Reports
Tips for working with Dashboards and Widgets
Identify the audience
Think about who will use the dashboard: are you the only user or will you share the dashboard with others? Let's say you need to keep people from various organizations informed about your messaging programs. You might need a dashboard for executives, another dashboard for IT, and another for your own team. A good rule of thumb is to keep the data on a given dashboard specific to one type of user. A dashboard becomes less efficient to use when it contains a mix of data, some that's relevant to one audience and some to another.
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Dashboards for executives
Executives always seem pressed for time and are often interested in seeing just high-level information that tells them whether you're on the right track. So keep dashboards for executives focused on strategy rather than operational details. If you've established key performance indicators (KPI) for your project, create a dashboard that reports on those indicators, such as revenue and costs month over month.
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Dashboards for IT
IT personnel will be interested primarily in operational data that tells them whether your messaging programs are running reliably. In addition to knowing about uptime and scheduled maintenance events, your operational audience may be interested in message success/failure rates and traffic volumes.
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Dashboards for managers
Anyone with a direct stake in your messaging programs, including program managers and marketing managers will be interested in data that lets them see whether the program is running smoothly and whether there's an unusual number of errors occurring. These users are also sometimes interested in drilling into data to see information by timeframe, message originator, mobile operator, or country.
Identify the dashboard's objective
The most effective dashboard is one that supports a single objective. In other words, each graphical widget answers a question relevant to one objective.
For example, let's say your team is running a mobile marketing campaign to attract customers to a new coupon program. The program involves inviting customers to sign up by texting COUPON to a short code. You're using two different short codes, one in an advertisement running in transit stations and one in an email ad. A common metric for programs like this is the engagement rate: how many people are joining the new program? To track this metric, you could create a dashboard for the marketing team that contains a widget showing the number of customers opting in per day. You could also create two separate dashboards of the same metric but focused on each short code. This would answer the question, which channel is more effective? Another metric deserving its own dashboard are the number of customers opting out of your program.
There are always multiple ways to visualize your data. Knowing the metrics before you start setting up dashboards and widgets will help you get maximum value from these reporting tools.
Decide how often to refresh the data
You'll want to make sure that your dashboard data is refreshed at the right intervals. The refresh characteristic is a function of the underlying report rather than the dashboard widget itself. If you base a widget on a report that runs daily, then the widget will update daily. If you base a widget on a report that runs monthly but you'd like the widget to update more frequently, then you need to modify the underlying report, or run the report (select the report, select More Actions and Run Now). Once the report finishes running, the widget will refresh.
For information about how to modify the schedule of a custom report, see Create a Custom Report: Detailed Steps.