Meaningful data drives business decisions, but if most stakeholders have different decisions to make and goals to reach, then how can you produce an analytics report that helps everyone?

The simple answer is: you can’t. You could, if you wrote one ultra-epic, leather-bound, 500-page update with an accompanying suggestion that recipients “leverage” the index, but if your coworkers and clients are poring over page after page of data looking for the nugget that matters to them and subsequently wondering what to do with it, then for what do they pay you, their analyst?

With a customized dashboard, you can deliver data and actionable next steps to specific teams or stakeholders based on their functions and goals.

Tailor Your Reports

Interview your stakeholders, and then tailor your data to their business objectives. If their goals are different enough, then create different reports for different people. This aligns your reports with their assigned objectives, increasing the likelihood that some good comes out of the work you produce.

PayPal partnered with Springbox to launch an asset management portal for affiliates and partners. The portal serves as a central location where all users can download branding assets and learn how to properly use PayPal-branded materials. We organized these materials based on how they should be used in interactive and print materials, as well as by geographical regions with different languages.

Once the site went live, PayPal needed to understand how people used it. Specifically:

• Who uses the portal?
• Is use increasing over time? If so, by whom? Certain countries/locations? Types of companies? Internal PayPal users or external companies?
• What materials are most popular?
• Where might people need more information or additional downloads?

To help, we designed a series of monthly dashboards that speak directly to these business objectives.

This first dashboard provides a “User Profile” displaying who accesses the site based on company and by geography. We also show activity by internal PayPal vs. external users. By highlighting how many new users have registered and how many people have logged in within the past 30, 60, and 180 days, we provide context to site usage and growth. We represent raw counts and percents of total users so PayPal can see how engaged their population is at any given time.

The second dashboard, “Site Usage and Traffic,” provides visit counts, top page counts, and asset downloads, but we also highlight pages where people often visit that may have fewer downloads available. This helps PayPal assess both sides of the spectrum: geographical regions/languages with heavy traffic and emerging regions/languages that might need increased support.

As with the “User Profile” dashboard, we can provide all of the metrics here by country, company, and traffic source — among other dimensions. In this way, both dashboards serve as a jumping off point for additional deep-dives. (For example, if PayPal were to target a campaign and wondered how that traffic behaved or if they launched new assets and needed to know how the community responded, then we could let them know. If they need to see content consumption for new users vs. repeat visitors, then we could provide that as well.) This opens up dialogue around what’s possible so that we can provide increasingly actionable insights to different stakeholders with different goals.

Wanna Know How Sharp You Look? Check a Mirror

Okay, I stole that subtitle from a post on benchmarking by Juan Damia last fall. Fact is: He’s right. We need context around performance metrics, and consequently, so do good dashboards. Rather than offering an industry average, trend out your performance over time. For PayPal, we offer cumulative and monthly comparisons. If you do provide more specific metrics around a particular segment of the population or an ad-hoc data pull, then be ready to offer an internal benchmark around that, too.