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When you’re in the car, the dashboard tells you everything you need to know.
It shows you how fast you’re going, how much gas is left in the tank, if there are any issues with the engine and more.
It’s all of the data of your automobile in one easy display.
It’s no wonder that dashboards have appeared in sales, marketing, finance, management and many other facets.
Over the years, dashboards have improved and evolved. With the right dashboard, you can measure the health of your strategies in a single view.
This discussion will look at what is the purpose of a dashboard and alternatives to the Google Dashboard for PPC marketers.
Let’s get started.
What are dashboards? Dashboards display an interface of helpful gauges and charts that allow us to understand key performance indicators at a glance.
Some dashboards even allow you to make changes to your activities to improve performance.
In other words, dashboards are an interactive control center that details all of your most vital data and information.
With such an essential role, the purpose of a dashboard can’t easily be explained. There are several benefits to using this tool in your various processes, especially PPC marketing.
The main advantage of a PPC dashboard is visibility. You can see all of the most crucial inner workings of your account on one page.
This account-wide overview helps you quickly measure the success of an advertising campaign. If performance spikes or drops off, you’ll detect the change in your dashboard and take action.
With all of the moving pieces, metrics, options and other settings in your PPC strategy, having a singular view for the most relevant details of your campaigns is crucial to success.
The other purpose of a dashboard is to enhance your internal and external communication.
Often, you find yourself reporting data findings to stakeholders, clients and other parties. Dashboards are a great way to do this. They encompass all of your most crucial data and analysis results.
Plus, dashboards allow these stakeholders to periodically check performance on their own, instead of waiting for your reports.
With just one click, you can share everything with the client or manager!
To improve your performance, you have to know the latest trends. The sooner you act on an emerging pattern or shift, the more potential value there is to gain.
It’s like having the opportunity to invest in a Fortune 100 company at the ground floor.
The purpose of a dashboard is to help you interact with your data in a singular, straightforward view. With the right Google Ads dashboard, you can swiftly detect and act on any new trend in keywords or search behaviors.
By becoming the first business to capitalize, you’ll establish yourself in the ad ranks and make it harder for off-guard competitors to benefit.
Dashboards aren’t just handy for detecting trends. They are also powerful tools when looking for outliers, anomalies and other unexpected behaviors in your data.
Like the check engine light in your car suddenly illuminating, outliers in a PPC dashboard are immediately apparent. You can quickly spot the data points that don’t match your normal performance levels.
This speedy detection of outliers and anomalies allows you to act faster and ensure that any potential issues or opportunities are managed and taken care of properly.
All of the data that you include in your dashboard helps you make better decisions. Plus, you make these decisions with concrete evidence, rather than assumptions or guesses.
Data-driven decision-making is vital to success in the Digital Age. You have mountains of data available, containing all of the knowledge you need to improve your strategies and achieve success.
The trick is being able to extract that knowledge from all your raw information. By giving you a complete data overview of your strategies, dashboards give you a crucial tool in understanding your metrics and making data-driven decisions.
Ultimately, what is the purpose of a dashboard but to make you more efficient? That’s what anyone wants from all their tools — the ability to get more done with the time you have.
By creating a one-stop page to view your account-level PPC performance, you save lots of time having to hunt down each individual report.
In turn, this helps you make decisions faster and identify those crucial changes to your performance that require action.
Dashboards fill many roles and applications. You can use a dashboard for virtually any data-rich process.
To help understand some of these applications, here are some dashboard examples for various purposes.
Marketing dashboards are crucial, especially in the multi-channel world that we live in. Marketing doesn’t just happen in one place, but across multiple channels — SEO, PPC, social media, blogging, display advertising, etc.
You need a dashboard to measure the success of each individual channel and your marketing strategy as a whole.
Thus, marketers will often work with multiple dashboards. You may even have two or three dashboards for the same channel, depending on your goals.
Businesses need to have healthy sales numbers and a robust bottom line to stay afloat. Some companies focus entirely on their sales to measure success.
A sales dashboard puts all of this data in a single place, including your total sales, where your sales come from, the average sale value and more.
With a sales dashboard, you can quickly see the financial health of your business and how valuable your sales strategies are to customers.
Executives have to keep an eye on multiple departments and strategies simultaneously. They have a finger in everything!
Executive dashboards help summarize all of the most crucial information in one place. It presents the entire organization’s performance details in a straightforward, digestible format.
Again, it’s about efficiency. Executives are incredibly busy. Dashboards allow them to stay on top of everything, without spending too much time reading multiple management reports for every facet of the company.
While every dashboard is helpful to a point, some are certainly better than others. This raises an interesting question: why are some dashboards good and why do some dashboards fail?
Many factors need to align perfectly to create the best dashboard experience.
When building or investing in a new dashboard, the first thought is to ask, “what is the purpose of this dashboard?” What do you need the tool to measure and why?
If you don’t get this question entirely correct, you may get a dashboard that doesn’t deliver the results you need.
You may have multiple organizational goals at once. You should think about how you can create one dashboard to encompass all of these various parts.
That said, it’s also vital to know when your dashboard is too overloaded. You want this tool to improve efficiency and help you see the big picture. Having too much stuff on your dashboard will distract from both of these objectives.
This factor goes hand-in-hand with knowing what to ask. You need to know the right data to include in your dashboard.
Even if you ask the right question(s), you may select the wrong data to answer those queries. Or, you’ll grab too much data and your dashboard will become redundant or overwhelming.
There are two elements to keep in mind when selecting data: what you want to monitor and analyze and the data source.
The first element requires you to think critically about your goals and KPIs. If metrics don’t directly relate to these objectives, they are best left off your dashboard.
Since dashboards provide an overview of your entire account performance, you have to be absolutely sure that you’re only including data from verified sources. Otherwise, your whole dashboard may be inaccurate!
What are dashboards without an audience? You need to think about who will use the dashboard. If you’re setting up a dashboard for yourself, the decision is very easy because you know what you need and like. It’s less clear-cut when the dashboard is for stakeholders or clients.
It may seem silly but some dashboards fail for the littlest details, like choosing the wrong color or font. Other times, the failure is more prominent, such as including the wrong data.
Try and put yourself in the shoes of the audience. Who are they? What do they want? How can you serve those needs with a dashboard?
The deeper you understand the audience, the easier it is to create a compelling dashboard for them.
As you’re asking your questions and choosing your data and audience, consider the look and appearance of your dashboard.
How your dashboard physically looks and operates will substantially impact how useful it is to your audience.
As mentioned, this tool needs to be clear and straightforward. If you squeeze too much data on the page, you’ll lose the simplicity and ease that dashboards are known to provide. However, if you include too little data, your dashboard will be incomplete.
The best dashboards use their appearance as a way to engage audiences. The colors you choose, charts you include and other design elements you incorporate should all work in unison to deliver a beautiful dashboard.
It has to look so good audiences want to take a look!
Data (and dashboards) are not always universal. Connectivity and interfacing issues occur when you can’t connect your dashboard to other tools or business systems.
It’s hard to anticipate compatibility issues, especially when developing dashboards for others to use. You may not know all of the various tools and systems they will use in connection with the dashboard.
Thus, you must communicate with the intended audience and ask about any obstacles they face. This will help you troubleshoot interfacing and compatibility issues promptly.
You don’t want users to neglect the dashboard or enter their data manually due to a connectivity problem!
Dashboards can be expensive, which makes selecting the correct one an incredibly crucial decision.
Depending on the solution, you may have to pay for individual licenses for each person accessing the tool. Other providers charge a monthly or yearly subscription fee that will change depending on how many users.
When selecting a dashboard, you need to consider all of the above elements and think about the best pricing plan for your needs. You should cross-compare prices of multiple solutions to find the optimal choice.
Every Google Ads user is familiar with the Google Dashboard. It shows you a basic overview of your PPC performance.
Google’s dashboard is only helpful to a point. Many PPC experts wish it had more features and functionality. Some of the commonly cited problems with it are:
The bottom line is that the Google Dashboard has multiple pain points. PPC Signal, on the other hand, solves these problems and offers an overall more efficient dashboard for PPC marketers.
PPC Signal is a Google Ads management tool that relies on artificial intelligence technology to track and detect significant performance changes in your accounts automatically.
Every trend, shift or change that the system detects is logged and presented on the tool’s main dashboard.
This means that the PPC Signal dashboard operates as a complete index of every significant change to hit your PPC strategies.
Note the word significant. PPC Signal doesn’t just let you know every single time a metric moves up or down.
The AI system carefully and meticulously analyzes every increase or decrease and compares it to past performance to determine noteworthy and substantial changes.
You can sum up the difference between PPC Signal and other tools in one word: efficiency.
Whereas the Google Dashboard gauges your overall performance, PPC Signal enables you to look specifically at how your performance is changing.
It’s the difference between show and tell. Google shows you your performance data. PPC Signal tells you how it’s changed.
This is a tremendous difference when it comes to efficiency. With the Google Dashboard, you have to analyze each change for yourself. You have to view the dashboard and look for useful insights.
With PPC Signal, this part of the process is done for you. The system presents you with complete insights into how your specific strategies have changed, even down to the keyword level.
Instead of struggling through tedious analysis, you can focus all of your time and attention on taking action on your data.
PPC Signal relies on machine learning algorithms to detect trends, shifts, outliers, anomalies and other exciting patterns in your data, whether positive or negative.
Without getting too deep into the AI technology, let’s look at the user experience for PPC Signal.
When you access the PPC Signal tool, you arrive at your main dashboard screen.
Here, you see all of your active signals. You can also see how many signals you’ve bookmarked or resolved.
While this sample Google Ads account has only 21 active signals, a larger one may have hundreds.
To make it easier to find the more relevant changes to your business’ goal, PPC Signal includes a number of filtering options that you can use to customize the active signals that appear.
You filter by:
For every individual signal, you can view it closer.
Clicking Explore will open an expanded view of the performance change, making PPC Signal an impressive, interactive dashboard for Google Ads users.
In this menu, you can engage with the data further. You can add additional metrics to the visualization, bookmark it for later action, take action and view the data as a table.
You can easily export the data to Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel or another tool, which guarantees compatibility and easy interfacing with existing systems.
Essentially, PPC Signal automatically delivers a steady stream of actionable insights for your Google Ads strategies.
You can use filters to pick and choose which insights you want to investigate. The PPC Signal system even recommends what action to take to resolve risks or capitalize on emerging opportunities!
Reports and dashboards are often confused because they include some of the same elements (charts, tables, graphs and so on). A report is a collection of data detailing a specific event or analysis. Meanwhile, dashboards monitor what’s going on and provide a consistent overview of performance. You may monitor your marketing dashboard and notice a loss in traffic. Then, you conduct a more detailed PPC report to find out why this loss occurred.
Many elements work together to create the appearance of a dashboard. Ideally, a dashboard should be informative, but also clear and concise. You want to convey the most crucial information in a manner that’s easiest to understand. To do this, you may need to remove tertiary information that is less valuable. That said, including too little information in the dashboard may make it less helpful.
Dashboards utilize charts, graphs and other data visualizations to make the information more accessible. It’s much faster for the brain to comprehend visual depictions of data than the raw numbers themselves. Plus, these visuals are more engaging and aesthetically pleasing, which will improve the overall appearance of the dashboard.
What is the purpose of a dashboard? For a dashboard to be helpful, it needs to make your life easier and more efficient.
Most dashboards achieve this by making your most important data more accessible for easier routine monitoring. This helps you detect changes in overall performance that need further investigating.
However, the limitations of the Google Dashboard leave a lot to be desired by PPC marketers.
PPC Signal takes the dashboard to the next level. Instead of showing your overall performance and asking you to do the analysis, PPC Signal presents complete, verified insights and the recommended action.
The only effort on your end is to decide which signals to act on first! This makes your PPC campaign management incredibly efficient. Nothing will go undetected!
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