Product – Cyfe

Use Embedded Analytics To Easily Share Data In More Places

Liezen Van Loh — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 13:09:17 +0000

You’ve worked hard to measure metrics that matter to your business, clients, employees, or customers. Many times these metrics come from a variety of data sources making it a challenge to present a complete picture of performance. Business intelligence tools, such as Cyfe, help you to pull your data into a single and shareable dashboard. Then, you can easily share a link to your dashboard via email, message board, or website.

But sometimes, you need to share your key metrics in real-time in a way that’s a bit more flexible for your organization. Meet your stakeholders where they’re at with the versatility of Embedded Analytics.

Cyfe’s Embedded Analytics is easy to use, does not require coding, and makes it possible to curate and embed data directly into software applications and websites. Using more than 100 available integrations, this iframe embed feature offers the flexibility needed to bring together multiple sources of data into a single display you can deliver to employees, stakeholders, partners, or customers via the applications they use every day. Now you can enhance team communication, web apps, portals, and websites with visual data, simply.

Add Reporting In Your SaaS Product Without the Work

Enhance your SaaS offering with reporting your customers want or don’t even know they need yet without taking on the engineering task. Embed Cyfe instead.

Using Embedded Analytics, you can embed online review performance into your social media SaaS platform. Include financial data with your HR software. Build custom SQL widgets that report on your CRM. The Embedded Analytics feature is built to nest seamlessly into your proprietary software. Choose from 100+ integrations and 250+ metrics out of the box to help build your dashboard to display the data your customers need.

LinkTrust, an affiliate marketing platform, uses Embedded analytics via a Cyfe dashboard to display performance metrics in-app for campaigns, Twitter, Facebook, and Google Trends

As an independent software provider, you can use our white label offering without any interruption to the branded service you provide. Visualize key data in your app so that it’s easier to understand and track. Create reports to display and download. Show customers key metrics that empower daily decision-making to make your SaaS offering indispensable.

Tell A Client's Story With Visual Data To Earn More Business

You know that data can tell a powerful story, but how? Using Cyfe, you can create a visual display of carefully curated performance data into a single, easy-to-digest dashboard. Tell the story of underperforming channels to win clients. Use Embedded Analytics directly in your agency portal to show improvement over time, establish trust, and present clients with opportunities for additional wins. Sharing data transparently can lead to easy upsells for your agency.

Jemully Media is a digital media agency delivering social media campaign metrics to clients via an agency portal using Cyfe’s Embedded Analytics

With 250+ metrics included out of the box plus an available Zapier integration, bringing together data as unique as your client is simple. Social media highlights, campaign spending, and conversion rates can be displayed alongside email list subscribers and customer interests. Show your client what they are interested in to show them that you are an invaluable partner.

Embedded Analytics Lets You Share Data Anywhere

Knowledge doesn’t have to be siloed or gated behind yet another login. You can distill data into a single dashboard to share anywhere. Engage stakeholders, partners, and customers where they already are to build trust, support decision-making, and get recognition.

Cyfe dashboards offer 100+ integrations and 250 available metrics out of the box so that you can create dreamy performance displays

For those that manage the performance of a channel, team, or department, you may need to share performance data out across your organization or with key stakeholders. Cyfe allows you to collect data from the tools you use into a single dashboard display. Dashboards are easy to share. Send a link or embed your dashboard in a shared space so that others in your organization can view KPI’s without logging in to any of the original data sources.

SMCo Thrift uses Cyfe to display up-to-date sales data on monitors located in shared employee spaces

Sharing data outside of your organization can be difficult. Granting access, restricting data, and managing access over time can become a headache and a hazard. Cyfe allows read-only access of select data that can be shared without creating a log in. Sharing a dashboard using Embedded Analytics anchors your data in a shared application or website plus offers an additional layer of security.

Don’t limit data sharing to internal communication or partnerships. Give your data wings. Use data on your business website to influence customers. Create a dashboard to display product sales, Net Promoter Score, and satisfaction metrics to increase credibility with your customers.

Communicate Metrics That Matter To Employees In Apps They Use Everyday

One of the biggest benefits of embedded analytics is the ability to nest reports and data inside the applications that teams use the most. These applications are a great place to get eyes on important data. Whether you use an internal portal, a customer service platform, or sales software, embedded analytics decreases friction for easier data discovery and faster data delivery.

For businesses that manage an internal portal, Embedded Analytics can display what matters to your employees. Share percent to goal progress, sales performance, traffic to your brand website, or customer satisfaction data. Add social integrations, such as Twitter or LinkedIn, to surface follower counts and interactions with your brand.

Conversion funnel and lead sources are displayed in and employee portal amongst company announcements and other helpful documents using Embedded Analytics

Strengthen awareness of sales efforts within a team or across an entire organization with a powerful display of traffic, leads, and closed sales. Use Salesforce? We have an integration for that. Dashboards serve as visual motivation for individual contributors and teams.

Make sales data visually engaging using a Cyfe dashboard. Embed your dashboard into the apps your teams use most.

Pull important metrics together into a single dashboard embedded into the apps your employees use everyday to eliminate the need for users to switch between applications. With regular exposure to business metrics that matter, employee awareness and adoption of data increases. More informed employees make better business decisions.

How To Get Started With Embedded Analytics

Deliver data to customers, clients, and employees in the apps they use everyday using Embedded Analytics. Improve SaaS platforms, portals, and websites with visual data dashboards using minimal effort.

It’s easy to get started. Embedded Analytics is available to all paid Cyfe plans. First, build your dashboard from over 100 integrations, including 250+ metrics. Then, follow four easy steps to embed your data where you need it most. Your wow moment is just steps away.

User Guide: Embedded Analytics

Liezen Van Loh

Liezen is a designer, a writer, and a marketer. She is incredibly curious and always looking for more pieces to the puzzle. You will most often find her in a sweatshirt and sneakers debating about becoming vegan over a cheeseburger.

The post Use Embedded Analytics To Easily Share Data In More Places appeared first on Cyfe.

How Cyfe Dashboards Save Curry Printing’s Marketing Manager 9 Hours Per Month

Phillip Paquette — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 13:06:38 +0000

For over 40 years, Curry Printing has served as the premier print provider for companies across the Baltimore metro area. They offer a true one-stop-shop. Focused on solving client challenges, Curry Printing provides design, production, and fulfillment of professionally printed products across all mediums. Speed, reliability, efficiency, and professionalism are at the heart of every service.

As technology advances, jobs that once took days can be done in 15 minutes. Curry Printing remains ready as new challenges arise.

Problem

As the sole marketer at Curry Printing, Marketing Manager Melanie Moore wears many hats including:

Handling paid advertising (Facebook and GoogleAds)
Managing organic social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn)
Monitoring customer reviews

Within weeks of joining Curry Printing, she was tasked with presenting her first marketing performance report. Hours into compiling that report, Melanie identified the need for a simpler way to collect and interpret data across the many marketing initiatives across the company.

“I was trying to pull together all of our numbers and all of our data from every platform that we use. I wanted to do a 2019 comparison and was running into a ton of problems. It was really hard to just look at the data and find what I was looking for.”

From her perspective, while Google Ads provides a great service with all of the data she needs, the interface isn’t intuitive.

Melanie also found it challenging to quantify the total reach of her social media engagement. She spent countless hours manually going through both Instagram and Facebook to calculate the total reach of their social efforts. Instagram didn’t have a way to automatically compile her performance data in a way that was useful for her report. Additionally, Instagram’s reporting doesn’t provide a way to compare performance with Curry Printing’s other social channels.

Melanie encountered another problem. She needed to have unlimited data storage. That way, she could draw conclusions from short and long-term patterns in the historical data. While some platforms may go back four or five months, she required a system that supported year-over-year data. This system also needed to break down data into visualizations she can share in reports.

“I am a very visual person and I like to be able to quickly look at a chart or graph so I wanted a platform that could compile all the data in a visual format and be able to store more than a year’s worth of data.”

Solution

Melanie started researching dashboard tools. She spent the time evaluating ten other platforms, before choosing Cyfe. It checked off all of the boxes.

“It was also reasonably priced and seemed easy to use.”

After signing up for a free trial, Melanie was able to launch dashboards illustrating the results of her different marketing initiatives — all in under an hour.

“Everything is very simple to set up on Cyfe, and the very visual layout makes it incredibly easy to compare results across time or platforms.”

Melanie’s Google Ads dashboard on Cyfe tracks:

Cost
Conversions
Any other actions taken via ads
Specific ad keywords
Impressions
Clicks

“It overlays all of the data on a beautiful graph and displays each of the totals for those metrics in bold, so I can easily see what’s working across my ad campaigns. Google Ads has a similar feature, but it takes more tinkering to get it to display what I want, and generally isn’t quite as good of a summary.”

On her social media dashboard, she can see Curry Printing’s most engaging organic content and track total followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

“Cyfe allowed me to not only get all my data analytics in one place, but it made it easy to categorize results in different dashboards.”

With Cyfe, Curry Printing can go back to any historical data and compare their business results year over year.

“I don’t have to check all my apps, which is nice and it’s more intuitive than several platforms. I like how customizable it is and can separate what I need to see.”

Results

Since using Cyfe dashboards, Melanie saves nine hours per month on reporting and reviewing her marketing metrics. Now she can focus more of her time on driving even bigger results. Now she can invest more time on social media content creation and art direction.

Compared to the Google Ads built in-reporting, her ads dashboard on Cyfe is “simpler and more visual.” She can view all of her keywords across ad groups. Within a few minutes, she can see which are performing best and then optimize specific ads further.

Reporting now to Curry Printing’s owner Paula Fargo is also much easier. Melanie can quickly share Cyfe graphs to break down the data. In turn, her boss has far fewer questions.

“Because these charts are so visual, they’re very easy to screenshot and send to my boss. It’s super easy for me to show her that we’ve spent less money to get more clicks.”

Managing Reputation

Curry Printing has a 95% client retention rate so keeping up their reputation is vital.

With the integrations of Grade.us, Melanie also discovered her team can track their customer reviews. She’s centralized her Google, Yelp, Facebook, and other third-party reviews on a single dashboard via the Grade.us widget.

“Instead of having to go to each review site every week to check, Cyfe simplifies the process and saves me time.”

Conclusion

Melanie was losing time manually tracking ads, social engagement, and online reviews. She needed dashboard software that visualized her data and helped identify opportunities in her advertising and marketing campaigns.

Cyfe was able to organize her data, centralize her efforts, and clarify her marketing performance. It didn’t hurt that the software was affordable.

Melanie and her team at Curry Printing can now quickly see the results of their marketing spend and that client interactions are in line with their expectations. This helps them continue to drive higher-performing marketing campaigns. With the addition of the Grade.us reputation dashboard, Curry Printing can also continue to encourage customer loyalty.

The post How Cyfe Dashboards Save Curry Printing’s Marketing Manager 9 Hours Per Month appeared first on Cyfe.

What is a Data Dashboard?

Phillip Paquette — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 12:56:50 +0000

Data-backed decisions are more valuable than ever. In fact, insights-driven businesses grow on average more than 30% each year.

Still there are challenges for data-driven companies:

Defining success
Having data accessible team-wide
Breaking down data so that it’s easy to understand

Meet your goals and stay aligned on performance by developing insight-driven dashboards.

If you’ve ever had to work purely off assumptions, you can’t feel confident in your direction.

When your team’s looking to drive results, dashboards help you make data-driven decisions that support your goals.

Discover how dashboards can provide real-time insights that keep your team on the same page.

What is a Data Dashboard?

A data dashboard is an information tool that visually tracks and displays key performance indicators (KPI) based on a set of specific business objectives.

Dashboards take data collected over time from various data sources, APIs, your files, your organization’s app accounts, and any other database you choose to track. Your dashboards translate that data into tables, line charts, bar charts, and other visualization appropriate for each data type.

What is the Purpose of a Dashboard?

Not all dashboards serve the same purpose. In fact, dashboards have a range of use cases. Dashboards help:

Business leaders have a quick reference source for monitoring KPIs
Managers and employees make data-driven decisions and track department-level and individual KPIs
Agencies share the results of campaigns and stay on the same page with customers through white label reporting

By tying KPIs to specific business goals, you can set benchmarks and measure your version of success.

Why is a Dashboard Important?

Revenue. Lifetime value of your customers. Churn rate. These are all metrics you can track. Plotting these metrics over time allows you to identify positive and negative trends in your business efforts and inform your strategies.

Dashboards allow each stakeholder to know the analytics that matter to their business, department, or project. Even non-technical users can quickly compile data and be able to spot trends through the visualization options in dashboards.

Dashboards provide a real-time overview of your KPIs through visualizations including tables, line charts, and bar charts.

The intuitive design of dashboards lets you quickly analyze and share specific performance metrics. That way, teams can take immediate action on emerging issues if needed. Plus, everyone that needs to see key metrics can without potentially altering the data.

For example, If you’re a marketing manager presenting to your executive team, you know you need to show results. A dashboard set up with the right data sources can tie your website performance to revenue and sales.

What are the 6 Benefits of a Dashboard?

In case you need to get buy-in on your team, here are the top six benefits of a dashboard:

Provide an objective overview of how you or your department are meeting goals
The graphs generated in dashboards are easy to understand and quickly spot trends
Prevent data silos and keep teams aligned
Leverage historical and real-time data to help with budget allocation and other resource planning
Bring together all your data from multiple sources into one central location
Quickly customize dashboards based on a variety of factors including individuals KPIs or a specific period

Let’s say you want to see the effect of a new product release teamwide. You can review:

How many new deals your team wins post-product release
The impact on customer satisfaction scores
Your cost per acquisition on ads since your new product came out

You can bring all of these insights together in a single dashboard.

Dashboards Versus Reports

Dashboards and static reports both offer different types of value to the end-user. Some executives prefer information delivered to them on a timely schedule. Others prefer to have an easily accessible up to date entry point to their data at any time. Some like a combination of both.

Unlike static reports, with real-time dashboards, the data automatically refreshes from the source. Dashboards can save time by pulling in historical data and comparing with the most up to date information. Simply share the live dashboard’s URL with your stakeholder.

You also don’t have to go into multiple sources to gather and track data. Dashboards provide a more efficient reporting tool than spreadsheets or most platform’s built-in reports.

Pulling a report from Google Analytics, QuickBooks, Facebook Ads, and Campaign Monitor doesn’t have to be a couple of PDFs in a row. You don’t need to have an employee photoshop the graphs that are relevant. Dashboards allow you to take those data sources and display them in concert with each other.

If you still need more traditional reports though, the best dashboard platforms give you the option to export or schedule automatic email reports.

Dashboard	Traditional Reports
Real-time data	Static data
Share via URL, PDF, email	Share via PDF, email
Contain visualizations	May Contain Visualizations
Contains Multiple Data Sources	May Contain Multiple Data Sources

How Does a Dashboard Work?

A dashboard lets you review multiple data sources in one central location so you can:

Monitor and analyze your most important metrics
Identify trends and make more informed decisions

Widgets are where you can specify which data sources and KPIs you display in your dashboard. The example below is the number of unique users over a 30 day period pulled from Google Analytics.

Then you can set alerts to monitor metrics and deliver notifications when specific conditions occur, such as your Facebook Ads click-through rate plummets.

Plus, create widget goals to benchmark metrics against your business objectives. For example, you can see if all your sales reps hit their monthly quota.

What Do You Put in a Dashboard?

Selecting what data displays in your dashboards starts with your goals.

Establish a specific, measurable goal. Consider if there is any existing benchmark data to help confirm your goal is attainable.
Select the metrics and the data source that measure progress towards this goal.
Identify list the different types of dashboards you need to track your company, team, or individual goals.

What Types of Dashboards are There?

Many individuals create dashboards based on their role within a company including:

Executive dashboards to review high-level KPIs
Marketing dashboards for everything from web analytics to a Facebook Ads dashboard breaking down your campaign results
Sales dashboards to track win rates, deal sizes, and other important sales performance metrics
Client dashboards so agencies can share their results

How Do You Create a Dashboard?

In Cyfe, you can select to build a dashboard from scratch or choose a pre-built dashboard.

To add a pre-built dashboard:

Log into Cyfe and navigate to the top toolbar.
Click on the “+” symbol (“New Dashboard”).

Choose “Templates”.

Configure each card by hovering over each widget. Select “Configure” and provide your account information.

You can also start your dashboard from scratch by clicking “Add Widget” at the top toolbar:

Choose integration you’re looking for from the tabs.

Confirm the integration you want to add by selecting “Add”. x

You can customize any dashboard by:

Setting a default date range. Anytime you visit your dashboard, that will be the date range that initially appears.

Moving around and resizing widgets

Adjust the data displayed in your widgets without updating the default range. Set a desired date range by selecting the calendar icon and choosing from the available dates.

Update the data shown without affecting the default date range by selecting the Daily/ Weekly/ or Monthly buttons. These settings will adjust the data to represent a daily, weekly, or monthly summary of the widgets in your dashboard.

How Do You Design a Dashboard?

Well-designed dashboards incorporate UX principles. To start designing a dashboard, identify who will be reviewing the dashboard and the goals of creating it.

Place your most vital metrics in the top, left corner. Like reading a book, subsequent metrics should flow left to right to make analysis easier.

Consider sticking to a single screen to improve the UX with the initial dashboard view.

A few other design tips to keep in mind:

Select a few colors to use on your board. Check out these color palettes below and visit Color Hunt for more ideas.

Use one font per dashboard to keep the design clean.
Adjust a widget’s size to highlight the most vital metrics.

Dashboard Examples

Use any of the examples below as springboards for your dashboard.

Analytical Dashboards

Analytical dashboards present key metrics reflected against previous performance. Gauge individual or team-wide performance including:

Customer satisfaction scores and agent-level performance in Zendesk
List growth and click-through rates on MailChimp, Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign, and GetResponse
Opportunities won and other data in Salesforce, HubSpot, or other sales CRMs

Business Dashboards

Business dashboards can provide anyone in a leadership role a way to review high-level KPIs such as:

Income and expenses logged in QuickBooks
Sales via Shopify or Eventbrite
Conversion rates on different ad networks

Platform Dashboards

Platform dashboards provide access to real-time data from specific social platforms including:

Engagement on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, or Instagram
Ad spend and conversions on each social platform’s ad network
Website traffic generated from different social channels measured in Google Analytics

Summing It Up

You don’t need to be an analyst to use and understand the data in a dashboard. Anyone can use a dashboard to make more informed decisions and monitor KPIs.

Dashboards can also keep everyone aligned whether you’re sharing the most relevant metrics with your clients or connecting remote marketing and sales teams.

Your dashboard can adapt as your goals progress over time. Keep in mind though you may need to adjust your KPIs and data sources.

Phillip Paquette

Phillip Paquette is the Head Content Marketer and Founder at OnPoint Content. Coming from a background in journalism, in-depth research and interviews are key ingredients in his special sauce. Feel free to reach out with any questions or comments at phillip@onpointcontent.io.

The post What is a Data Dashboard? appeared first on Cyfe.

How DRIVE® Increased Average Customer Spend by 1.78x with Cyfe Dashboards

Garrett Sussman — Wed, 09 Sep 2020 11:41:36 +0000

Many businesses have small cracks that could lead to larger problems later, like an improperly maintained vehicle leaking fluid. For the past 30+ years, consulting and technology firm DRIVE® has consulted and trained auto and truck repair shops across the U.S. and Canada to grow their companies and fill these cracks. They’re the development firm version of a car mechanic. DRIVE® helps auto shops grow, manage, and operate their business through long term planning and day-to-day operations.

The firm has expanded its own business service offerings as the auto repair industry has matured. Over the past few years, the DRIVE® team began to add marketing and advertising services. The success of these programs has allowed them to innovate and deliver a full agency marketing service program to their customers. These services include:

Web design and development
Social media management
Digital Advertising
Content Marketing
Direct Mail
Email
And more…

DRIVE®’s marketing agency services deliver explosive results for their clients. Their customers consistently see an increase in phone calls, appointments, customers, sales, and revenue.

Challenge:

For Phillip Marzouk, DRIVE®’s Marketing Agency Director, one of the major problems he was facing was communicating those wins to clients. He was looking for a way to highlight that DRIVE® was directly responsible for the new business and increase in sales.

“We want to be able to track what works and what doesn’t on a shop-by-shop basis and determine our customers’ advertising needs to make the most out of their dollars.”

Ever since DRIVE® first started offering web development services, reporting and proving their ongoing value to their clients was a challenge.

“We would send automated reports out of Google Analytics and the customers didn’t understand it,” says Phillip.

His team calls customers once a month and reviews all the data together. Each month, they found themselves re-educating clients on what the various metrics meant and the context around them. It felt like the reports were creating unnecessary confusion and frustration. They were also taking up valuable time.

“We were looking for a system that would allow us to better report to our client base. We were looking for some automation levels in reporting. A tool that would allow us to give access to our client base to a live dashboard. And we wanted the control to show them the numbers that mattered.”

Manually collecting all of the reports and stitching them together would have required time that they didn’t have. An automated reporting system would solve this major dilemma.

Particularly, they needed the ability to customize their dashboard to focus on the numbers that really mattered. This would not only alleviate unnecessary stress for their clients, but it would also highlight the great job they were doing in marketing their business.

Solution:

The Cyfe dashboard was an ideal solution for Phillip’s reporting problems. It connected all of the different data sources that DRIVE® and their clients were already using.

“The most attractive feature of Cyfe was the sheer number of platforms that the dashboard could link up with easily. Most other tools required hours of manual work to pull in the right data accurately. It’s not sustainable or scalable. They couldn’t connect automatically. For a team with minimal developer resources, you can’t depend on connecting to APIs.”

Cyfe connects to everything, and for any custom data, the platform connects to Google Sheets or lets you upload spreadsheets so they can push the data they need.

“When you’re making 400+ dashboards, you simply make a few clicks and it is all connected. Spending minutes per dashboard instead of hours per dashboard. Otherwise, we’d still be building out our clients’ dashboard right now. “

How did Cyfe allow Phillip to give his clients access to their reporting in real-time?

“Clients have a link that they can bookmark in their browser and visit whenever they want. We’ve got some clients that never close their dashboard. Others will only check in once every three months. It’s at their pace.”

With a dashboard shared between account executives, advisors, and the clients, a communication gap was filled. Cyfe surfaced a solution to an unanticipated problem.

“We’re able to use it more efficiently within our organization. What makes us different from other advertising agencies is that we’re an extension of a business development firm. So one of the most important things was to be able to report these numbers to our own business advisors.”

When one of their business advisors touches base with a client, and says, “Hey you’re having a lot of problems bringing in cars. Let’s see what’s going on with your marketing.” They don’t need to take a few days to pull together a marketing report. They can just click on the same link that the client has and see a live update of what’s happening with their marketing.

“When you’re managing 400 plus clients, seconds start to matter. So having that reporting dashboard with a live view, numbers we can curate, and data that we can accurately represent what’s going on was really important to us.”

Results:

So how did Cyfe ultimately impact the business? The primary value centered around improved client communication and support.

Client satisfaction improved substantially.
Customer retention improved.
Customer complaints went down.
Money saved in customer service calls.
50% reduction in customer service calls.
Customers increased average spend by 1.78 times.
Customer LTV increased.

Customer Service and Reputation

The business’s concern about the quality and efficiency of communication has completely changed with Phillip’s investment in reporting. Improving client communication was the result of better access to data. Poor reporting resulted in customers not knowing what they were getting for the money they were spending.

“The number of overall service calls due to a lack of communication has gone down exponentially.”

Cyfe allowed them to connect their website, Google My Business, and Ads into one dashboard to show website calls and calls from Google My Business. The dashboard tied the value to the marketing services.

Before Cyfe, Customers didn’t understand that the high ranking on Google translated to more traffic, phone calls, customers, sales, and ultimately more dollars in their pocket.

Being able to connect the website performance metrics and Google My Business actions into one dashboard clarified to clients what DRIVE® was doing to boost client business.

“Now we don’t have customers not understanding the service or concerned about communication because, at any point in time, they can click on their dashboard link and see live:
‘I’ve got this many calls out of my website. This many calls out of Google My Business. I know where the numbers are coming from. I know what’s happening. Now there’s value to what’s going on.’”

A clear understanding of the marketing performance led to a 50% reduction in customer service calls for DRIVE®. The reduction in calls saved a significant amount of money for the team.

“The very first thing we noticed was that client satisfaction improved substantially. The second thing that we noticed a few weeks down the line was customer retention increased.”

Business Value For Clients and DRIVE® Shops

Now that clients understand the value, they can give Phillip’s team the credit.

“Now clients are saying, ‘You’re responsible for me getting hundreds and hundreds of phone calls in just the last month. I can’t get rid of you.’”

In the context of the pandemic, Phillip and his team were able to show clients that their phone calls and business had increased. The reporting dashboard made a more compelling argument that the clients could invest more in marketing and advertising.

When they made the suggestion to add sanitization services at their client’s businesses
services at their clients’ dealerships, they were able to show in their reporting that the new service resulted in huge spikes of phone calls and sales.

“Clients would be able to attribute where things were coming from. Something that they could never do before. We could do that now with Cyfe dashboarding.”

Cyfe also allowed DRIVE ® to propose increases in advertising spend because they could visualize and attribute the phone calls to the ad spend.

One client had to add a 4th phone line because they were investing more in their advertising and it visibly drove more phone calls and more business. All of these tactics and reporting increased the lifetime value of their clients.

Conclusion

For Phillip and his team at DRIVE®, choosing Cyfe impacted their business operations dramatically. Set up was simple, saving them time in getting their clients’ live access to their performance. It improved customer satisfaction and reduced service calls, improving communication. It clarified and highlighted their value, earning them credit for their spending. It helped them help their clients more effectively.

What was the biggest value of adding Cyfe as your reporting tool of choice?

“The biggest thing that we saw was customers increasing their average spend. One customer became worth more dollars simply from having a dashboarding tool that allowed them to access it at any time and attribute what is working and where their money is going.”

The post How DRIVE® Increased Average Customer Spend by 1.78x with Cyfe Dashboards appeared first on Cyfe.

How to Build an Effective Web Analytics Dashboard

Garrett Sussman — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 05:04:00 +0000

How can we prove that our online marketing strategies are working?

Whether you’re tackling the performance of your website or building out a digital presence with clear goals for hundreds of clients, your web analytics can tell the story of what’s working, what needs attention, and where you should reevaluate.

Being able to monitor, track, and share your efforts on a well-designed web analytics dashboard can help elevate your business, client relationships, or internal company standing.

But with the ridiculous quantity of data sources, tools, and resources, where do you start?

What is a web analytics dashboard?

A web analytics dashboard organizes and visualizes the most important data tied to your business goals and tracks the performance of those metrics over time.

By capturing the key performance indicators (KPIs) of your digital assets (your website, social accounts, advertising campaigns, etc.), you can shape a narrative that ensures your financial investments result in business growth.

Which web analytics are most important to your business?

Determining where to begin with your web analytics dashboard actually starts with your business goals. If you run an eCommerce business, you’re focusing primarily on product sales. If you’re a media publisher, you might be focused on website traffic and subscriptions. A local service business might be trying to book appointments.

eCommerce – sales
Publisher – ad buys, sponsors, subscriptions
Local Service Business – appointments
Non-profit organization – donations
Marketing agency – clients

Understanding your primary business goal and how it relates to your digital marketing strategies will guide your analytics monitoring decisions. Once you have your primary, revenue-generating business goals identified, you should map out secondary goals that support the primary goal. This can be tied to your website, advertising campaigns, social media campaigns, email marketing campaigns, or other marketing strategies.

Website traffic
Calls/Driving directions
Email/phone number captures
Consultations
Website forms filled
Demos
Social media followers/likes/engagement
Email opens/clicks
eBook downloads

By documenting your most important metrics, you can begin to understand how increases or decreases of those KPIs are tied to your marketing efforts.

Why do you need a web analytics dashboard to monitor your KPIs?

When you’re in charge of digital marketing and reporting on your performance to executives or clients, you need an easy way to share your data with the people that you’re working for.

A dashboard can solve a few different problems that you’ll run into when it comes to reporting:

Tools don’t always have easily accessible reporting
Not enough users provisioned for individual logins
Asking stakeholders to log into a variety of tools
Combining an expanse of data into one centralized location
Tools require some expertise to understand the results

Your marketing and analytics don’t always play nice. Why send your boss 8 different reports on your website, email, social, advertising, when you can include it all on one real-time dashboard that they can access on their own terms?

Let’s look at how you can create an effective web analytics dashboard that will cut down the time you spend getting to your analytics, giving you more time to actually review your data.

Start with your website analytics

When you build out your web analytics dashboard, your primary goals are going to be accomplished on your website. For that reason, you’ll want to start with the two most universal (and free) options available: Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

The Essential Google Analytics Dashboard

Despite the fact that you can pull in your web analytics from many different data sources, if you’re just getting started and want to simplify KPI monitoring, you can settle on a pure Google Analytics Dashboard.

At Cyfe, we’ve actually made it even easier with a pre-built template that has the essential metrics that you’ll want to monitor.

While Cyfe also has widgets for analytics from Chartbeat, GoSquared, and Mixpanel, we’ll continue to focus on Google Analytics since it’s the top choice in free web analytics tools.

There are over 100 Google Analytics widgets to choose from covering metrics for your Google Ads, apps, audience, content, conversions, commerce, and traffic sources.

Think about the areas in Google Analytics you visit the most.

For example, your audience overview, which includes pageviews, sessions, and users.

Top traffic sources and the corresponding sessions:

Real-time visitors to your website:

Top landing pages by URL that visitors are seeing first:

And, of course, your conversions. You can easily create multiple goals in Google Analytics and then track the conversion of any specific goal of your choice via the metrics selecting in the Google Analytics Cyfe widget.

As you can see, getting your favorite pieces of Google Analytics data for one website in one quick dashboard at a glance can be valuable in and of itself.

You can also create a dashboard that looks at important data from all of your websites at one glance.

Being able to see performance across multiple domains is a game-changer for digital marketing agencies, multiple business owners, and larger holding companies. Since visualizing cross-domain tracking can be difficult via Google Analytics, you can use a Cyfe dashboard to bring those multiple website views together.

Now, let’s look beyond Google Analytics to other data you’ll want to keep track of for your websites.

Google Search Console Widgets

Serious marketers who want their websites to perform well in Google use Google Search Console, and for good reason. This is where you can get a peek into what Google thinks of your website. The overview widget will show you if you have unread messages, crawl errors, and the number of pages indexed from your site map along with the top internal and external keywords for your website.

Put these widgets together for one or more websites in your analytics dashboard, and now you’ve brought two powerful Google tools into one place. But let’s not stop there…

Google My Business Widgets

Running a local business or have multiple local business clients? You Google My Business metrics are going to tap into those primary goals that you’re always looking to improve. Through the Google My Business widget, you’re able to monitor your:

Brand searches
Google My Business views
Actions
Website visits
Calls
Driving Directions

When you’re an agency running marketing for a local business, phone calls and requests for directions are some of the most important KPIs to share with your clients.

More Essential Web Analytics Widgets

Want to know what other analytics tools think about your website? Why not add an Alexa widget to keep track of your traffic rank?

And a Pingdom widget to keep track of your website’s downtime.

Add these widgets for one or more websites into your dashboard for the ultimate overview of all of your website’s important analytics data.

Even More Analytics Widgets

If those weren’t enough for you, you can even start to mix in analytics from beyond your website. For example, you could line up your web analytics data next to widgets for the following.

Google AdSense earnings, page views, clicks, CTR, CPC, and RPM.
Google Ads cost, impressions, clicks, and conversions.
Emails sent, bounces, unsubscribes, opens, and clicks from Aweber, Constant Contact, MailChimp, GetResponse, and other mailing list services.
Google Alerts for mentions of your website or business.
Online reviews from Google, Facebook, and 3rd Party review sites.
Moz backlinks, external links, mozRank, domain authority, and page authority.
Daily keyword rankings in SERPs.
Analytics from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or YouTube.
Open support tickets from Zendesk.

The possibilities to monitor one or more websites are endless!

Get started building your own web analytics dashboard

As you can see, web analytics dashboards can help you cut down the mindless time spent logging into, navigating around, and browsing your web analytics data. This way, you can spend more time getting valuable insights to inform your digital marketing efforts, help your business grow, and move forward.

Garrett Sussman

Garrett is the head of content at Cyfe, a data visualization dashboard tool. When he's not crafting content, he's scouting the perfect ice coffee, devouring the newest graphic novels, and concocting a new recipe in the kitchen.

The post How to Build an Effective Web Analytics Dashboard appeared first on Cyfe.

Zapier Integration: The Easy Guide for Cyfe Users

Michael Keenan — Wed, 15 Jul 2020 07:00:00 +0000

If you want to speed up data collection and save time reporting, then you must understand and use Zapier with your Cyfe account.

Zapier is an easy online automation tool, but it can be challenging to know the best apps to connect to.

But don’t let that discourage you. Zapier is really simple to set up, and we’ve put together a list of the top Zaps you can use with Cyfe today.

Here’s everything you’ll learn in this guide:

What is Zapier?

Zapier is an automation tool that connects thousands of web apps, such as WooCommerce, CallRail, Slack, and more. If you have an app to connect to your Cyfe dashboard, and Cyfe doesn’t currently support it, you can use Zapier to send data between them without any coding or developers.

Building a workflow takes just a few clicks, so that you can get started right away.

Three terms you should know before moving forward:

Zap. A Zap is a workflow between your apps. For example, you could have a Zap that updates new orders from WooCommerce to a clients data dashboard. Zaps are made up of a trigger and one or more actions.
Trigger. A trigger is the event that starts a Zap.
Action. An action is the event that completes that Zap.

How Zapier integrations work with Cyfe

Whether you’re new to Zapier or using it for the first time with Cyfe, let’s walk through how you’d create a Zap.

Say you want to send WooCommerce data to an eCommerce dashboard in your Cyfe account.

Here’s what the set up looks like:

After you sign in to your WooCommerce account, edit the Push Value in Cyfe box. You’ll notice the following form.

The difference when using Zapier and Cyfe is pulling the API endpoint for your widget. To get this URL:

Log into your Cyfe account.
Click Add Widget in the top left-hand corner.
Type Push API in the search bar.
Add Push API widget, then click Configure Widget.
Copy URL in the API Endpoint box.

Add that URL to the API Endpoint box in your Zap. Adjust the name, metric value, color, type, and connotation.

Once you fill out in the form, which takes five minutes tops, turn on the Zap, and that’s it. Zapier will start sending data from the app to your Cyfe dashboard.

Curious what apps Zapier works with? There are thousands to search through, or try out these popular Zaps today to get started.

Top 9 Cyfe + Zapier integrations

Here are the top Cyfe and Zapier use cases you can get started with today.

1. Track the number of new CallRail phone calls over time

CallRail tracks phone calls for your marketing campaigns, but if you want to track call volume in an easy-to-understand graph, connect CallRail to Cyfe. With Zapier, you can automatically send new calls to your Cyfe dashboard each time you get a new call.

Want to connect CallRail to Cyfe? Get started now with this template.

Other popular metrics you can track when connecting CallRail to Cyfe are:

Phones call completed
New company created
Form captured
Session tracker created
SMS received
Phone call marketing as spam
SMS sent

2. Track number of new HubSpot contacts over time

Want to build out your database with sales leads? Connect Cyfe with HubSpot to track when a new contact is added to your HubSpot database. Determine what campaigns are working and which aren’t, so you can make smarter business decisions for client’s.

Want to connect HubSpot and Cyfe? Use this free template.

Other popular metrics you can track using HubSpot and Cyfe are:

New Deal
Email subscriptions timeline
New Form submission
New engagement
New calendar task
Contact recently updated or created

3. Track new Freshdesk tickets

If you want to make customer support more efficient, you must keep track of new tickets over time. Connect Freshdesk to Cyfe using Zapier to automatically update your dashboard each time a new ticket is created in Freshdesk.

Want to connect FreshDesk and Cyfe? Use this free template.

Other popular metrics you can track connecting Freshbooks and Cyfe are:

New contact
Update ticket
Update contact

4. Track New Backups in DigitalOcean

Digital Ocean is a simple, fast, and scalable SSD cloud virtual server that you can deploy in seconds. If your company stores a lot of data, you can see when new backups are created.

Want to connect DigitalOcean and Cyfe? Get started now.

Other popular metrics you can track with DigitalOcean and Cyfe are:

New snapshot
New droplet
New SSH key

5. Update values in Cyfe on new orders on WooCommerce

Want to know how your WooCommerce orders are coming long? Whether you’re tracking their count or value, use the WooCommerce integration to help. Whenever you have a new order, Zapier will send the updated value to your Cyfe dashboard.

Connect WooCommerce and Cyfe now with this template. It’s free to create your Zap.

Other eCommerce metrics you can track using WooCommerce and Cyfe are:

Coupon events (created, updated, deleted, etc.)
Product events
Customer events
Order events
Subscription events

6. Add new Pipedrive deals to Cyfe

Do you use Pipedrive to speed up your sales pipeline and be more efficient? Connect Pipedrive to Cyfe to track long-term dealings and more. Whenever you receive a new deal in Pipedrive, this Zap will update the value in your Cyfe dashboard.

Want to connect Pipedrive with Cyfe? Use this free template.

Other popular metrics you can track connecting Pipedrive and Cyfe are:

New activity
New person
Updated deal stage
Organization matching filter
Person matching filter
Deal matching filter

7. Track new Magento orders over time

Monitor new orders from your eCommerce store and understand your business growth by connecting Magento to Cyfe. When you use this Zap, you can push a value to Cyfe each time you receive a new Magento order, and more.

Connect Magento to your Cyfe account with this free Zap template.

Other metrics you can track from your Magento store are:

New sales order shipment
New credit memo
New customer
New sales order invoice

8. Track new ActiveCampaign contacts over time

Stay updated on your marketing campaigns by using the ActiveCampaign Cyfe integration. Once activated, you can keep track of new contacts and more all in one place.

Connect ActiveCampaign to Cyfe with this free Zap template.

Other popular metrics you can track using ActiveCampaign and Cyfe are:

New campaign link click
New deal note
New campaign opens
New campaign unsubscribe
New deal task

9. Track new form submissions on Gravity Forms

If you want to keep track of your Gravity Forms activity, you can set up an integration with Cyfe through Zapier. This Zap will push each form and survey submission you get on Gravity Forms to a Cyfe dashboard so you can monitor sign-up trends.

Connect Gravity Forms and Cyfe with this free template.

How to Use Push by Zapier

Push by Zapier is a Google Chrome extension that lets you perform Zaps from anywhere on the internet.

Need to log work time, add a phone number to your contact list, create a document, save a website, start a timer or run any other tedious task fast? Push by Zapier is the quickest way to do them and hundreds of other tasks you want.

It works in three steps:

Install Zapier’s Chrome extension.

2. Sign in to your Zapier account

Click Make a Push Zap!

4. Build the Zap to automate the task you want.

5. Click the button in the Zapier Chrome extension whenever you want to run the workflow.

For more help on how to use Push by Zapier, read this help doc by Zapier.

Final thoughts

Using Zapier with Cyfe isn’t complicated. You just need to figure out what metrics to monitor, grab the API endpoint when creating a widget, and fill out the necessary information to build the Zap. Once you turn a Zap one, it handles all your tedious tasks in reporting, so you can focus on more meaningful work in your business.

Michael Keenan

Michael is a SaaS Marketer and SEO living in Guadalajara, Mexico. Through storytelling and data-driven content, his focus is providing valuable insight and advice on issues that prospects and customers care most about. He’s inspired by learning people’s stories, climbing mountains, and traveling with his partner and Xoloitzcuintli.

The post Zapier Integration: The Easy Guide for Cyfe Users appeared first on Cyfe.

How To Create the Ultimate Social Media Dashboard

Michael Keenan — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 06:00:03 +0000

Updated: 7-1-2020

Whether you’re a consultant managing multiple social media accounts or a business owner managing your own, you want to keep all your analytics in one place. Without it, you’re stuck flipping through 10 different boards to show all your social media data.

Visual dashboards can give anyone who needs to monitor their social media channels a one-stop shop for the most important data.

In this post, we’re going to build the ultimate social media dashboard with Cyfe to help you quickly get a full look at your social media activity.

What is a social media dashboard?

A social media dashboard is an information management tool used to track, analyze, and display key engagement metrics across multiple social media channels, all in one place. Social media dashboards gather information from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube to create unified social media metrics reports.

These social dashboards are designed to benchmark and visualize metrics but are not intended for data analysis. Their primary purpose is to monitor business-critical data on social media, and achieve the following:

Create measurable business goals for social media accounts
Provide tracking and sharing data
Assess audience size, engagement, and demographics
Collect social media statistics
Compare data from individual campaigns, posts, or pages

How does a social media dashboard work?

Social media dashboards are used by social media managers, marketing, and communications teams who use social media to run campaigns and discover consumer insights. These tools allow you to create dashboards with scorecards and easy-to-understand visualizations of social data to follow trends and KPIs from any social media platform.

Many social media dashboards offer a drag-and-drop function so the average social media manager or marketer can build the social dashboard they need, quickly and easily.

Three key benefits of your social media dashboard:

Pull data from any social channel through one-click integrations.
Offer visual representation of key performance indicators, in real-time.
Provides easy-to-interpret metrics for high-level overviews of social strategy goals.

Social media dashboard widget examples

First, let’s look at widgets you can use to see important analytics and data about your activity on the top social networks.

Facebook Page dashboard widgets

When you use a reporting tool like Cyfe, you can choose from over 50 widgets for Facebook page insights that cover:

Reach
Impressions
Clicks
Check-ins
Like
Views
Posts

While you could create a social media dashboard just for Facebook, here are a few top ones to include in your ultimate social media dashboard.

Facebook Page Overview

Your Facebook Page overview widget gives you the top insights for your Page. You can use it to track activity over the past year and pinpoint specific time periods your page was most popular.

Facebook Page Impression Types

How are you driving traffic to your page? The Facebook Page Impression Types widget shows you the source of Page impressions. It tracks mentions of your brand, fans, posts on your feed by you, posts on your wall by fans, and other types of posts.

Facebook Page Likes by Country

For businesses that are targeting customers in a particular location, you want to know where your fans are located. The likes country map widget can help you keep track of where your fans are based.

Facebook Page Check-ins

Local businesses will want to monitor their Facebook check-ins using the check-in widget. You can even use the text widget next to your check-ins widget to log particular events that might have driven more check-ins.

Twitter dashboard widgets

The Twitter dashboard widget shows you the top Twitter analytics for your account. In addition to seeing your follower growth, you can monitor the frequency of your tweets, how many people add you to Twitter lists, or the number of times someone favorited your Tweet.

LinkedIn dashboard widgets

If you use LinkedIn to market on social media, monitor all your company LinkedIn analytics in one place. With Cyfe, you can track key metrics including:

Interactions
Interaction rate
Impressions
Likes
Comments
Shares
Click
Followers Growth
All Page Views
And more

Pinterest analytics dashboard widgets

In addition to the top networks, you can also monitor an overview of your profiles on Pinterest. You can track boards, pins, followers, and how many people you’re following.

Instagram analytics dashboard widgets

With the Instagram analytics dashboard widget, you can track different metrics such as Followers, the number of photos, and how many accounts you’re following.

YouTube dashboard widgets

The YouTube widget tracks views, comments, favorites, likes, and subscribers for your social media dashboard. If you want to go more in-depth with YouTube Analytics, you can use the YouTube dashboard template by Cyfe to track overall channel performance, see where viewers are coming from, and determine what your best videos are.

Facebook Ads dashboard widgets

The Facebook Ads dashboard widget lets you track advertising metrics from Facebook, including cost, impressions, clicks, video watches, cost per action, and more.

How to create a social media analytics dashboard

Whether you’re building a social media dashboard for a client or internal comms, here’s a step-by-step guide on how to create a meaningful dashboard:

1. Set your goals

First, determine what your social media objectives are. They will help guide you through what widgets to use in your dashboard.

2. Sign up for a reporting tool

Use a freemium tool like Cyfe to build a custom dashboard and track the most important KPIs for you.

3. Create a new dashboard

Don’t forget to give it a name such as [Client Name] Social Media Dashboard.

4. Add widgets for each social channel

You can choose from channels like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook ads, LinkedIn, and more in your Cyfe data dashboard.

5. Continue to build out your dashboard

Your social dashboard is not a static asset. As you run different campaigns, you may discover new metrics that lead to valuable insights for you or your client. Continually improve by adding or removing metrics on your dashboard to help make better decisions for your business.

Social media management dashboard FAQ

What are the best social media management tools?

Hootsuite for simplified social media scheduling.
Cyfe for social media monitoring and analytics.
Traject Social for social media management.
Iconosquare for running Instagram business accounts.
ManyChat for running paid social campaigns and lead generation.
Post Planner for content curation.

How do I manage my social media?

Create your social media strategy.
Choose a social media management software.
Build an editorial calendar.
Monitor engagement and connect with your audience.
Track important KPIs.
Analyze and improve your strategy.

What are the best KPIs to track in a social media management dashboard?

Number blog subscribers
Number of comments (engagement)
Forwards to a friend
Social bookmarks
Positive sentiment
Web traffic from social sites
Share of conversation
Media engagement
Likes and/or followers

Pulling the social media dashboard together

A social media dashboard can be built in a number of ways. While this process definitely works, don’t limit yourself to just one style! Cyfe has over 9 different social media widgets you can use to track campaigns, so you can make more informed decisions and grow your business.

Michael Keenan

The post How To Create the Ultimate Social Media Dashboard appeared first on Cyfe.

Introducing the Cyfe Dashboard Templates Gallery

Garrett Sussman — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 11:22:12 +0000

When you’re just starting a company or identifying your key performance indicators, setting up your reporting can be overwhelming. Sometimes you just want to have the most important metrics beautifully presented on an easy to consume dashboard.

At Cyfe, we have always wanted to simplify reporting and make it accessible to anyone that wants real-time access to the success of their business. That’s why we are happy to announce the release of our brand new Dashboard Templates Gallery.

Historically, when you signed up for the Cyfe free trial, you were presented with an empty dashboard, a blank canvas. Business people, marketers, and salespeople alike have requested some guidance in getting started with their reporting. That’s where the new templates come in.

In the first iteration of our Dashboard Templates Gallery, new Cyfe customers will be able to choose from one of four unique templates:

Google Analytics Dashboard
Google Ads Dashboard
Facebook Ads Dashboard
Youtube Dashboard

We worked with customers to identify which metrics were the most important to them in each of these four categories.

How To Use the Cyfe Dashboard Templates Gallery

Currently, this feature is only available to brand new Cyfe users. We will make templates available to existing customers soon.

Check out my quick walkthrough video or read the step by step guide below:

When you sign up as a new user, you will be able to choose from any of the four pre-made templates or start your own blank dashboard.

To get started:

1. Click the ADD button under the template of your choice.

2. Hover over any of the widgets and click the CONFIGURE button.

3. Select the specific account and website that you want to connect.

4. Click the Save Widget button and your dashboard will populate with your data.

You can then delete widgets from the template, add your own, or leave it as is. Once configured, share out the reports or links to everyone on the team that wants to monitor performance in real-time, on their terms.

Which templates are available in the first iteration of our gallery?

Google Analytics Dashboard Template

With the Google Analytics dashboard template, measure everything essential to the performance of your website. Monitor pageviews and users, traffic sources, demographics, and conversions.

Google Ads Dashboard Template

With the Google Ads dashboard template, you can display all of your campaign performance across groups and keywords. Track overall costs, impressions, clicks, CPC, conversions, and CTR for your ad spend. Simplify your Google Ad reporting and share exactly what matters without overcomplicating things.

Facebook Ads Dashboard Template

Measure your Facebook ad performance with the Facebook Ads dashboard template. Designed with the key performance indicators in mind, easily monitor an overview of cost, impressions, clicks, and actions. Track campaigns by ad sets. Adjust your strategy based on cost per action and frequency.

YouTube Dashboard Template

Starting to focus on your video marketing? The YouTube dashboard tracks every important video related metric for your brand. Understand your YouTube watch time, the percentage of the video that your viewers watch, top videos by performance. Measure subscribers, comments, likes, and shares. Even monitor the success of your playbooks.

Dashboard templates are a starting point

These new pre-made dashboard templates are the perfect entry point for anyone interested in monitoring their business metrics. Whether you’re just starting with website analytics, advertising, or video marketing, these dashboards will surface the most important information your business needs. They can also be an essential part of your agency business development.

Once you’ve got a grasp of these dashboard templates, you can begin to modify them yourself.

Want to merge your Google Ads and Facebook Ads into one dashboard? You can do that.

Need to add Vimeo videos to your YouTube dash? Vimeo is available.

Try out the blank dashboard and build your own social media dashboard.

Keep your eyes peeled for additional dashboard templates as they become available and let us know if there are any dashboard templates that you want us to build in the future.

Garrett Sussman

The post Introducing the Cyfe Dashboard Templates Gallery appeared first on Cyfe.

Data Insights: How to Extract Insights from Data

Michael Keenan — Wed, 03 Jun 2020 07:26:00 +0000

Whether you’re the founder of your own one-person agency, or a marketing manager at a 5,000+ person organization, the strategy behind your data insights could improve both your decision-making process and marketing campaigns — which makes prioritizing collect and analysis more critical and challenging.

So what should you focus on to help grow your business?

In this article, we’ll look at why data insights are important, how you can observe and make sense of your data, and some key examples of actionable insights for small businesses.

What are data insights?

Data insights refer to the process of collecting, analyzing, and acting on data related to your company and its clients. The goal is simple: make better decisions. A good data management and analysis strategy help companies monitor the health of critical systems, streamline processes, and improve profitability.

When people talk about data insights, they usually referring to three core components:

Data: think about what happens when you go on Facebook. When you log into the app, you allow it to collect information about: where you live, articles you read, places you’ve been, where you went to collect, and other sensitive information. It can even send you push notifications each time you get a comment or reaction. Every time you use Facebook, it sends this unstructured data to a warehouse or database in the form of numbers and text.

Analytics: So what does Facebook does with all this information? With the help of data insights tools, the social media giant will break your information down into smaller groups to create a detailed buyer persona of you. Facebook can then understand how and why you behave the way you do. They can tell from the data that you’re getting married or planning to buy a house based on your actions in the app.

Insights: Now that Facebook better understands you, they can send personalized offers to you and other customers similar to you. The platform can now send targeted messages about new homes to buy in your area, or offers for low mortgage rates. Actionable insights are what you learn from data collected, and how your business can use it to improve an objective.

Why are data insights important?

74% of companies say they want to be “data-driven,” according to a Forrester report, but only 29% are actually successful at connecting analytics to insight. Data will be the largest area of spending for companies as they attempt to become more data-driven. If your business is going to survive, you need a strategy for the future. You have marketing, social media, web analytics, sales, and support. Staying up-to-date with reliable information on your growth is not easy tasks. Data insights can give you a clear overview of what’s happening across your business. And see everything in one place with a data visualization tool like Cyfe.

With easy access and visibility to data, it’s easier to process the information and make smarter decisions, faster. Teams can see key metrics into how your company is performing, how successful campaigns are, where your best customers are coming from, and so much more. A smart data strategy can help companies of all sizes improve their bottom line, especially small businesses that need to do more with less.

Four tips for pulling insights from data

1. Accurately display information in a data visualization platform

When showing key metrics from your data analysis, keep your x and y-axis points in proportion. Otherwise, you have a graph that misrepresents the data.

The example below shows interest rates between 2008 and 2012, and while the graph on the right makes the metrics look the same, the graph on the left shows a more accurate picture of what happened.

The right side shows static activity, but the left side truncates the y-axis to represent 3.140% through 3.154%. While the numbers do increase over the four-year time frame, the amount of the increase is insignificant. But at a quick glance, the chart on the left looks like rates skyrocketed.

Data insights can tell a different story based on their visual presentation. Aim to find a technology that collects your data sources and displays them in a clean and accurate way.

2. Identify the right patterns in data sets

As marketers or data scientists, we gather data so we can find patterns in it. Most commonly, numbers trending upwards or similarities between two sets of numbers. Often we spot patterns in a table presentation, or, you can visualize it in a chart such as line graphs, scatter plots, or a time series.

One common pattern to look for when visualizing data is trending quality.

Spotting trends refers to a number that is increasing or decreasing — for example, data on pageviews in your Google Analytics account.

In this case, the numbers are increasing week-by-week, so this is an upward trend. It shows the underlying asset is working. For example, if this is a blog post on your website, you’ll want to create content around similar topics. The uptrend can mean readers are interested.

Now consider this data about organic search traffic from Jan 1st until Jan 25th.

In this case, the number of organic entrances is decreasing week by week, indicating a downtrend. This could mean an algorithm update impacted your rankings, or you need to optimize decaying content.

We analyze data to help make predictions and decisions about a business objective. Look for correlations between uptrends and downtrends and why they exist, so you can better understand and prepare for future situations.

3. Look at the correct time frames

Timing is everything. Errors can occur when business owners look at a quick slice of data and make assumptions without taking into account historical trends. A “slice” could be a month, quarter, or a year, however, you want to look back in time to get a clear picture of what’s happening.

Looking at historical data can provide insight into how your business has reacted to different variables such as economic cycles, seasonality, and market trends. These data points are analyzed for trends or patterns that may align with current conditions so you can make a smarter decision based on fact.

To view historical data, use a data visualization tool that lets you access different time frames easily. When presenting the analysis, you can reference historical trends and tell a more cohesive story for the data.

4. Avoid measuring averages and totals

Consider this: if you calculate the average net worth of everyone in a bar one night and Bill Gates walks in. That number is going to skew upward dramatically. This is where averages can get dangerous. Data points such as these may produce a correlation you want to see, but once Bill leaves the room, you’re going to have a much different story to tell.

Try to stand clear of feel-good metrics like Total Followers or Average Time on Page. These only give you half the picture. To see the full picture, you want to measure percent changes and point lifts depending on what data you’re presenting.

Four key data insight examples for small businesses

1. Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)

Customer acquisition refers to the process of gaining new customers for your business. Customer acquisition costs are the cost associated with finding and convincing a customer to buy your product or service. This includes marketing costs, advertising spend, employee salaries, overhead, and commissions or bonuses.

What it costs to acquire a customer helps determine the overall profitability of your business. Some businesses are not profitable after a customers first purchase; it may take multiple purchases to go green. You want to keep track of this data to see what campaigns work and which don’t. If CAC is high, it could mean your targeting or ideal customer profile is off.

To calculate customer acquisition costs, take your total sales and marketing spend divided by new customers in a given time frame. Track any changes in CAC monthly or quarterly to see where you can improve your strategy.

2. Buying habits

Buying habits are commonly overlooked as a metric for small business owners. However, understanding how and why your customers buy is important. When you understand your customers, you can create more effective advertising campaigns, tailor marketing communications, and improve the communications strategy for your business.

To better understand customers buying habits, ask yourself the following questions:

Where do your customers shop?
How frequently do they buy?
What channels do they prefer to chat on?
What are their buying preferences?
Why do they buy your products or services?

Another data point to observe is: are the products customers frequently buy your most profitable items or are they your loss leaders? If you’re only reselling your loss leader products or services over and over, you’re not going to be in business very long. Understanding this may help you adjust your mindset and start focusing on pushing your customers to your more profitable products and services.

3. Average ticket price

Average ticket price is a great metric to track when pulling insights from data. It covers the average total of every ticket or order placed over a period of time. Even if you have a ton of traffic and a high conversion rate, if your average ticket price is low, it’ll be hard to stay in the green.

To improve average ticket price, you can use upselling techniques to encourage customers or clients to buy more. For example, you can offer complementary products at a checkout page if you’re an eCommerce store. If you’re an agency, you can upsell a Messenger bot with your Facebook ads campaigns. Lifting your average ticket price

4. Marketing Originated Customer Percentage

The Marketing Originated Customer Percentage refers to how much new business is a direct result of your marketing efforts. To calculate it, take all the new customers you received in a given period, and look back at which ones started with a lead that marketing generated. You can use a marketing analytics tool such as HubSpot to track every channel and touchpoint a lead has before they buy.

The average percentage can be between 20 – 40% for the average sales team. If you have a lot of lead generation from marketing, it can be more between 40 – 80%. An alternative way to look at this is calculating based on revenue. It all depends on how you want to look at your business.

Finding the truth in data insights

While the above examples show some of the common ways data insights are found and used, it’s certainly not all of them. Always remember two things one, if you think your data insights look off or too good to be true, they most likely are. The second is to use an all-in-one business dashboard to show clean, structured data that’s easy to understand. Good data visualization can lower your chances of misrepresenting and interpreting data insights, which results in poor decision making in your business. Don’t waste time looking at inaccurate data insights. Getting comfortable around the right business intelligence analytics helps you and your team discover the truth faster, more accurately, and with a lot less fuss. This way, you can be confident in the actions you decide to take that are informed by non-biased data insights.

Michael Keenan

The post Data Insights: How to Extract Insights from Data appeared first on Cyfe.

How to Monitor Your Sales KPIs & Motivate Your Sales Team

Michael Keenan — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 07:00:36 +0000

Sales KPIs – key performance indicators – are your business’ superpower for success and growth. They deliver important intelligence about all aspects of your sales cycle, helping you and your team:

identify your prospects
qualify leads
discover the best ways to connect with leads
manage objections
identify pain points and provide solutions
deliver products and services
manage your follow up and maintain relationships

Needless to say, keeping a close eye on your sales KPIs can mean the difference between a record year and closing the doors.

But what are the best KPIs to monitor? And how can you ensure your sales team is motivated to smash their goals? Here we’ll discuss the most important KPIs to measure for sales success.

Top 9 sales KPIs to measure in 2020

1. New Leads or Opportunities

It’s an obvious but important KPI which needs consistent monitoring. Tracking new leads tells you:

how many leads you’re getting
where your leads are coming from
when to focus your advertising activity
how your sales team are contributing to the growth of the business
who’s achieving their quota
the percentage of your team meeting their quota
if your quota is too high or too low

A sales dashboard in Cyfe is a highly-effective way to keep track of new leads (and many other KPIs). It uses real-time data and metrics from your business’ customer databases – Shopify, Infusionsoft, Salesforce, etc. – to monitor opportunities as they come in. No more trawling through reams of data, save time and money by streamlining and automating this task.

2. Sales Volume by Location

If you want to understand where the demand for your product is highest and lowest, monitoring Sales Volume by Location (in-store or online) is the ticket.

Comparing sales volumes across different locations sharpens your team’s activity. For example, your findings could tell you where to execute campaigns or which regions would benefit from new product enhancements. So you can supercharge sales by focusing on the best actions in the right locations.

As with tracking new opportunities, monitoring this KPI is much easier with a dashboard that can consolidate all your data in one place. That way you can easily compare Sales Volume by Location and share it with your team swiftly for valuable insights.

3. Lead Conversion Rate

The all-important question: how many leads are converting in sales? Tracking this metric helps you:

measure the effectiveness of your pitches
tweak your sales process to target more qualified leads
understand more about the prospects who convert
create a proven plan for future customer acquisition
target your ideal customers

To measure Lead Conversion Rate, pick a period you want to measure and run a report of leads generated in that time. Next, run a report of leads converted within that period. Then divide the leads converted by the leads generated to get your conversion rate. How you complete this task may change depending on the CRM software you use.

4. Actual vs. Forecasted Revenue

This is actually two essential sales KPIs in one. Actual vs. Forecasted Revenue tells you how successful your business is (or isn’t) by identifying how close you are to meeting your forecasted revenue.

If you discover that your forecasted revenue is way below your actual revenue, it’s time to take action. Review more detailed sales KPIs to understand where losses may be occurring in your forecasting process or sales cycle.

To monitor and measure this KPI, start by setting up a specific time frame in which to review your revenue stream. This could mean year-over-year, but also quarterly, monthly, or weekly. No matter your decided time breakdown, you must get a handle on how much revenue you’re projecting vs. how much you’re really earning. Otherwise, your business decisions will be for naught.

5. Sales Cycle Length

Analyzing Sales Cycle Length for individual reps shows you how effective a rep is in comparison to their colleagues. This empowers you to provide extra training and goal setting for the right staff to improve their performance.

But a quick sales cycle might not always be good for business. For example, you may find that your shortest sales cycle is generating dissatisfied customers. In this case, you might consider how lengthening the sales cycle can boost customer happiness.

Using a dashboard to monitor Sales Cycle Length ensures all the data you need is in one place and is easily accessible. That way, you can quickly gain valuable insights and share what you’ve learned with the team in an easy-to-understand way.

6. Employee Satisfaction

Often overlooked, but critical as work-related stress has been deemed the health epidemic of the 21st century by the World Health Organization.

Poor employee wellbeing is as bad for the individual as it is for business. These are the people on the front lines speaking and working with your customers and potential clients. They are the face of the products and services you wish to sell, so keeping them pleased is in your best interest.

The good news is that employee motivation and satisfaction are measurable and entirely relevant sales KPIs.

One way to gauge employee satisfaction is through feedback. You could ask your employees to rank their job satisfaction from 1 – 10 and follow up with qualifying questions to find out what’s making them unhappy or happy. Comparing these results with your goals will paint a picture of your overall employee happiness while highlighting factors you need to work to improve your staff’s wellbeing.

7. Competitor Pricing

An awareness of your competitors’ pricing is a great asset for a competitive strategy. For example, if you discover that your prices are around the same, you could implement a price-match strategy that ensures your customers get the best deals, giving your business a competitive edge.

Price monitoring can be executed via a web scraping tool or a parser. They give you the ability to gather live pricing data at intervals of your choosing. All you need to do is identify your competition and products that would present the best data points. Then determine how frequently you’d like to monitor competitor prices for scraping.

Next, gather your relevant product URLs and import them into your scraping or parser tool. Then you’re all set to analyze the data to help you achieve that pricing sweet spot to encourage sales and customer loyalty.

8. Customer Engagement (after the sale)

Build customer loyalty and keep them coming back for more. This can be achieved by monitoring the Customer Engagement KPI.

Customer engagement metrics could be:

Social engagement (number of likes, shares, reactions, retweets, etc.)
Email engagement (open rates, click-through rates, etc.)
Activity time (the total time a customer spends interacting with your service or brand)
Visit frequency (how often a customer uses your service or visits your website)

Collaborating with Marketing will help you gather and understand this data. These metrics help you to familiarize yourself with the type of people who buy your products or services. So you can continually refine your offerings and engagement strategies to give your customers exactly what they want.

9. Customer Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is one of the most important metrics to track for growing sales teams. It tells a company how much revenue they can expect from one customer through its business relationship.

Here’s a quick and easy way to calculate CLV for your business:

The longer a customer buys from a company, the greater their lifetime value becomes. You can use this metric to identify which customer segments are most valuable for the company.

Motivating your sales team like a boss

Okay, you’re the boss already. But do you know how to effectively motivate your sales team to meet their goals? Spoiler alert: you don’t need to be a dictator.

Here are our top takeaways on creating a positive work environment that fosters motivation as well as autonomy, commitment, and teamwork.

1. Ensure transparency

Keeping all your performance and sales data to yourself doesn’t create a sense of unity or teamwork. Instead, you need to adopt a transparent policy when it comes to sales and individual performance. This:

Helps staff keep on top of their performance
Helps them prepare for appraisals
Creates healthy competition between your sales team

All of which boosts your team’s motivation organically.

We recommend creating a sales team dashboard which can be made accessible to all your reps. This tracks the most important sales KPIs for each of your reps.

You can then use the new Cyfe Goals feature (which you can learn more about on our website) to set the quotas for each salesperson. That way, your sales team can see exactly how close they are to reaching their quota or even their personal goals in real-time.

2. Use alerts

An Alert can be a notification text message or email that is sent to a salesperson once a certain threshold is met (such as X number of calls made) within your sales dashboard. This function is available at Cyfe and you can learn more about it in our article: Get More From Your Business Intelligence Analytics With Alerts.

Alerts are ninja motivators. What better way to let your team members know that they’re close to hitting their daily quota? Or that they’ve surpassed their quota? Alerting your team of their performance keeps their goals front-of-mind, encouraging them to work harder towards specific achievements.

3. Leverage contests

Sales contests are another great way to keep your sales team motivated and performing at their best. Here are a couple of ideas for contests that you can run utilizing your sales dashboard.

Simple daily sales contest

Set a target goal for all your team members and the first to reach that goal for the day wins. It’s important to set a realistic goal, but also one that won’t likely be reached until later in the day. You can monitor all progress directly from your sales dashboard.

First to reach their daily quota contest

With daily goals set up for each salesperson, you can make a simple contest for the first person to hit their quota for the day. They all need to get there (that’s the purpose of the quota after all), but if you can push them to reach their quota early, everything that they accomplish the rest of the day is just a bonus!

PRO TIP: Make sure to have a prize that your sales team actually wants to win. Nothing kills a contest faster than a reward that no one really cares about.

Using these sales KPIs for sales success

Become a leader that knows the best sales KPIs to monitor, how to set progressive goals, and how to effectively motivate your reps. The reward is a sales team who view you as a hero because you consistently help them smash their targets, get excellent feedback and have a positive impact on the business.

Michael Keenan

The post How to Monitor Your Sales KPIs & Motivate Your Sales Team appeared first on Cyfe.

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Use Embedded Analytics To Easily Share Data In More Places

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Add Reporting In Your SaaS Product Without the Work

Tell A Client's Story With Visual Data To Earn More Business

Embedded Analytics Lets You Share Data Anywhere

Communicate Metrics That Matter To Employees In Apps They Use Everyday

How To Get Started With Embedded Analytics

Liezen Van Loh

How Cyfe Dashboards Save Curry Printing’s Marketing Manager 9 Hours Per Month

Problem

Solution

Results

Managing Reputation

Conclusion

What is a Data Dashboard?

Table of Contents

What is a Data Dashboard?

What is the Purpose of a Dashboard?

Why is a Dashboard Important?

What are the 6 Benefits of a Dashboard?

Dashboards Versus Reports

How Does a Dashboard Work?

What Do You Put in a Dashboard?

What Types of Dashboards are There?

How Do You Create a Dashboard?

How Do You Design a Dashboard?

Dashboard Examples

Analytical Dashboards

Business Dashboards

Platform Dashboards

Summing It Up

Phillip Paquette

How DRIVE® Increased Average Customer Spend by 1.78x with Cyfe Dashboards

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Solution:

Results:

Customer Service and Reputation

Business Value For Clients and DRIVE® Shops

Conclusion

How to Build an Effective Web Analytics Dashboard

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What is a web analytics dashboard?

Which web analytics are most important to your business?

Why do you need a web analytics dashboard to monitor your KPIs?

Start with your website analytics

The Essential Google Analytics Dashboard

Google Search Console Widgets

Google My Business Widgets

More Essential Web Analytics Widgets

Even More Analytics Widgets

Get started building your own web analytics dashboard

Garrett Sussman

Zapier Integration: The Easy Guide for Cyfe Users

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What is Zapier?

How Zapier integrations work with Cyfe

Top 9 Cyfe + Zapier integrations

1. Track the number of new CallRail phone calls over time

2. Track number of new HubSpot contacts over time

3. Track new Freshdesk tickets

4. Track New Backups in DigitalOcean

5. Update values in Cyfe on new orders on WooCommerce

6. Add new Pipedrive deals to Cyfe

7. Track new Magento orders over time

8. Track new ActiveCampaign contacts over time

9. Track new form submissions on Gravity Forms

How to Use Push by Zapier

Final thoughts

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What is a social media dashboard?

How does a social media dashboard work?

Social media dashboard widget examples

Facebook Page dashboard widgets

Facebook Page Overview

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