition phase
where we'll actually look at all the different metrics,
dimension data and the sources
that we need to have ready
in order to build our dashboard
and once we know what data we want to visualize
we can actually start sketching out our wireframing,
our dashboard on paper or in a wireframing software.
So, let's go a little bit more in depth into these steps.
So, first of all, in the exploration phase
you would ask questions.
Now, who's this data dashboard actually for?
Be very clear about your target audience
and then actually talk to your target audience,
what they see the dashboard actually doing for them,
what's the goal of the dashboard,
why do they want this dashboard to be built?
How should this dashboard make their lives easier?
Now if it's for example about data analysis,
then you might want to dig deeper
and find out how they are doing data analysis
without the dashboard at the moment.
How can it actually save time?
What data points are they looking at?
What analysis are they going through?
What are the different steps that they're going through
in order to get to insights.
Now, all of that feedback should be taken into account
once you conceptualize your dashboard
so your dashboard actually fulfills its purpose
for the target audience.
Now, this might look like, in our case,
take the Facebook optimizer
that actually you would ask for questions
asking what are your most important KPIs?
What do you want to have on this dashboard.
When you log into Facebook in the morning
what steps are you going through?
Why is that frustrating?
How can that be solved through a dashboard?
And you might get answers just like these
that actually tell you a lot about what this dashboard
should accomplish for the client,
for the audience, for the user
and that's also how the dashboard can be really meaningful
to the user because it actually saves some time
and you're actually using it in order to make decisions
or get a quick overview
in order to know where to dig deeper.
So, this Facebook optimizer would maybe say
I need an overview over my KPIs,
I'm really going through these steps
in order to optimize my campaigns,
I'm looking at that data,
I'm doing this analysis,
and if the dashboard would help me to do this all faster,
then it would be something that I would use.
Now, there's nothing worse than putting time
into building an awesome dashboard that nobody uses.
So, talk to your target audience
and find out what they want on this dashboard
before you start implementing anything.
Now, once you've gone through that phase,
you need to actually get some definitions straight.
From the interview you probably elicited
different metrics, different dimensions,
and different sources where this data comes from
and this is something that you need to write down
in order to be ready for the next part
when we pull the data actually from the system
and prepare it in Google Sheets.
If you don't prepare that beforehand,
first of all, won't get clear on your visualization
but may also find yourself going back and forth
between your data extracts,
the data that you want to display
and the actual visualization
which can be very distracting and not very efficient.
So, get clear about the metrics,
so for Facebook ads dashboard
you might want to know how many clicks,
how many impressions,
what was the click through rate,
what was the ad spend and so on.
Put that all down onto a sheet of paper
or into a document,
so you'll know what to look out for
once you prepare your data in the next step.
Now, once you have all the different data points
that you want to visualize,
it actually comes down to thinking about the visualization.
How can I tell a story with my dashboard?
And I'd recommend that you actually take time
to look through other dashboards,
look through other implementations
of Google Data Studio dashboards,
as for example the Google Data Studio gallery
that you can see different visualizations from
but also ask yourself how useful is this
for my dashboard?
Does it actually make sense to display the data
in that way?
Will it help my target audience
to do what they want to do with the dashboard,
for example, get you insights
or keep a clear overview?
Don't overcrowd your dashboard
and actually you can also look through other dashboards
of other companies, of other tool vendors.
There are also great examples that we will link up
in the description below that you can check out
and get inspired before you start
actually sketching and wireframing.
Now, for our example in this course
I went ahead and built a little sketch
in a tool called Balsamic.
You can check that out in the description below as well,
where I thought about okay,
what story do I want to take my user through?
What would be the visual layout?
How would we segment the data later on?
What is important to my target audience?
And this is where I came up with this little sketch here
where I said I want to have on the top my control panels
where I can choose the date
but also dig deeper into a campaign,
then we would have our most important metrics
in the first row
and in these columns we would have the acquisition,
the actual costs and the conversations,
so we get a quick overview on how that is doing.
Then we'll go through
and answer the most important questions
such as how is this stacking up to my ad budget,
my targets that I have in place already?
Give some more context on the click
versus cost per click price,
the spend versus the revenue,
we also probably also put in
the whole return on investment metric
and then down below we would have some more analysis
in form of a table where the user
can really dig into what campaign
didn't do so well,
what was the driver of the growth of my campaign,
or to the client
and which ad sets should I be looking into further?
Remember, the real goal here was to give
a quick overview for a Facebook ads manager
on how the performance of the campaign is doing
and maybe also giving some points
in order to ask more questions,
dig deeper into the data,
go into the Facebook ads interface
and optimize his campaigns.
So, I'd recommend for anybody to sketch out
or wireframe your dashboard beforehand
and get very clear about the visualizations
that might make sense for your target audience
to reach their goal.
Alright, so there you have it.
These are really the essential preparational steps
that you should go through
to build an effective dashboard.
Now, if you want to think through this by yourself
for your client or the dashboard that you are building
we actually prepared a worksheet for you
that you can download at measureschool.com/dashboardplan
and there you can fill out this worksheet
and really get clear on the message that you want to convey
to your audience.
And if you're ready to proceed,
then head over to the next video right over there
and if you haven't yet, then consider subscribing
down there because we're bringing you new videos every week.
Now, my name is Julian.
See you in the next lesson.