In this episode of In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris discuss when dashboards like Google Data Studio are the best choice and especially when they’re not the best choice for getting insights out of data. What do dashboards do well, and what do they do poorly? Listen to this episode for a list of best practices around dashboards and data visualization.

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Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Christopher Penn

In this episode of in your insights, we have talked a ton about dashboards, Data Studio dashboards and the variety of other packages out there. And no surprise, a lot of vendors who offer dashboards as services say that they are the magic cure for all of your marketing reporting issues. But we know there is no such thing as magic. So today, we’re talking about what are the limitations of dashboards? What are the things that dashboards can’t do? And when is the dashboard the wrong tool to use? So Katie, let’s start with you, as the senior executive and the CEO of the company, dashboards are obviously very useful for you to be able to figure out like the general pulse check other company, but when for you, is the dashboard, not the best choice for getting information.

Katie Robbert

Um, you know, this morning actually is a really great example, I was looking at sort of the 360 of all of our data. And it was telling me what happened, it was telling me how the campaigns performed, it was telling me where traffic was coming from. But it stopped there, it didn’t tell me why that information happened. And so that’s my next step. And that’s not something I can glean from the dashboard, unless I was intimately involved in whatever the campaign was, and talking with the people, but even then, that’s not reflected on the dashboard. That would just be information that I had inside my head. So I think the biggest limitation of the dashboard is that it can tell you what happened. But very rarely does it tell you why it happened.

Christopher Penn

So where do you go for that information? Now, obviously, we’re small company. But, for example, when we both manage larger teams, how do you get that information in a way that’s scalable?

Katie Robbert

You know, that’s when you start to do a bit more of that qualitative structured market research, you could run a consumer survey, or a call tricks or a survey monkey. You know, whatever your survey provider of choices, you can start to do some audience analysis, you can just start asking your customers, you can start asking your prospects, but it’s really starting to ask those more open ended behavioral questions of why did you take this action? versus what actions did you take?

Christopher Penn

So it’s interesting, you mentioned that because we just ran our own quarterly survey, asking people so what their biggest pain point in marketing is, and we have a lot of that data, we have several hundred responses from our audience. How are you matching that up with what we see in the data? How, how do you connect the two because they’re, in a lot of cases, there’s the qualitative data is very rich, some people were very kind and providing, like paragraphs of information. And on the other hand, you pull up the dashboard, and you see, you know, this number, this number is down. How do you how do you merge the two together? Well, you

Katie Robbert

know, I think it all depends on what the question was that you were asking what your goal was. And so, you know, we asked literal one question. And that’s actually something that’s very scalable.