Creating Meaningful Reporting Dashboards

Each company generates regular reports for ecommerce, typically weekly roll-ups for trading meetings and often daily tactical reports for specific capabilities such as site performance and SEO indexation + ranking.

The depth and quality of these reports varies considerably. We’ve been in meetings where data is used to explain performance variations in a smart way, others where a generic report is presented with no analysis of what the data is showing and what can be done about it.

The difference between reporting and insight is huge, so this week we’re going to discuss what data you can and should be presenting via dashboards and how you can evolve reports to make them meaningful. For example, a report showing site conversion rate has increased from 3.2% to 3.5% WoW tells you nothing useful but a blended report showing traffic source, volume, conversion rate, AOV, revenue, margin, CPA etc. with a WoW comparison provides a richer picture of why the conversion rate has changed, and whether this has positively impacted the business.

Here are the 3 questions:

1. What data points/KPIs should ecommerce teams be reporting on regularly and why?
2. What other data points do you need to integrate with core web analytics to make reports really useful?
3. What examples can you share of ‘really useful’ ecommerce performance reports, and how can they be used?

Join us at 1pm UK time on Monday 1st October and do share this post either on Twitter or via email with anyone you think would be interested.

Thanks, Dan & James.

p.s. If you’re wondering “what’s this about?” there is a page explaining all just here.