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Pull up one of your dashboards and take a look. It most likely displays your company logo, the perimeter and period of analysis, various KPIs and assorted graphics. In many dashboards – and maybe also in yours, the one you’ve created for your company – there’s a blank space. Enough space to add a few notes, and leave recipients the freedom to add their own annotations. Or maybe it’s a bordered box aptly entitled “Comments”, clearly indicating that this empty space is destined for remarks on company results. Or maybe, you or one of your colleagues has added notes on the KPI figures, on abnormal patterns, on possible explanations, or on the context surrounding a KPI’s upward evolution.

There are many questions about this part of a dashboard: Should we leave a space for comments? Should we define and limit this comment space? Should we fill this part in? If so, what do we write? Who should be responsible? Do we just describe what’s happening in the dashboard? Or should we start interpreting things? Or do we go even further and make concrete action recommendations? I’m positive that you’ve asked yourself these questions, and perhaps you are truly bothered and confused by this issue of comments. If so, here are a few thoughts to help you take the plunge and tackle dashboard comments head-on.

Is it necessary to integrate comments in a dashboard?

Not everyone agrees on this. In this article, Tim Wilson outlines several reasons why we should not integrate comments in a dashboard.

I don’t share the same opinion, and here are the 3 reasons why I believe comments should be part of a dashboard:

  • Not all recipients have the skills necessary to be able to comment on or understand what’s being measured. Lending some interpretative help will enable everyone to understand what’s happening and avoid misunderstandings.
  • Not all recipients have a full understanding of what occurred during the analysis period, such as external or internalevents that may have had an impact on site performance. Providing some context with the dashboard helps avoid incorrect interpretations or hasty overreactions.
  • Not all recipients have the time to do it, either. Decision-makers often have little time to devote to analysing numbers and graphs shown in a dashboard. It’s therefore very helpful if part of the analysis is already done. Managers or marketing departments will appreciate it if some of the analysis legwork has already been started.

Good to know:
AT Internet’s new dashboard application makes it easy to insert comments and allows you to place the Comment box in the best spot on the dashboard.

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Is it the web analyst’s job to comment on dashboards?

Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes!

A web analyst’s job is not only to provide data – his or her mission goes beyond that. The web analyst must help the company know itself better thanks to data and improve performance.

The web analyst is maybe not a marketing specialist, he or she is perhaps not aware of all initiatives that took place during the analysis period, and he or she is perhaps not up to speed on the important decisions planned for the coming weeks. But the web analyst is definitely the only one with a full understanding of the way in which KPIs are measured, of what each dashboard element corresponds to, and the only one capable of verifying data quality, if necessary.

Dashboard recipients can always modify and build on these initial comments further down the line. The goal is to initiate the analysis task so that it becomes a habit in each dashboard recipient’s mind.

How far should we go with comments?

One thing is for sure – simply describing what’s occurring, without adding a basic layer of interpretation, does not add much value. You have to go beyond just describing. Comments allow you to extract the most important takeaways from the analysis period’s occurrences. and deserving of attention.

But can we go even further? Not all data is present in a dashboard. To cull true learnings, we often need more information about the measured element. It’s sometimes necessary to access interface data in order to get more details and nuances, put it all into perspective, and qualify the information given by the KPI. It is also sometimes necessary to analyse possible causes of a problem, or at least put forth a few different potential explanations to explore. A dashboard is not an audit, which is why it’s preferable to recommend additional investigative work for a more complete picture.

Comments show the state of understanding and possible explanations of problems to be explored in more depth. They also provide an area to suggest additional analytic actions in order to better understand a problem.

You’re perhaps now convinced of comments’ importance in a dashboard, but it all seems difficult or time-consuming. We can help you.

AT Insight, a Business Analytics consulting unit, is launching a new kind of service that is a long-term partnership with clients who turn to us for their dashboard creation.

On a regular basis, an AT Insight consultant can interpret your company’s results based on your dashboards.

This will pave the way for comments to be inserted directly in your dashboards.

Here is our Dashboard Interpretation Matrix enabling us to organise our efforts:

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After having explained the contextual elements, the AT Internet consultant extracts the learnings and classifies them by different categories: Success, Poor performance, Strengths, Areas for improvement

This brings dashboard creation full circle, placing the last piece in the company’s puzzle of digital strategy tracking, and legitimising .

Author

Head of Client Success – Generaleads Benoit has a master’s degree in Economics from the University of Bordeaux and 10 years of web analytics experience developed while at AT Internet. In early 2015, Benoit joined the Google AdWords specialist agency GENERALEADS as Head of Client Success. In parallel, he’s working on the start-up GetLandy, the first landing page creation tool designed for traffic managers.

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