Episode 25: Visualize Your Data Story with Dashboards
Harnessing Visual Dashboards to Understand Your Business Data and Drive Decisions with Confidence
What good is data if you can't make decisions on it?
That's where visual dashboards come to the rescue.
Imagine having all your data together, making it easy to see how your business performs.
Your custom-built dashboard will track KPIs, web analytics, social media data, and more to help you better understand your data's story and make better decisions to march forward with confidence.
Podcast Transcript:
0:01 Kiva Slade
Hello and welcome to collab with Kiva. I'm your host Kiva, Slade. From the marbled halls of the US Congress to my racing themed office chair. I've learned that there is no perfect path to the life of your dreams. My journey over the past 20 years has included being a legislative director for a member of Congress, policy director for a nonprofit, stay at home mom, homeschooling mom, jewelry biz owner, and now the owner of a service based business. Whether your journey has been a straight line, or full of zigs and zags. Join me and my guest as we share insights hope in lessons learned from our female entrepreneurship journeys. Made the collaborative sharing of our stories be the tide that lifts your boat. Let's dive in. Hello, and welcome back to collab with Kiva. I am your host, Kiva. Slade, we have been diving into web analytics, social media analytics, digital marketing, analytics, and all things data related to how our businesses are, like found on the internet. What journey are customers take, as they go from learning about as to better understanding as to maybe making a purchase with us? We've talked about Google Analytics, we've talked about so many different things. And in the midst of all this, you might be wondering, okay, Kiva, where do I store this data? What do I do with this data that you have told me I need? I'm so happy you asked that question. Because, as we talked about before, your data definitely tells the story. It's whether or not you're listening to the story. And it's sometimes hard to fully follow the story. If the data is just housed in, say, a spreadsheet or Google Analytics, the data has to come out and basically turn into a visualization. And I love to refer to those and many in the industry do as dashboards in these dashboards can take the data that's important for you because remember, just because you can measure something doesn't mean you should. So measuring what matters in your business, and actually having that consolidated into a visual representation, that you can check as the CEO or as the head marketer, or something along those lines, that you can get a pulse of what is happening in the business, quick snapshot of it. Now, let's be realistic. For anyone who's had any experience with statistics or numbers in general. Numbers can be skewed, let's be honest. Okay. stories can be told with numbers that Oh, no, sometimes they might skirt some ethical boundaries with those. In addition to that, there's just some bad dashboards and charts out there, you know, like, not everything has to be a pie chart. Sorry, not sorry. Not everything translates well as a bar graph. In we have scatter plots, I mean, literally, there is no shortage of ways in which one can share data or visualize it. However, it's important that we actually visualize it in a way that makes sense and stays true to the data that is being shown.
4:02
And if you've ever there's charts upon charts are just examples of you, where you really have to pay attention to see where things were manipulated. And we're not about the manipulation of data, we are about listening to the story that the data is sharing with us, and actually then using that information to drive decisions in the business. So I want to be super clear about that. So what happens with a dashboard? And it will depend, of course, on your type of business, what are the things that you are interested in tracking? For example, I've shared one example of a client of mine for those in the digital space online space. Many of you have a quote unquote, funnel. And what happens in that funnel? Well, there's the top of the funnel. That's typically an awareness As part of the journey, where customers are getting to know you getting to understand more about you, so you might have an opt in on your website, a freebie, or a small, small offer that people can purchase, or they can share their email address and start to get to know more about you and what you do. And then they kind of move to we like you can either call them a qualified lead or, or not, and depending on you know, on how you decide to set up things in your customer journey, but we move on to the consideration phase, which, really, you're naming that problem. And you're, they're understanding how you can solve that problem for them. Okay, and then there's that decision phase where you've provided a pretty good solution, and they're like, Hey, take my money, I need that. So when you're or you might have an event that you are wanting to sell tickets to, and you want to see how many people actually work their way through the funnel, in app, purchase the tickets for the event, or the webinar, or whatever it is that you might be doing. The bottom line is, most businesses have some element of a funnel, whether it's a simple one, or whether it's one that can be a bit more complicated with order bumps, and upsells, and all kinds of other bells and whistles. The point being, you want to gauge how effective each phase of your funnel actually is, and then also your overall funnel. So with this client of mine, we set up goals in Google Analytics, and we were able to determine not only how many people came to the initial landing page, and where they came from, so that's important as well, whether they were from Facebook, where are they from Instagram, where are they from? Our email list. So that was helpful, because then we were able to track from there, not only who landed on the website, the landing page, we then went to see who went from the landing page to the checkout page. And then who actually checked out from the checkout page and made their way to the thank you page. And that's important, because technically, if you go from the landing page to the checkout page, and then you say, Ah, no, maybe not today, maybe tomorrow, maybe never, you know, technically they've abandoned that cart. So it was interesting to see it with numbers, but also visually seeing how it truly does look like a funnel, you'll have a large number of people who will visit that initial landing page, there's a smaller amount of people who will go from your landing page to your checkout page. And there's even a smaller amount of people who will go from your land your checkout page to the actual thank you page because they've actually completed the purchase. And when you can see that visualized into an actual funnel, you can start to look and see where are people dropping off? What's taking place, what maybe the copy isn't resonating from landing page to checkout page, maybe there's a price point issue, maybe there's something else that's going on, your checkout page might have some issues with it, and it's making it hard for people to actually check out.
9:01
So there's things that you can start to look at based on that information. However, if you don't have that information, how do you know whether or not you had a successful funnel? can sometimes we might set a goal for ourselves and say, hey, I want to sell 20 tickets to this. I'm just going to use that as an example. And you sell the 20 and you're thinking to yourself, Yay, I did great. If you looked at the numbers, though, you actually could have sold 50 Then you might not feel that it was as great as it was that you sold the 20. And so really setting that up for the client was super helpful in being able to see what was taking place. And there was a lot of other things behind the scenes that led into that and seeing where the actual buyers were coming From Surprisingly, even though we had a lot of visitors from Instagram, we did not have a lot of buyers from Instagram. And so that let us know a few things as well. But I share all that to say. And that's just one type of dashboard. You can also have a full on, you know, CEO dashboard for various things that you want to track in your business. I was talking with a friend the other day, and she was saying that her dashboard is it's like her lifeline, she is able to pop in, look at it and see what's going on in her business. And she's currently in the process of looking to sell the business. And the dashboard has actually become a valuable tool in the process of selling the business, because she's able to share that information. And it concisely paints the picture of what's taking place and how profitable the business is. And it has been a huge asset to her business by having this dashboard available. And again, there are tons of different things that you can measure, if you are in the online space. Having data on your, your sales process, from when someone does opt in to your website, your mailing list, how long is it before they make a purchase? You can literally track that data and have an understanding of what that is, and how many how long of a process is that, which helps when you're thinking about maybe launching something new and thinking, Oh, I can do this in three weeks? Well, if most of your customers take three months, before they make a purchase, does it make sense to truly do something and launch it in three weeks? Your sales cycle is a bit longer than that. And that's helpful information to actually know. Or do people have I've seen in a business where there's a low price kind of bundle, and people love it, but they literally join to get it and then they leave. That's the really the it's such a draw. But it's not keeping the people in their ecosystem. So there's a lot of different things, obviously, that you can discern from your data. But you have to actually have the data to be able to exercise the discernment. And again, there's different different ways in which data can be visualized, to make the numbers make sense. But also to once again, give you that one stop shop so to speak of where you can go to get a pulse of what's taking place in your business, is I don't know if you've ever gone into Google Analytics. But man, let me tell you, there's a lot of things that you can look at. And once again, not all of them might be the things that you should look at.
13:29
So, it's super helpful to wind up having something that actually aggregates together the data points that you need to keep track of in your business. So again, we've been talking about the importance of measurement, and measuring the activities in your business, measuring a lot of different things in your business. But also taking that now a step further in understanding that it's great to have the data. But you actually have to do something with the data. And if you remember, we talked in the beginning about to read Raymond's quote, which is analytics equals two thirds of marketing. We have to get that fractional percentage, right in our lives and in our businesses. Because in many cases, analytics is not even a third of marketing for some, and it's no shade. We've all not done it. And it's it's not anyone you know, saying oh my gosh, I can't believe you haven't had this. No, not at all. Because most people don't, however, as we continue to move forward in not only our digital age, but as we just continue to move forward in the world we currently live in realizing the importance of technology, realizing the importance in the prevalence of technology, and how we shop and how we glean information and how we do things, it is going to be imperative that businesses pay attention to their numbers. And I tell this to businesses all the time, not just your analytic numbers as it relates to your marketing efforts, all of your numbers are super duper important people in knowing where your money is going, knowing that return on that investment, understanding what your profit margin is, understanding so many different parts of your business, those numbers are important. I'm always reminded of Oprah, when she had her show, and Toni Braxton was on and it was after a bankruptcy. And Oprah was saying you always sign your own checks. And that's equivalent to you always know your numbers. As the CEO of your business, whether it is the CEO of one or the CEO of many, you have to know your numbers, it is your job to know what those numbers are. And, in some cases, before, taking it back to web analytics, social media analytics analytics, in general, when it comes to digital marketing. I've seen some of your sites, there's multiple instances of Universal Analytics installed multiple tag managers, that lets me know that these kinds of things are not truly being tracked in house, there is probably like, at one point, this one oh, we didn't realize we had it. So we put on this code. And then we didn't realize this. So someone said we needed this. And it's okay, that we need to get that cleaned up, we need to get that, you know, give it some white glove treatment, and make sure that everything is pointing in the right direction, that everything is set up the way that it needs to be set up, in order for you to start collecting the data that you need to make the decisions in your business that you need to make. And I'll reiterate what I've shared on numerous occasions, Google Analytics is not retroactive. So we don't have it, it's not going to count what took place yesterday or five minutes ago. If you do have it, and you have multiple instances of it. And we now need to clean that up. We're going to lose some data, don't panic, it's going to be okay. Because we're now going to have better data, we're going to have clean data that we're going to utilize. In addition to that, when I talk about clean, we talk about parameters and different things that are set up inside of there.
18:25
So that we really are looking at good numbers, in not inflated numbers that might come from different possibilities, one being you checking your website all the time. So I want to again, just share that a dashboard is helpful for you as a CEO. It gives you a pulse of what's taking place in your business in a visual format. Again, numbers can be used to convey stories that may not be 100%. True. So when working with someone, you want to make sure that they're having integrity with their data with your data. So that things are not being manipulated to paint a story that is an accurate, because then you will make decisions based on inaccurate data, which means your decisions are also going to be inaccurate. So data integrity, super important. Having a dashboard also important in realizing that the way we show up and keep track of these things is also important, because this is not going away. And data isn't just available to big businesses. You have a plethora of tools at your disposal, even as a small business and let's make sure we use those wisely and use them well. so that we can do the things that our businesses are set up and designed to do. If you have any questions, you want to talk about getting your own dashboard. And you want to just talk through what is it look like Kiva to clean up what I have going on. Feel free to reach out to me on my website, that 516 collaborative.com book a call, and let's talk about it. And I'll see you next week on collab with Kiba. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of collab with Kiba you know my heart, and it wants you to know that you are uniquely made and that your business path is unique to you. I hope that now you have some clear takeaways from this episode that have left you inspired and motivated to keep pressing forward on your unique path. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out on any future episodes. And of course, your reviews on Apple are greatly appreciated. If you are a small business owner, and you are ready to build out your business playbook, and you're ready to document and delegate what takes place in your business so it can grow beyond you. Make sure you visit me on my website, the 516 collaborative.com and let's schedule a time to talk. I'll see everyone next time. Bye
Meet Kiva Slade - the Founder and CEO of The 516 Collaborative. With a unique background in high-power politics on Capitol Hill and sixteen years as a homeschooling mama, Kiva found her calling in the online business world as a trusted guide for entrepreneurs looking to build the business of their dreams.
Kiva's work began behind the scenes, orchestrating the back end of businesses and managing teams. But her inner data diva couldn't help but notice that small businesses needed help harnessing the power of data for growth. So she and her team set out to uncover and tidy up the data required to enable clients to grow their businesses confidently and easily.