Your Executive Dashboard Isn't for Analysts
In my last post, I wrote about the importance of defining meaningful KPIs before trying to measure success. If your conversion rate increased two percentage points, is that good? Without a baseline, a target, and an understanding of the business objective behind the metric, you don't really know.
Once you've established those KPIs, however, there's another question:
How best to report them to executives?
One of the most common mistakes I see in analytics reporting is treating an executive dashboard like a condensed analyst dashboard.
They're not the same thing.
An analyst may need dozens of metrics, dimensions, breakdowns, filters, trends, and visualizations to understand what's happening and investigate why. An executive generally needs something different. They need to know whether the organization is achieving its goals, where it isn't, and where their attention may be required.
The Practical Takeaways
Keep executive dashboards short and to the point.
Cater the data in each dashboard to its audience.
Focus on answering three questions:
Where are our KPIs vs their targets?
What is the trend for our KPIs?
Why were there significant changes in some KPIs?
Start With the Audience, Not the Data
When building a dashboard in Workspace, it's tempting to start by asking, "What data do we have?"
For an executive dashboard, I'd start with a different question:
"What does this executive need to know?"
A Chief Marketing Officer and a Director of Digital Analytics may both care about website performance, but they shouldn't necessarily receive the same dashboard.
The analyst may need to see traffic sources, campaign performance, conversion funnels, individual page performance, error rates, device types, and dozens of other variables.
The CMO may need to know whether digital acquisition is growing, whether those visitors are converting, whether key customer journeys are improving, and whether the organization is on track to meet its goals.
That difference should determine what goes on the dashboard.
A Dashboard Should Answer Questions
I've seen plenty of dashboards that are essentially collections of numbers.
Visits: 4.2 million.
Conversion rate: 6.1%.
Form submissions: 87,432.
Average engagement time: 3:42.
Those numbers may all be accurate. But what are they telling the person looking at them?
An effective executive dashboard should provide context.
If conversion rate is 6.1%, what was the target? What was it last quarter? Is it trending in the right direction? Is the change large enough to matter?
If form submissions increased 14%, was the organization's goal 5% growth or 20% growth?
That's the connection to the KPI discussion from my previous post. The KPI isn't valuable merely because you've put it on a dashboard. Its value comes from helping someone understand performance relative to a business objective.
Show the Target
One of the simplest ways to make an executive dashboard more useful is to stop displaying KPIs in isolation.
Instead of:
Conversion Rate: 6.1%
consider presenting:
Conversion Rate: 6.1%
Target: 6.0%
Performance vs Target: +0.1pp
Now the executive knows considerably more without having to perform any analysis.
Use Trends to Provide Context
A single number is a snapshot.
A trend tells a story.
If an executive sees that conversion rate is currently above target, that's useful. But seeing that it has steadily improved for six months tells them something more.
Likewise, a KPI may still be above target while trending downward for several consecutive periods. That's something leadership may want to know before the metric actually falls below its target.
Executive dashboards should therefore combine current performance with enough historical context to make the direction of the business clear.
For example:
Conversion Rate Last Month: 6.1%
Last 3 Months Trend: -0.6pp
This highlights that while the conversion rate is still above target, the trend is downward and may warrant attention.
Which leads to the next question: why?
Explain What Matters Without Writing a Book
Showing that a KPI has changed significantly is useful. When you know why it changed, an executive dashboard should provide that context as well.
That doesn't mean adding a paragraph of analysis next to every visualization. If conversion rate declined because, for example, a technical issue affected a high-traffic form for several days, a brief Text panel in Workspace can tell the executive what happened and, if appropriate, what is being done about it.
For example:
Conversion Rate Last Month: 6.1%
Last 3 Months Trend: -0.6pp
Conversion rate was negatively impacted by a form error affecting mobile users from July 8-12. The issue has been resolved.
That's probably enough.
The executive now knows that performance is trending downward, understands at least one significant reason why, and knows that the identified issue has been addressed. The detailed analysis that established the cause doesn't need to be reproduced on the executive dashboard.
The same approach can be used for other significant anomalies, unusual external events, or changes in measurement that affect the interpretation of a KPI.
The same approach can be used for other significant anomalies, unusual external events, or changes in measurement that affect the interpretation of a KPI. If the cause of a significant change isn't yet known, say that it's being investigated. If there's a working theory that hasn't been confirmed, make that clear as well.
In short, don't put a significant positive or negative KPI change on the dashboard without providing some context for why it happened.
The key is restraint. Use Text panels to explain changes that materially affect how an executive should interpret the data. If the explanation starts turning into a research paper, it probably belongs somewhere else.
Design for Five Minutes, Not Fifty
I like a simple test for executive dashboards:
Can an executive understand the state of the digital business in five minutes?
I like a simple test for executive dashboards:
Can an executive understand the state of the business in five minutes?
At a high level, the dashboard should allow them to answer three questions:
Where are we vs. target? Are the organization's key performance indicators meeting the goals that were established for them?
Where are we headed? Are those KPIs improving, deteriorating, or remaining relatively stable over time?
Why? Why did we see significant changes in these KPIs, and is there enough context to understand what drove those changes?
An executive shouldn't have to spend fifty minutes examining tables and interpreting visualizations to answer those questions. The dashboard should surface what matters, provide enough context to understand significant changes, and make it clear when something warrants further investigation.
At Heavey Digital Consulting, we help organizations get more value from Adobe Customer Journey Analytics by connecting implementation, measurement strategy, KPIs, and reporting to the business objectives they're intended to support. That includes designing executive dashboards that communicate what matters without burying decision-makers in everything that can be measured.
Because reporting more data isn't the goal.
Making better decisions is.
