Phillip Paquette – Cyfe

How To Build A Facebook Ads Reporting Dashboard + Free Template

Phillip Paquette — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 15:32:18 +0000

As you know, Facebook Ad’s built-in reporting may not be the best way to keep track of your campaign’s performance.

Optimize your ads and make more informed budget decisions by creating a Facebook Ads reporting dashboard where you can monitor campaigns at a high level and drill down to specific metrics. Data dashboards also give you the ability to:

analyze the results you’re driving through customizable data visualizations
bring together all the advertising metrics you track across Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and other ad networks into one place
share with stakeholders your most effective campaigns without needing to mess with Facebook account roles and permissions

In this article, we’ll break down how to build the most effective Facebook Ads reporting dashboard including the metrics you can track to measure KPI’s such as reach, conversions, and ROI.

How to Analyze Facebook Ads Campaign Performance With Dashboards

You can build out clear, actionable Facebook Ads reporting using a dashboard in three simple steps:

1. Define your audience and goals – The audience, in this case, is who will see your reporting whether it’s a client or co-worker. The type of campaigns you’re tracking will dictate what metrics are added to your Facebook Ads dashboard (more on that later).

2. Outline your reporting cadence – Are you needing a dashboard you can check daily? Do you need to send out weekly reports? Commit to a schedule and make sure your dashboard displays data to match. Cyfe lets you compare performance across date periods. You can also easily toggle between daily, weekly, and monthly views of your campaigns or set a custom date range.

3. Launch your dashboard – Easily connect your Facebook Ads data to your dashboard with a pre-built integration and launch your dashboard. Factor in these tips to create a dashboard and get the most out of it.

If you’re looking to get started using an existing template, you can also try our Facebook Ads dashboard for free.

Dashboards are also easy to share with different stakeholders — they don’t require a login to access. In Cyfe, share dashboards via a link or automated email. You can also add dashboards into internal sites and web apps using Cyfe’s embedded analytics.

The bottom line with Facebook Ads reporting: by building out a dashboard with a clean design and data visualizations, you can make your campaign results clear to others.

How to Measure the Success of a Facebook Ads Campaign

The metrics and KPIs included in your Facebook Ads campaign dashboard will depend on the funnel stage of your ads.

That said, Cyfe’s Facebook Ads reporting dashboard template includes the following metrics so you can tweak as you see fit:

Metric	Description
Impressions	the total amount of times Facebook users saw your ad
Clicks	the number of times users click on links within your ad
Click-Through Rate	the percentage of users who saw your ad and clicked on its associated link
Actions	the total number of views, clicks, and conversions around your ad
Cost Per Actions	the total number of actions divided by the amount spent on your Facebook ad
Frequency	the average number of times Facebook users view your ad
Overview	show your ad costs, impressions, clicks, and actions in a single data visualization section

Ultimately the KPIs you select will depend on your campaign goals. Let’s look at other metrics based on where leads are in your marketing funnel.

Facebook Ads Awareness Campaign Metrics

If you’re running brand awareness campaigns on Facebook, you’re likely prioritizing reach and any traffic increases you can attribute to your campaigns. Consider adding these metrics into your Facebook Ads reporting dashboard (in addition to any of the metrics mentioned above):

Metric	Description
Reach	the number of unique users who saw your ad
Cost Per Click	the average cost for each link click
Post Engagement	the total number of actions that people take involving your ads

If your awareness ads contain video, you’ll also want to monitor within your Facebook Ads Campaign dashboard:

Metric	Description
ThruPlays	the number of times your video was played to completion, or for at least 15 seconds
Video Watches at 25%	The number of times users played your video to at least 25% of its length.This includes plays where a user skipped to the 25% point of the video. You can also track the video watches at 50%, 75%, and 100% in a Facebook Ads reporting dashboard
Cost Per ThruPlay	the average cost for each ThruPlay in a given Facebook Ads campaign

Consideration Campaign Metrics

If you’re retargeting Facebook users and anyone else who has likely heard of your brand, you may be tracking these KPIs to drive further engagement:

Metric	Description
Action Types	an overview of actions Facebook users take around your ad including post engagement, video views, and link clicks
Unique Click-Through Rate	The number of unique link clicks divided by the reach

Conversion Campaign Metrics

For all your leads that complete an action, you now want to see how many conversions occurred. Facebook Ads reporting dashboards can track:

Metric	Description
Website Purchases ROAS	the total return on ad spend (ROAS) from website purchases tracked by the Facebook pixel or Conversions API on your website
Website Purchases Conversion Value	the total value of event conversions tracked by the pixel on your website and attributed to your ads

Once you’ve selected your metrics, you can customize the display of your dashboard. In Cyfe you can do this by selecting the chart type to show different data visualizations including line, columns, and stacked bar graphs. For example, if you want to see the video watches at different completion percentages, you may decide to use a bar graph.

Want to take it a step further? Launch a Google Analytics dashboard to keep track of all the referral traffic your site generates from Facebook Ads. That way, you can see how much Facebook Ads are moving the needle versus other marketing initiatives.

Summing Up Facebook Ads Reporting

By having your Facebook Ads metrics in one place together, you can see the clear winners driving results for your team. You can easily update your KPIs as you see fit and view the real-time results of any Facebook Ads campaigns with Cyfe’s dashboards. Share performance with your team, stakeholders, and organization.

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 How To Build A Facebook Ads Reporting Dashboard + Free Template appeared first on Cyfe.

10 White Label Marketing Tools Digital Agencies Use To Drive Growth

Phillip Paquette — Sat, 20 Feb 2021 17:35:17 +0000

A recent study by Bain & Company found that a 5% percent increase in customer retention can lead to a 75% increase in company profits. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel to retain your agency clients — you just need to continually provide them more value.

One way agencies deliver more value and prove ROI without huge overhead is by using white label marketing tools.

In this guide, we’ll look at off-the-shelf digital tools you can white label and leverage to expand your services and scale up your agency.

1. White Label Design Tool - Xtensio

Looking for a tool to create all your business development collateral without having to bill a designer internally or hire a freelancer to get your proposals done? With Xtensio, you can easily create sleek pitch decks, user personas, and other presentation documents.

Work off their proposal, sales sheet, and other templates to create your own sales collateral. Drag and drop to make any tweaks. Then, share with colleagues to collaborate on the final version or ping these documents over to clients.

2. White Label Reputation Management - Grade.us

If you’re part of a digital marketing or local SEO agency, online reputation inevitably comes up with clients. Grade.us is a powerful platform used by agencies as a white label marketing tool for reputation management.

Give your clients a single space to manage their reputation and grow their reviews on Google, Facebook, and other third-party review websites. Grade.us’ white-label tool also can monitor reviews for Yelp and sites specific to industries including:

Angie’s List, HomeAdvisor, and Houzz for home service companies
Zocdoc, Healthgrades, and WebMD for healthcare offices
Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com for real estate clients

Use the Grade.us Review Management ROI Calculator to determine your agency’s potential profit margins and monthly recurring revenue.

Grade.us also offers white label pitch decks and educational resources to close new clients along with review management checklists to ensure your customers get the most value out of the reputation management tool.

3. White Label Video Creation Tool - Lumen5

Create videos in minutes for clients or your agency’s social media initiatives using Lumen5.

Here’s how it works: Lumen5 reviews the text of any content via AI and generates the music and image suggestions to help you storyboard and publish videos onto any social network.

Whether you’re looking to test new social content for your clients or scale-up that service offering, Lumen5 can help.

4. White Label Invoicing & Payment Solution - Invoice Ninja

A smooth payment experience can also be a marketing tool that encourages retention. Invoice Ninja offers free, unlimited invoices and quotes for up to 100 clients. Their white label service is $30 per year and lets you add your agency’s logo, brand colors, and adjust the overall style for invoices.

5. White Label SEO Reporting - AuthorityLabs

Show your SEO strategy is driving organic rankings. AuthorityLabs lets you white label SEO ranking reports.

Rank Tracker is their core daily reporting system used by Mint, Symantec, and other enterprise brands. Rank Tracker reports give you the most up to date, accurate ranking data. That way, clients can see:

The snippets acquired in SERPs
Their keywords ranking in relation to competitors
How their pages rank for a given keyword in specific countries, cities, and zip codes

With this rank tracking data, you can also build out interactive, accurate reports in Google Data Studio.

6. White Label Landing Page Creator - Landingi

As you know, if you’re building out ad campaigns, the ad creative is only half the battle. Your agency also needs to manage landing page design and optimization so you can own the landing page metrics. There are a variety of white label marketing tools for email but you can build out dozens of landing pages fast on behalf of your clients with Landingi.

Landingi’s white label agency plan includes:

Unlimited landing pages
30 custom domains
Custom templates you can save and share with clients
Priority support

7. White Label Project Management Tool - Notion

Make sure your ducks are in a row for every project across all your different clients using Notion. Create a database containing all the tasks associated with each client. Then assign tasks internally and stay on top of every deadline. As you’re developing briefs or gathering your customer’s feedback, you can add them to any task.

If you’re looking to get started faster, Notion provides templates you can duplicate to create your own briefs, content calendars, and more.

8. White Label Messaging Platform - SimpleTexting

SimpleTexting offers a white label solution for automating and running SMS campaigns. Their white label marketing tools let you:

Run trigger-based event messages and mass texting campaigns
Monitor account activities and run reports
Rebrand their platform as an offering you can price to your client
Manage email templates across sub-accounts

9. White Label Email Marketing Platform - ActiveCampaign

If email marketing is your agency’s bread and butter or a service you’re ready to roll out, ActiveCampaign offers their automation platform as a white label marketing tool.

Enterprise account holders ($229 per month) can:

Create custom domains
Rebrand with their logo and colors
Remove all references and links to ActiveCampaign

Each of these features let you provide a fully branded experience to your clients. ActiveCampaign also directly integrates with Cyfe so you can report email marketing results to your customers from our white label dashboards.

10. White Label Dashboards & Reporting - Cyfe

As far as white label marketing tools go, Cyfe brings together all your client’s data sources into a single spot where your customers can monitor their KPIs and quickly understand the results you’re driving through data visualizations.

Depending on the services your agency provides, you can build dashboards off Cyfe’s dashboard templates including:

Social media dashboards covering your client’s results on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn
Report at a campaign, ad group, or keyword level on key metrics like conversions, cost per conversion, and click-through rate with the Google Ads dashboard
Website conversion rates, goals, page views, and other KPIs for your client’s website performance using the Google Analytics Dashboard
A dashboard for your own team’s internal use containing marketing agency KPIs

Cyfe’s white label solutions let you create an effective, branded experience with:

Branded reports including customized dashboard backgrounds and domain names
Embedded analytics so you can add key metrics to a client portal or any other existing reporting system
Custom URLs that direct your client’s stakeholders to dashboards
Set benchmark metrics against your client’s business goals to stay on track and report growth

Phillip Paquette

The post 10 White Label Marketing Tools Digital Agencies Use To Drive Growth appeared first on Cyfe.

SMCo Thrift’s Sales Dashboard Solution Increases Client Sales by 20%

Phillip Paquette — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 14:49:49 +0000

SMCo Thrift works with thrift stores to improve business operations, drive funding to help support their non-profit organizations, and develop their marketing initiatives and brand growth.

The client's problem

In 2018, SMCo Thrift ran into industry-specific challenges and issues unique to their business model.

While non-profits may be great at serving others, they “are typically not good at business,” said Evan Crass, Vice President of SMCo Thrift.

They also saw there was room for improvement with KARM Stores, which SMCo Thrift manages and whose profits support Knox Area Rescue Ministries. They were looking for ways to improve the operations at KARM Stores’ 20 locations.

“We were waking up every day wondering how do we do this well?”

One service that SMCo Thrift offers includes the recommendation and implementation of software tools. They started with a tool that gave stores the ability to provide a tax-deductible receipt to donors. Their toolkit grew to include tracking inventory complemented by a point-of-sale system. To tie all of their efforts and report quickly on each store’s performance, they wanted to provide an all-in-one business dashboard.

However, the original dashboard features in their platform were limited to simple raw table views and an ability to export data into Excel.

“A lot of people’s eyes would start swimming when they were looking at those raw numbers.”

They required a better solution that could visualize the key data from each store so it would be easier for their clients to understand and track.

SMCo Thrift's solution

SMCo Thrift first investigated several dashboard solutions. They looked at each of these solutions from the perspective of KARM Stores and improving their toolkit so they could help other organizations.

With their decision process, they considered:

Scalability: They needed a platform they could first test within their organization that could be quickly rolled out to others
Simplicity: Their toolkit was built on SQL and needed the ability to set up simple select statements for queries that could then be easily visualized.
Price: They weighed which platforms provided the most value at an affordable price point that would fit into the budget of a cost-conscious thrift store.

In September 2019, Evan and his team discovered Cyfe’s white label solution, which “allowed them to get to the scale we were looking at. We were able to see big changes early on in the way clients were interacting with data.”

TV Mode for team alignment

Many of the teams that SMCo Thrift works with broadcast dashboards onto a television monitor in the store’s break room. That way, they can have a team huddle at the beginning of a shift to review their current store’s performance and goals including sales and production value.

While taking in donations they can go into SMCo Thrift’s toolkit, ThriftTrac, and categorize item donations and identify what’s sellable. When ThriftTrac users log into the platform, they see a dashboard view of a stores’ KPIs including:

Sales
Product donations
Sellthrough rate

Each thrift store location SMCo Thrift manages also has a second dashboard containing daily sales reports used by the bookkeeper to create the end-of-day journal entries.

Any non-profit team member can also easily share results and provide a snapshot of how much money their store earns with their non-profit’s executive director and board of directors.

Easier data transfer

Many non-profits have a donor management platform system that contains information about donors and acts as a communication tool.

“It’s a pain in the butt though to import and export information from those systems.”

Since partnering with Cyfe, SMCo Thrift’s clients can get quick stats on the average donation amount per donor or send an email to donors. These non-profits may have an outsourced communications specialist so they can easily export those contact details and drop an email blast.

The results

SMCo Thrift’s clients are able to hit their goals faster with a 41% total sales increase across all the organizations they work with after adding Cyfe as a white label solution to their platform. That’s a 20% median sales increase.

“What used to take six months to be able to change course, we’re able to do in half the time or less.”

In their client’s dashboards, SMCo Thrift can take a variety of data points so that any non-profit employee or a thrift store volunteer can see their target goal for a KPI and track their progress.

One of the biggest metrics they can now track in stores is the average price per piece sold, helping non-profits monitor and grow that KPI. They can monitor this KPI to see which particular items sell well and what is the most advantageous price point.

Gauging realistic goals

Due to COVID-19, stores are not seeing the same year-over-year growth. Still, SMCo Thrift can adjust their clients’ targets to more attainable goals. Then visualize the goal as a gauge on the dashboard.

“This provides a simple way for non-profits to understand what metrics they need to meet regardless if that person isn’t great with numbers.”

Letting the data speak for itself

It’s also easier now to sell their software.

“Even though it was the last piece, people really started getting it after we added Cyfe.”

During conferences, they can share the sales success they’ve recorded working with many non-profits and have grown their network to stores across North America. Their clients have over 175 different dashboards.

“Showing that growth has been such a game-changer. At our conference, we invite our customers to join a panel and tell us the most compelling stories like ‘Anytime I am sitting with my team on a Monday morning, I can change the date range and see if we are winning or losing.’”

For SMCo Thrift, Cyfe provides an off-the-shelf tool they can still customize without needing to build a data dashboard from the ground up. Instead, they can focus their development efforts on components unique to their industry.

“As a software developer, you want to be able to mobilize and equip your users to make the best decisions. We realize as a software provider that makes us unique. Cyfe as a partner has allowed us to truly shine.”

Conclusion

Evan and the rest of his team needed a more accessible solution to data reporting that could be easily picked up by their diverse group of clients. Data visualization is a key part of keeping their tool user friendly and helping non-profits hit their goals.

Using Cyfe as a white label solution, SMCo Thrift can customize dashboards for client’s specific needs and scale up their platform. They also have more time to serve new clients and develop solutions specific to non-profit organizations running thrift stores.

Phillip Paquette

The post SMCo Thrift’s Sales Dashboard Solution Increases Client Sales by 20% appeared first on Cyfe.

How to Measure Marketing With Attribution Models

Phillip Paquette — Thu, 07 Jan 2021 08:34:00 +0000

What’s the point of marketing? You’re putting your business in front of your potential customers. Your marketing message needs to drive revenue, conversions, sales, and other business KPIs.

How do you determine which of your marketing campaigns deserve credit for the conversion? Does your customer’s first interaction with a blog post get all of the credit? How about the ad they clip at the end of their research? Which touchpoint matters the most and how does that impact future marketing investments?

Enter attribution models.

What are Marketing Attribution Models?

Marketing attribution models are frameworks for determining which touchpoints a lead interacts with that you credit for a conversion. Touchpoints receive (or don’t receive) a percentage value of the credit defined by the attribution model.

Why use Marketing Attribution Models?

Platforms like Google Analytics can quickly show conversions by channels including:

Organic search ads
Direct traffic (when someone enters your site’s URL into their browser or visits via a bookmark)
Social media
Email (whether it’s from your sales, marketing teams, or customer referrals)
Referrals (such as 3rd party reviews sites like Yelp or backlinks pushing traffic to your website)

Still, you need to factor in all the prior touchpoints that contribute to a sale. For many buying cycles, your leads may see 6-10 pieces of content before even converting across different channels.

Attribution models give you:

A plan for comparing the effectiveness of different initiatives.
A clearer picture of ROI on your marketing activities beyond ad spend whether you need to prove marketing ROI to your clients or your CEO.
The ability to reallocate your budget based on what’s most effective.

That’s just a few of the major reasons why Salesforce research found 41% of organizations use marketing attribution modeling to measure ROI.

Now let’s look at specific attribution models.

The Most Common Marketing Attribution Models

The attribution models you will use depend on:

The amount of data you have at hand.
The number of campaigns you run.
The funnel stages you are looking to measure.

1. First Click Attribution

First click attribution assigns all credit for a lead’s conversion based on their first interaction/click. This can be especially useful to see what content or ads drive initial interest that converts. In other words, you can find the top of funnel marketing that is most effective.

All that said, when comparing campaigns you won’t be able to see what other touchpoints influenced a conversion except the initial interaction if you only use a first click attribution model.

2. Last Touch Attribution

Last touch attribution is also a single-touch model. Instead, it assigns 100% of all value to the last click. Last touch attribution lets you see your strongest channels for converting leads if your sales cycle is short. You can also compare how much specific offers convert such as discounts served through ads.

Using this model alone you will only be tracking the final interaction and won’t be able to see if there are any bottlenecks in your campaigns.

3. Time Decay Attribution

Like linear attribution, time decay factors in all interactions you can trace. However, a time decay model gives more value to touchpoints that happen closer to a purchase. The first interaction gets less and the last interaction receives the most credit.

If you’re working with long sales cycles, this can help you drill down to:

See what touchpoints closest to the last one before conversion provided value.
Figure out if they interact with a cluster of content before converting.

Then you can iterate on your middle and bottom of funnel activities.

This model requires more advanced tracking you won’t get out of the box with Google Analytics. It also doesn’t show the value of the top of the funnel content.

“Generally, the more expensive your product, the longer you want to open that window. Facebook allows you to keep the window open up to 90 days to track data and see how many touchpoints there are,” said Sandro Galindo on the Sandro & Liz Marketing Podcast.

“A good place to start for most businesses is that one day decay just to divide the attribution, give it more weight to the most recent, and less weight as time goes on.”

4. Data-Driven Model

The data-driven model uses the algorithmic model in Google Analytics 360. The algorithm factors in all the conversion paths of your leads and sets values on each interaction based on their importance in the conversion process.

This model is advertising-driven as Analytics 360 requires a Google Ads account with at least 15,000 clicks on Google Search and a conversion action with at least 600 conversions within 30 days

5. Linear Attribution

Linear attribution places equal credit to every touchpoint your lead interacts with before converting. This model reinforces:

The value of each step in your funnel.
The average B2B buyer reads 10 pieces of content before purchasing.
The overall campaigns that are driving leads for your brand.

Here’s the catch, though: Due to the equal distribution of credit, linear attribution does not highlight which specific marketing activities are more effective.

6. Position-Based Attribution

Position-based attribution, also known as u-shaped attribution, looks at your lead generation efforts. This model places value with:

40% going to the first touch.
40% to the point where they become a lead (e.g. they request a demo).
20% equally distributed across any touchpoints between the other two touches.

If you hand off leads to your sales team, you can see which touchpoints generate the most initial interest and entice leads enough to provide their information. But by design, this model assumes the first and last interactions are the most important parts of a customer’s journey.

7. W-Shaped Attribution

W-shaped attribution takes the idea of u-shaped models one step further. Along with the first and lead creation touches (credited 30% each), this model gives 30% to the final touchpoint before a lead becomes a customer. The remaining 10% goes to all other interactions a lead has with your brand.

This can help you see which marketing activity pushes a lead to take the next step in your funnel. In other words:

The first touch shows what ad, blog post, or other marketing initiative led to an anonymous user reaching the top of your funnel.
A user opts into downloading your eBook or subscribes to your newsletter, hitting your mid-funnel content.
At the bottom of the funnel, you can see if a lead reads a product comparison whitepaper or receives a one-time-discount offer and then converts.

8. Custom Attribution

With custom attribution models, you set the rules on how much credit different interactions receive on a lead’s journey. If you have a specific campaign and the existing data you need to determine the most important touchpoints, custom models can be valuable.

Simpler models are a better fit in the beginning though if you’re:

Creating initial campaigns and need to establish benchmarks.
Working on personalization campaigns.
Moving upstream to higher-value target clients.

How to Measure Marketing Attribution with Custom Models

There are two key ways you can create custom models:

Through an experienced data scientist that has access to business intelligence tools
Create custom models off a default model in Google Analytics

Here’s how to create a custom model in GA:

Select Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Model Comparison Tool

2. Click into “Select model” and choose “Create new custom model”

3. Give your model a name and select a baseline model you can customize from

4. Toggle your desired customization options including:

Lookback window (the total amount of time a touchpoint can go that you want to credit in your attribution model) so you can factor in your sales cycle into your attribution model (the max time allowed in Google Analytics is 90 days prior to a conversion).

Automatically adjust credit based on how much a user engages with content based on time on site or page scroll depth.

Set custom rules that define how much credit each touchpoint gets based on conditions being met.

5. Once you’re done, click “Save and Apply.”

Summing It Up

To track the effectiveness of all your marketing spend and what content pushes leads further along to buy, you’ll likely need more than one attribution model.

Once you have attribution models set up in platforms like Google Analytics, you can view your KPIs and attribution measurements in a single dashboard using Cyfe.

Dashboards let you analyze code free and access all the data you need. Bring together in minutes all your data sources such as:

Facebook
Google Ads
HubSpot
Salesforce

Phillip Paquette

The post How to Measure Marketing With Attribution Models 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 Business Intelligence? How BI can power businesses

Phillip Paquette — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 08:07:34 +0000

Smarter decisions. Pinpointing problems. Driving up revenue. Whether you own a small business, agency, or consultant, you’re taking big actions every day.

So how do you break down the data behind your business to reach the right conclusions?

The more complex your business, the more difficult it is to surface insights that will improve your financial outlook. With advanced formulas, predictive models, and sophisticated algorithms, you can begin to simplify how your smartest business minds can process your company’s performance and impact growth.

Learn how business intelligence can be used by strategists across your organization to enhance the way you run your business.

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence (BI) refers to tools and practices that translate data into actionable business insights. BI tools collect, store, and analyze large data sets, helping companies make high-level and tactical business decisions. These tools can present data through:

Dashboards
Cloud data services
Data warehouses
Data discovery tools

Who is Business Intelligence for?

Business intelligence tools are, technically speaking, available for any type of company from enterprises to small businesses. That said, BI tools are not necessarily the best option for smaller organizations unless they have the technical resources to implement and use it.

If you’re looking to get up and running in a short timeframe, BI tools can be complicated to set up. Some companies will pay development firms for on-premise deployment and training due to the complexity of BI platforms.

While some BI tools offer high customization, these tools can also be difficult for non-technical users. In large companies, business intelligence analysts go through the data in BI tools. Then work with in-house data scientists to analyze the gathered data.

Keep in mind BI software is often expensive. A license’s cost averages roughly $3,000 per year.

The Difference Between BI and Business Analytics

While the differences are up to debate for many working in big data, here’s what you need to know:

Business intelligence looks at what happened in the past and how it happened. Often it looks at the big picture trends and patterns but does not consider the future.
Business analytics look at current data to predict future trends.

In other words, BI tools focus on advancing current operations. Business analytics can help update your operations to improve your future work.

While you can use both in tandem to boost your current and future operations, business analytics with a real-time monitoring dashboard can serve the same role.

Business analytics tools like Cyfe are easier to get started. You can get up and running in three easy steps.

Select a dashboard template.

2. Configure your data source whether it’s Google Analytics, QuickBooks, or other software.

Drag and drop to customize your dashboard.

Then use Cyfe’s dashboard to monitor and report on data in real-time.

Let’s say you own an eCommerce clothing brand. BI tools can reveal information such as:

Your most popular item last season by looking at sales figures
Where those customers live
What eCommerce channel drove the most sales

Then you may decide to set up ad campaigns targeting specific geo-locations.

In this case, Business analytics with a real-time dashboard can help you:

See what sites customers come from before landing on your site
Review your most successful ad campaigns
Monitor your eCommerce KPIs

After reviewing your business analytics, you may choose to reallocate your ad spend on specific networks or track data on a live A/B test.

Examples of BI

Here are a few more examples to illustrate how companies use business intelligence…

Amazon Analyzes Actions

Amazon uses big data to understand everything from where to keep inventory in specific warehouses to what customers buy in the same transaction. Using BI tools, Amazon can shorten shipping routes, provide personalized recommendations, and other great customer experiences.

Lowe’s Recovers Revenue

Lowe’s built out a data warehouse to help them look at lost revenue. Through BI tools they analyzed which stores were collecting delivery charges and which weren’t. Collections increased by $30 million the following year.

Seer Interactive Delivers Client Wins

Seer Interactive uses Traject Data SEO API to capture all the search terms their PPC clients’ potential customers use. With the API, they can capture low search volume keywords that provide a great ROI to their clients.

Tools for Business Intelligence

Now, let’s look at other popular business intelligence tools.

Tableau

Tableau, owned by Salesforce is the largest business intelligence tool. Tableau integrates with over 250 applications so you can pull data from files like spreadsheets to larger databases, including AWS.

Tableau has a huge community so you can ask questions in forums or even get certified as an expert on their platform.

A few drawbacks to be aware of with Tableau:

To fully utilize the software, you can expect a steep learning curve.
Only admins can set up scheduled email notifications; other users would need to use custom Python code to create alerts based on specific parameters
Prices start at $840 per year for a Tableau license.

Domo

Domo touts how fast analytics can work within their cloud-based platform. “We maintain a sub-second average query response time,” said CEO and founder Josh James.

Along with their fast query time, Domo users can collaborate through messages and annotations on any data visualizations.

Like other BI tools, users can also set up benchmark alerts and other notifications.

A few factors to consider with Domo:

On-prem deployment is not available
Users report limited pivot table functionality
Platform does not provide dashboard access to non-users

Looker

Looker is a browser-based BI platform. Meaning the installation and maintenance support compared to an on-premise solution is far less. This Google-owned tool lets you share data via links instead of files and has extensive help resources to get you using Looker.

However, some Looker users report:

difficulty customizing Looker templates
slow application loading times
less functionality using the mobile app

Summing It Up

BI tools can help break down big data, but these tools can have a steep learning curve or require a ton of upfront investment to deploy. Working at a large scale and hiring people with technical skills to act as power users can pay off.

More lightweight business analytic solutions can help make smarter decisions for many agencies, small business owners, and other entrepreneurs. Try out Cyfe to help you review:

Current or past business results.
Establish benchmarks to continually improve.
Receive real-time alerts when there are clear changes in your most important metrics.

Phillip Paquette

The post What is Business Intelligence? How BI can power businesses appeared first on Cyfe.

The 20 Best Data Visualizations of 2020

Phillip Paquette — Wed, 04 Nov 2020 12:16:48 +0000

Data is beautiful indeed. Not only can you beautifully illustrate data, visualization also helps you more effectively communicate metrics.

But what data visualizations are setting higher standards in 2020? With the below best data visualizations of 2020, you’ll see how data visualizations can:

Highlight specific causes
Provide vital information so people can make informed health choices
Illustrate trends over time
Pinpoint issues backed by data

1. Coronavirus Riskiest Activities

Data visualizations can break down large amounts of information into an easily understood way. With the pandemic came many ambiguous situations where people weren’t aware of how much they are at risk.

The below data visualization by Information is Beautiful breaks down popular activities by the level of risk.

Data Source: New York Times, Reuters, NPR, SF Gate and others

Data Metrics: Risky activities ranked lowest to highest

2. Identifying Generational Gaps in Music

Visualization can also be an immersive experience. The digital publication The Pudding created a multimedia quiz where site visitors:

Provide their birth year so The Pudding can recognize what generation each visitor is a part of
Listen to clips of music and state whether how much they recognize a song from the 1990s as it plays
- Below the multiple-choice answers, anyone can see the percentage of each generation that knows the song

Data Source: First-party data gathered from users who complete the quiz

Data Metrics: percentage of people who recognize a song

The visualization is clear so that users know it’s a timed quiz and can see their answer history.

According to BuzzSumo, this visualization is the most shared content from pudding.cool with over 9,000 engagements.

3. V. Analytics' Trending Google Searches 2018-2020

The most upvoted r/dataisbeautful post this year isn’t a meme. It’s an effective time lapse of the top Google trending searches by state each day from 2018 to 2020.

Data Source: Google

Data Metrics: Google Trends search data

4. Demographics of the United States Congress

These pie graphs posted to r/dataisbeautiful use multiple data points compiled via spreadsheet to show how much state reps accurately reflect the US population. Anyone can see how demographics including religion, race, and gender compare with each political party.

Data Source: Pew – Faith on the Hill Pew Religious Survey, Congressional Research Service, US Census Congressional Research Service, and US Census

Data Metrics: Religious, ethnicity, and gender demographics

5. How Much Football is in a Broadcast Game

Everyone’s trying to be smarter with their time. A Five Thirty Eight article visualizes data to show how much action each pro sports league airs compared to game stoppage and commercials.

Data Source: University of Texas at Austin Sports Analytics Course

Data Metrics: Total time in minutes airing game action, non-action, and commercials

The distinct color palette helps make this graphic visually appealing.

6. Overall Inflation Versus College Tuition Inflation

A simple line graph can also say a lot based on the data. In this case, you can see the Chartr graph below shows college tuition rates outpace inflation.

Data Source: US Bureau of Labor statistics

Data Metrics: Inflation rate

7. How to Profit in Space: A Visual Guide

Beyond SpaceX, companies are looking beyond earth at business opportunities. This data visualization guide by the Wall Street Journal looks at satellites in orbit by originating country and use.

Data Source: US Space Surveillance Network, The Union of Concerned Scientists

Data Metrics: Satellites in orbit from specific countries and by usage

8. YouTube Channels Then & Now

The below data visualization looks at the top 100 YouTube channels last year compared to 2010. As a second data point, it also factors in how many more of the top channels today are from brands like WWE instead of individual producers. Though minimalist in design, the visualization leverages YouTube brand colors.

Data Source: Wayback Machine and SocialBlade.com

Data Metrics: YouTube channels with the most subscribers that are a YouTuber, mainstream celebrity, or corporation

Monitor data from your own channel using our YouTube dashboard.

9. The Effect of COVID-19 on Unemployment

This animated data visualization shows unemployment figures across the US at the height of the pandemic. Commercial real estate software company Sites USA used After Effects to show the data progression.

Data Source: Sites USA

Data Metrics: Unemployment rates by US county

10. Global Commodities

A spinning globe showing different commodities and locations is a natural fit. Clicking on any country on this interactive data visualization by Data FX shows the:

Gross amount for imports or exports
Global share as a percentage
Rank compared to other countries

Their site contains data on imports and exports spanning the last ten years.

Data Source: UN Comtrade Database

Data Metrics: Gross imports and exports ($) along with global share and rank

11. Most Popular Programming Languages

YouTube content creator Pie Chart Pirate put together this breakdown of the most popular programming language based on GitHub data. The pie chart looks at data starting in 2012, showing the decline in Ruby and emergence of Go as a programming language.

Data Source: GitHub

Data Metrics: GitHub pull request data

12. Public Companies Receiving PPP Loans

Companies are also using data visualization to keep publicly traded companies accountable.

After JP Morgan announced they are investigating the misuse of pandemic funds, Quiver Quantitative created a visually appealing bar graph with complementary colors showing public companies that received PPP loans and either returned the loan or did not.

Data Source: US Department of Treasury

Data Metrics: Market cap in millions and whether each company returned or did not return PPP loan

13. Disney Revenue Streams

Chartr used data from SEC filings and MacroTrends to share Disney’s revenue totals. The bar graph is effective because they provide additional context including:

How much their brand grew in revenue after Bob Iger stepped in as CEO
2019 revenue totals with the percentage of specific revenue streams

Data Source: SEC filings and MacroTrends

Data Metrics: Revenue by year and 2019 by revenue stream

14. Symbolikon

Michela Graziani created a large set of designs featuring ancient symbols from different civilizations throughout history. Symbolikon’s home page features the below visualization incorporating muted colors and an interactive map.

Data Source: Symbolikon

Data Metrics: Ancient symbols by origin

Site visitors can click on any icon within the map to find whether the Incas or another society used the symbol. Anyone looking to design with these symbols can purchase and download them.

15. Homelessness on the Rise in the UK

Data visualizations can also bring to light larger social issues. Viz for Social Good worked with Tomorrow Today, a nonprofit committed to ending homelessness, to create a series of graphics highlighting the homeless in the UK.

Data Source: CHAIN and various local authorities
Data Metrics: Vacancy rate and rough sleepers

Over 200,000 people have viewed the visualizations.

16. COVID-19 Hot Spots

With so many different data sources available, it can be tricky to try to decipher what’s going on. New York Times compiles the current hot spots by county across the United States via data from different state and local agencies.

Data Source: State and local agencies; population and demographic data from US Census
Data Metrics: Weekly cases by county

The legend above the map makes it easy to navigate and any site visitors can also highlight a specific county to view 14 day trends on the number of COVID-19 cases. Anyone viewing the data visualization can also toggle between total cases, deaths, and per capita.

17. Wealth Shown to Scale

Data visualization can also serve to communicate specific items. This graphic lets any site visitor scroll to see Jeff Bezos estimated net worth. His $200 billion in wealth is shown with a ruler-style length at the bottom, with $80 million representing the equivalent of an inch.

As any user continues to scroll, they can clearly see how much that truly is.

Data Source: Forbes
Data Metrics: Wealth of Jeff Bezos and richest people in the world

18. Data Grammar

Data Grammar contains a glossary covering different types of data visualization. Complimentary colors help show why specific charts work best based on the scenario. Black and white images seamlessly weave into the accompanying graphics.

Data Source: Juillet Juillet

19. Migration Waves

National Geographic looks at the migration patterns over the last 50 years with this infographic.

A few conclusions from this data:

Less than 10% of migrants are forced to flee
Most migrants are seeking a better life and move only when they can afford to

Data Source: National Geographic

Data Metrics: Emigration by number of people in a given year and country

The wave patterns in the graphic are both functional and aesthetic. The waves show increase while National Geographic uses their core brand colors of yellow, black, and white here.

20. Movies Critics Loved, But Audiences Really Didn’t

The biggest disparity for the Rotten Tomatoes Score between critics and audiences happened with the release of the Last Jedi. 93% of critics gave it a positive review, other viewers averaged a 56% score. The scatter plot graph by Information is Beautiful looks at other major film releases where big disparities occurred.

Data Source: Rotten Tomatoes

Data Metrics: % gap between audience and critics for Rotten Tomatoes of various films

Summing It Up

As you can see from these examples, visualizations create clear conclusions that anyone can quickly get. Still, the best data visualizations are only as good as the data displayed.

Use the above examples and Cyfe’s dashboard templates as a springboard to help you identify the most important data you can share, whether it’s for your personal life or business KPIs.

Phillip Paquette

The post The 20 Best Data Visualizations of 2020 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

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

What is a KPI? Your guide to Key Performance Indicators

Phillip Paquette — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 06:30:10 +0000

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a selected measurement that businesses track to demonstrate how effective they are in achieving their targeted goals.

Go into any performance review or executive meeting. KPIs will come up.

In other words, a KPI is not the actual objective. KPIs help to measure if you’re on track to meet a goal.

Leveraging the most relevant data into your KPIs can pay off in a huge way. One study found if the median Fortune 1000 business increased the usability of its data by 10%, it would translate to an increase in $2.01 billion in total revenue every year. Yes, each year.

Your high-level goal might be to increase revenue 20% within the next year. So you may monitor KPIs that help support increased revenue including:

Return on ad spend
Number of appointments booked
Sales by region

If you’re looking to use KPIs to make a major business impact, read on to find out:

How Do KPIs Improve Your Business?

First and foremost, KPIs help you evaluate whether you’re achieving specific measurable milestones on the way to your high-level goal. Once they’re clearly defined and tracked, KPIs give companies:

A way to track progress on business goals
Ability to see how successful they are at reaching monthly, quarterly, and annual targets
Power to make more informed decisions
Objective results for evaluating performance; with past performance data you can see whether improvements occur

KPIs don’t only move your business forward. They are a clear point of communication managers can provide to team members, vendors, or contractors. That way, everyone knows they must perform based on specific results.

With KPIs in place, anyone in a leadership position can:

Set realistic goals
Develop strategies that directly support their objectives
Remove assumptions and educated guesses
Provide a fact-based approach for managing others

What are KPI Metrics?

Before talking about KPI Metrics, let’s discuss metrics in general.

Metrics are data points. You may be tracking them, but they are not always the most vital data your organizations need to monitor and perform against.

If you’re looking to increase average view duration on your YouTube channel, you wouldn’t monitor total subscribers as a KPI. Instead, you’d track watch time.

KPI metrics give you the extra layer of context as you’ve defined your strategies and goals. KPIs are metrics bound to specific goals. These are the most vital metrics your company measures and reviews to ensure you’re hitting or progressing towards specific objectives.

All KPIs are metrics. Not all metrics are KPIs.

Within a specific KPI, you can have multiple relevant metrics that impact your goal. Let’s say, you want to increase your new trial signups by 10% in the next three months. The amount of traffic visiting your website and the conversion rate can both impact that objective.

How Do You Pick KPIs?

With so much data readily available, choosing the right KPIs can be challenging.

Selecting KPIs starts with defining a specific outcome. For example, let’s say a sales manager’s goal is to increase revenue by 20% over the next year. Sales performance metrics to track would include average deal size, sales pipeline coverage, and win rate.

When defining KPIs, consider these questions:

What is your desired outcome?
What effect will this outcome have?
How can you measure progress?
How often do you need to review progress towards that goal?
How will anyone responsible for that KPI influence the desired outcome?
Who is responsible for a specific outcome?

Think about also the dynamics of different KPIs and how you can leverage KPIs toward goals at different levels. Many businesses use KPIs to measure the success of:

The overall company
Specific departments
Vital projects
Individual’s performance

High KPIs are key performance indicators that target company-wide goals. Low-level KPIs focus on specific department’s strategies or individual’s day-to-day work.

The number of KPIs in place depends on the number of strategic objectives a company has. However, a clear plan has at least 5-7 high key performance indicators. Teams and individuals should have 3-10 low-level KPIs in place depending on the number of active objectives.

Pro-tip: Be aware of metrics that anyone can game. Let’s say your customer service team wants to track how efficient reps are at resolving issues. If you track average handle time for calls, a rep could easily manipulate their average by hanging up during calls. A more suitable KPI might be first contact resolution (FCR).

Share the reasons behind the KPIs you selected to track in the planning stages with stakeholders whether it’s your direct reports or company leaders.

Be prepared to make the case for why you left out any specific metrics. Keep an open mind to any additional metrics they advocate to be KPIs. Among other reasons, they may have more direct experience on all the factors that can influence your goal.

5 High-Level KPI Examples

Your company might have organization-wide KPIs including:

Revenue
# of New Customers
Churn Rate
Lifetime Value (LTV)
Monthly Recurring Revenue

As you know, no single person solely impacts these KPIs at a company. They require collaboration and teamwork.

Here are common KPI examples for different departments…

Sales KPIs

Sales managers or VPs may have sales KPIs in place including:

Win rate – the percentage of converted leads

Sales cycle length – the average amount of time between first contact and sales reps closing a lead

Monthly Sales Growth – the increase or decrease in sales from the previous month

Additional Helpful Resources for Establishing Marketing KPIs:

Customer Success KPIs

Beyond churn rate and LTV, customer success might identify as KPIs:

Expansion Revenue – the amount of new money coming from existing customers

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) – the measurement of a customer’s satisfaction with a business, purchase, or interaction gathered via a survey

Customer Retention Cost – the total cost of a customer success program compared to the total number of active customers

Marketing KPIs

Whether you’re an in-house marketer at a venture-backed company or tracking marketing KPIs for small business owners, key metrics you can monitor include:

Conversion Rate – the percentage of users who complete a desired action

Organic Web Traffic – the amount of traffic a website generates through social media, SEO, and other channels

Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) – the amount of money spent on getting new customers

Open Rate – the percentage of people who opened a given email

Return on Ad Spend – the amount of revenue a company earns for each dollar spent on advertising

Additional Helpful Resources for Establishing Marketing KPIs:

Human Resources KPIs

HR teams can monitor KPIs such as:

Cost Per Hire – the average amount of money spent on making a hire

Employee Turnover – the number of employees who leave a company during a specified period (often the period is based on one year)

Absenteeism Rate – the ratio of absences to workdays in a month, quarter, or year

Salary Competitiveness Ratio (SCR) – a measure of how competitive the current salary is that a company offers compared to a competitor or the overall market

How Do You Measure KPIs?

Specific tools can help you measure different KPIs including:

Google Analytics for website traffic
Salesforce for sales metrics
Mailchimp for email KPIs

How Do You Monitor KPIs?

After you identify the KPIs you want to track, you’ll need a way to see in seconds how you or your team is performing.

Downloading reports from the previously mentioned platforms is an option. However, the built-in reporting requires more legwork customizing the reports to your business goals. Need to convert a report into a presentation? That can also consume your time.

Dashboards give you the ability to see and share results in real-time.

By connecting your data into pre-built dashboard templates, you can begin monitoring and sharing your KPIs in less than five minutes.

You can embed this highly visual view of your KPIs into a website, internal page, or anywhere else that accepts tags.

If you’re wondering how often to check on reports, that will depend on your goals and the specific KPI. That said, here are a few general guidelines to consider:

For low-level KPIs tracking individual performance, a manager at a minimum should be reviewing once a week for their direct report’s check-in.
High priority KPIs you’ll want to review more often.
Some KPIs, such as Monthly Recurring Revenue or Annual Recurring Revenue, measure a specific period so it will be clear how frequently you need to check them.

You can also get automatic notifications when there’s a major change in your KPIs through Cyfe. Set up rule-based alerts to receive notifications via email or SMS message.

How to Communicate KPIs to Your Team

Your team doesn’t want to feel like KPIs are a micromanagement tool. Communicating KPIs is all about positioning.

Your team members likely want to:

Learn and improve
See results from the time they invest
Know the work they’re doing matters

Introduce key performance indicators to your team as an opportunity to grow. They’ll have the ability to objectively see when they’re off track and course-correct themselves.

One-on-one meetings can shift to the big picture when you empower your team to self-correct in real-time. Then you can focus on continuous improvement, new goals, and their personal development.

Instead of anyone feeling like they’re micromanaged, you can show how your strategy aligns with what the team does every day. Then any manager can have a more engaged team.

How Do You Track and Evaluate KPIs?

Beyond tracking KPIs in dashboards, you also need a framework for managing and communicating goals.

One of the most popular is the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework. OKRs were popularized in the tech space by Google and consist of:

An Objective
Up to 5 Key Results that measure the progress of that objective
Initiatives illustrating the work necessary to reach the desired results

Example Objective

✅ Grow business to one million annual revenue

Example Key Results

✅ Increase monthly recurring revenue by 25%

✅ Decrease customer acquisition costs to $100 per lead

✅ Reduce churn rate by 10%

Example Initiatives

✅ Cross-sell by department with existing customers

✅ Shift budget to ad channels with the highest return on spend

✅ Set up automated email campaigns for inactive customers

What are KPI SMART Goals?

Consider also implementing SMART plans to manage your or your team’s goals. In case you need to break this down for others, SMART Goals are a framework many organizations use to set goals.

SMART stands for:

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-bound

Many SMART plans contain KPIs since key performance indicators satisfy the specific and measurable requirements of SMART goals.

Let’s say you’re a customer service manager. You see a rep on your team only touches five support tickets a day. During a one-on-one meeting, you outline a SMART goal to increase the number of tickets that rep resolves per day.

Here’s what that SMART plan might look like:

Specific – Increase the number of resolved tickets per day by 15% using bookmarks for resources and TextExpander to avoid typing out repetitive messages.
Measurable – You and the rep will monitor their Average Resolution Time, the total time taken to resolve the support ticket once viewed.
Attainable – Other team members have decreased their average resolution time with TextExpander and other tools.
Relevant – Completing more support tickets in a day reinforces a department goal to respond to each customer within 24 hours.
Time-bound – The goal needs to be completed within the next 30 days.

Establish SMART plans during one-on-one or team-wide meetings. With historical data, you should also be able to see whether a goal is attainable and realistic in a specific timeframe.

Summing It Up

Bottom line: KPIs help you stay on track towards business goals. SMART or OKRs plans help keep everyone aligned and on target.

By taking a few minutes to set up dashboards, you can quickly review and share KPIs. Then anyone on your team can see the direct results of their time at work.

Phillip Paquette

The post What is a KPI? Your guide to Key Performance Indicators appeared first on Cyfe.

8 Most Powerful Sales Performance Metrics You Should Track

Phillip Paquette — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 08:36:13 +0000

As a sales manager, you know the entire organization relies on you to be able to forecast revenue.

And while there are dozens of sales metrics you can check, you need to track the most insightful and actionable data points. Then you need a way to be able to quickly see both your team and individual sales metrics so you can drive results.

In this article, I’ll share eight key sales performance metrics to monitor. Plus, how you can quickly keep your team and organization updated on your results.

How to Monitor and Report On Sales Metrics

1. Average Deal Size

The average deal size is the average sales price of all closed deals for a given period.

A salesperson’s average deal size might be lower than the rest of their team for a range of reasons:

Not following up quickly with responsive leads
Providing discounts to every closed lead
Prioritizing larger, harder-to-win deals, taking time away from more predictable leads

In reviewing this sales metric by representative, there can be plenty of coaching opportunities to improve underperforming team members.

2. Win Rate

Win rate, also known as lead conversion rate, is the percentage of leads that become customers.

Let’s say you have 250 leads come in per month. If an average of 25 leads buys your product, your team’s win rate is 10%.

Win rate helps you evaluate your sales process so you can see:

Where qualified leads drop off in your funnel
How much the win rate varies by team member
Whether the win rate of an individual rep is lower because they are contacting too many unqualified leads
If moving your sales team remote affected your lead conversion rates

This sales metric also helps you estimate how many leads you need to generate to hit your monthly team quota. Let’s say your team’s monthly sales quota is $500,000 and the average deal size is $2,000. You can take that sales quota and divide it by average deal size to see you that need to close 250 leads.

Then if your win rate is 10%, you’ll need 2,500 leads per month.

As you fine-tune your sales process, you should see your team’s win rate increase. If it doesn’t, you may have an issue within your sales funnel or individuals on your team.

The one major exception: your win rate may decrease if you move upstream (such as from mid-market to enterprise sales).

You can track your win rate in most sales-oriented CRMs such as Salesforce.

3. Sales Pipeline Coverage

Your sales pipeline is your team’s total sales opportunities. But you can put this sales metric to better use to set your reps up for success by tracking your sales pipeline coverage (SPC). Sales pipeline coverage is a sales metric that helps you determine if your team has enough opportunities to hit revenue targets.

To determine sales pipeline coverage: take the sum of all your pipeline opportunities and divide it by the quota goal.

If your team has $500,000 in sales opportunities and your revenue goal is $500,000, you’ve got 1x pipeline coverage.

High performing sales teams may be able to still hit their quotas with coverages on the lower end. However, your pipeline coverage should be anywhere from 3x to 5x.

4. Time Spent Selling

A XANT study found that only 33.2% of sales reps’ time goes directly towards selling.

Time spent selling factors in the amount of time spent on external meetings, follow-up, and prospecting.

For measuring this sales metric, many sales automation and CRM platforms offer time tracking features.

If you’re looking to increase your team’s time spent directly selling, consider hiring a coordinator for research and other tasks. Or data enrichment solutions to help you find out more about leads like Clearbit.

Look at ways also to improve internal processes to help them be more efficient. On an individual basis, if you see time spent selling as a low outlier, spend a sitdown meeting reviewing how their processes might vary and coach the rep on how to streamline their actions further.

5. Sales Cycle

The sales cycle is the average amount of time it takes to close a deal. Along with calculating the length of the overall sales cycle, you’ll also want to track how long the individual stages in your sales process take.

By placing benchmarks by stage and overall sales cycle, you can:

Identify the most likely to buy active leads based on how long they’ve been in your sales funnel
Callout leads stuck in specific stages for longer periods of time
Optimize specific processes so sales stages take less time than previous sales periods

6. Monthly Sales Growth

As you know, you can’t just forecast future sales — you need to show month-to-month growth.

Beyond commissions, you and your entire team benefit from monthly sales growth:

Your company’s founder and any C-Suite executives can see clear monthly results
Sales reps can see their efforts make a difference
Sales managers can make the case to hire more reps or increase your team’s resources

Monthly sales growth as a sales metric measures the increase or decrease in sales month-over-month. To calculate monthly sales growth, take last month’s sales minus the prior month’s sales. Then take that number and divide by the previous period sales. Multiply that figure by 100 to get the percent increase or decrease in monthly sales growth.

So if your team produced $100,000 two months ago and last month generated $200,000, that’s 100% month-over-month growth.

Beyond motivating your sales team, monthly sales growth lets you see what’s encouraging (or discouraging) revenue including new processes and product features.

7. Lead Response Time

The longer it takes your team to respond to inquiries, the more likely you’re missing that opportunity.

One study found firms that attempted to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were almost seven times as likely to qualify the lead than those that waited even an extra hour. For teams that waited 24 hours or longer, they were 60 times less likely to make the sale.

Depending on your CRM, the process to track lead response time varies. You’ll need to stack Google Sheets and Zapier with HubSpot. For Salesforce, you can use an app like Response Time Tracker.

After tracking lead response times, you can potentially see how your lead response time impacts conversion rates. Then share with your team the results to incentivize them even further to get back to their leads faster.

8. Additional Revenue Opportunities

Yes, revenue is your team’s north star. But there are many different ways to review revenue to uncover growth, customer value, and retention.

You likely want to monitor:

New business: the direct impact your sales team made by seeing the amount of revenue from new business
Upsell rates: the percentage of customers who purchase another product or upgrade to a higher-tier package
Retention rates: the percentage of customers who renew their contracts

And if you’re selling a subscription service, you’re probably already looking at monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and the amount of revenue you expect to review each year (annual recurring revenue or ARR).

As you gather each of these sales performance metrics, you or your sales manager may decide to prioritize retention, upselling, or other strategies to see the bottom-line impact over the next quarter.

How to Monitor and Report On Sales Metrics

Imagine this: Walking into your next one-on-one with your VP of Sales, you hold your head up high. You know you have the right data to support new revenue opportunities. You can clearly show the huge results your team’s delivering. The strategy and metrics are all in place so it’s easy to get your bonus.

Or even unlock data-backed coaching opportunities so every rep is meeting their full potential.

Now you can do each of these by setting up a sales dashboard.

Cyfe’s dashboards integrate with HubSpot, Google Sheets, Salesforce, and many other platforms so you can easily plug in your data and keep your organization updated on the most important results your team’s delivering.

Then set up alerts, so you receive notifications by email or SMS when your data meets specific conditions. And share major changes with your team in real-time.

Summing It Up

It can feel like a whirlwind trying to wrangle data and figure out what metrics to prioritize.

Fortunately, your business goals can help you identify the right sales performance metrics. After you’ve identified your KPIs, keeping track of your team and individual rep’s performance becomes much easier with a dashboard.

By prioritizing the most actionable sales metrics to your team you can provide data-backed coaching and make the case for your team to earn more based on their individual performance.

You can also fix the biggest bottlenecks in your sales funnel and processes, setting yourself up to share huge results that can pay dividends throughout the rest of your career.

Phillip Paquette

The post 8 Most Powerful Sales Performance Metrics You Should Track appeared first on Cyfe.

Phillip Paquette – Cyfe

How To Build A Facebook Ads Reporting Dashboard + Free Template

Table of Contents

How to Analyze Facebook Ads Campaign Performance With Dashboards

How to Measure the Success of a Facebook Ads Campaign

Facebook Ads Awareness Campaign Metrics

Consideration Campaign Metrics

Conversion Campaign Metrics

Summing Up Facebook Ads Reporting

Phillip Paquette

10 White Label Marketing Tools Digital Agencies Use To Drive Growth

Table of Contents

1. White Label Design Tool - Xtensio

2. White Label Reputation Management - Grade.us

3. White Label Video Creation Tool - Lumen5

4. White Label Invoicing & Payment Solution - Invoice Ninja

5. White Label SEO Reporting - AuthorityLabs

6. White Label Landing Page Creator - Landingi

7. White Label Project Management Tool - Notion

8. White Label Messaging Platform - SimpleTexting

9. White Label Email Marketing Platform - ActiveCampaign

10. White Label Dashboards & Reporting - Cyfe

Phillip Paquette

SMCo Thrift’s Sales Dashboard Solution Increases Client Sales by 20%

The client's problem

SMCo Thrift's solution

TV Mode for team alignment

Easier data transfer

The results

Gauging realistic goals

Letting the data speak for itself

Conclusion

Phillip Paquette

How to Measure Marketing With Attribution Models

Table of Contents

What are Marketing Attribution Models?

Why use Marketing Attribution Models?

The Most Common Marketing Attribution Models

1. First Click Attribution

2. Last Touch Attribution

3. Time Decay Attribution

4. Data-Driven Model

5. Linear Attribution

6. Position-Based Attribution

7. W-Shaped Attribution

8. Custom Attribution

How to Measure Marketing Attribution with Custom Models

Summing It Up

Phillip Paquette

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

Problem

Solution

Results

Managing Reputation

Conclusion

What is Business Intelligence? How BI can power businesses

Table of Contents

What is Business Intelligence?

Who is Business Intelligence for?

The Difference Between BI and Business Analytics

Examples of BI

Amazon Analyzes Actions

Lowe’s Recovers Revenue

Seer Interactive Delivers Client Wins

Tools for Business Intelligence

Tableau

Domo

Looker

Summing It Up

Phillip Paquette

The 20 Best Data Visualizations of 2020

Table of Contents

1. Coronavirus Riskiest Activities

2. Identifying Generational Gaps in Music

3. V. Analytics' Trending Google Searches 2018-2020

4. Demographics of the United States Congress

5. How Much Football is in a Broadcast Game

6. Overall Inflation Versus College Tuition Inflation

7. How to Profit in Space: A Visual Guide

8. YouTube Channels Then & Now