Performance dashboards

What a performance dashboard is

A performance dashboard is a single screen showing a small number of live figures about your content, updating itself, that you can open at any hour without asking anyone for it. Four or five figures is the right number. It is built once, wired to the sources the figures come from, and then it runs.

It is not a report and it is not a measurement plan. Monthly reporting is a written page that says what happened and what to change, because a figure on its own does not tell you that. Content KPIs is the earlier decision about which three or four numbers are worth watching in the first place. The KPI work chooses the figures, the monthly report explains them, and the dashboard is the live view in between.

When you need one

When you find yourself asking somebody a question you could answer yourself in eight seconds. How many inquiries came through the site this month. Whether the new service page is being read. Whether last week's email did anything. If those questions come up weekly and the answer arrives days later, a dashboard pays for itself in patience alone.

The honest counter-argument. A dashboard nobody opens is worse than a monthly email, because it costs money to build, it creates a false sense that the measuring is handled, and it quietly goes wrong without anyone noticing. Most owners of small businesses do not open dashboards. They read a page once a month. If that is you, buy the monthly page instead and keep the money. I will say so on the call.

You also do not need one if nobody has decided what matters yet. A dashboard built before that decision is made turns into forty tiles of everything the tool could produce, which is the failure mode this service exists to avoid.

What goes on it

A small number of figures is the entire point, so the list is deliberately short and each one earns its place.

• Inquiries from the website. The figure the business actually cares about, this month against last, taken from the form or the inbox rather than estimated.
• The pages that produce them. Which handful of pages people were on before they made contact. Usually three or four pages, and usually not the ones anyone expects.
• Visits to the pages that matter. Not the whole site. The six or eight pages you sell from, each on its own line, so a drop on one is visible.
• Published this month. A simple count against what the schedule promised. It is the figure that explains most of the others.
• One channel figure, if you have a channel. Email subscribers and clicks, or one social measure. One, not a section.

Everything else goes on a second screen you are not expected to look at, or nowhere at all. Where a figure cannot be measured honestly with the tools you have, it is left off and the reason is written down rather than approximated with something adjacent.

What you get

The dashboard. Built in whatever your business already uses to see its numbers, or in a straightforward reporting tool if you have nothing. Shared with the people who should see it, on a link that works on a phone.

A one-page note on what each figure means. What it counts, what it does not count, where it comes from, and roughly what normal looks like for you. Pinned beside the dashboard, because a figure without a definition gets misread within a fortnight.

A quarterly check that it still works. Data connections break silently when a tool updates or a form changes. Four times a year I confirm the figures are still real, and tell you if one has been wrong.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Guelph physiotherapy clinic with three practitioners wants to know whether its website is bringing in new patients or whether the referrals are all coming from doctors. The office manager currently sends the owner a monthly screenshot of a visits graph, which answers nothing.

The dashboard that gets built has five figures. New patient inquiries through the booking form, this month and last. The pages those patients were on first, which turns out to be the running-injury page and the direct-billing page, not the home page. Visits to the six condition pages, each on its own row. Pieces published this month against the two promised. And the newsletter's click count. The first surprise is the direct-billing page, which nobody thought of as a sales page and which is second only to running injuries. The clinic writes two more practical pages of that kind, and the dashboard shows within two months whether they do the same job. The owner opens it on a Monday morning, which is exactly as often as anyone needs to.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you want to know, what you currently open and how often, and whether a dashboard or a monthly page is the honest answer. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Agreed before anything is built, with the quarterly check priced separately so you can take it or leave it.
3. Access. Read-only access to your analytics, your form or booking system, and your email platform, plus whoever manages the website for a short conversation.
4. The build. Three to six working days. The figures are agreed first in a one-page sketch, so we are arguing about a list rather than about a half-built screen.
5. Handover. A short walkthrough, the note explaining each figure, and the link shared with whoever should have it.

What it costs

Quoted in CAD after the half-hour call. The price depends on how many sources have to be connected and whether the figures already exist or need defining first; a clinic with one form and one analytics account is a small job, and a company with two websites, a shop and a booking system is not. The pricing page shows the four ways of working, and a dashboard is usually set up inside a larger engagement rather than bought alone. The number is fixed in writing before anything is built.

What happens next

Most people who get a dashboard also want the plain-language page each month, because the live view shows what changed and not why. A figure that slides for two months running is the trigger for a proper look at which pages are on the way down. And once a year of figures exists, it is the honest raw material for the next plan, since by then you know which subjects produce inquiries. A dashboard is a complete piece of work on its own, though, and nothing beyond it is assumed.