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The Complete Guide to BI Dashboards:
How-Tos and Best Practices

Memes and TikTok clips have taken over the internet by storm. Meanwhile, text-based content like blog posts seldom go viral, no matter how compelling or informative.

That alone says a lot about how visually oriented humans are. There’s a whole science behind our inherent obsession with visual cues. But that’s a conversation for another time.

For now, let’s focus on data and dive into different tools making headway in the visualization space.

Here, we unpack the benefits of having a BI dashboard in monitoring digital campaign performance, how you can create one, best practices, and essential BI dashboard softwares you can use today to discover data-driven insights.

What’s a business intelligence (BI) dashboard?

A BI dashboard is a digital reporting tool that displays, tracks, analyzes, and reports on KPIs and other essential marketing metrics. It visualizes high-level, data-driven insights in charts, graphs, and maps that enable users to monitor and examine their business performance at a glance.

BI dashboards provide users with the ‘big picture’ to critical questions in the decision-making process, indicating how a business is performing according to its defined targets and visualizing complex relationships on a single screen.

But, you might already be using spreadsheets to compile and track your marketing data. Do you still need a BI platform?

But first...do you actually need a BI dashboard?

The obvious reason here is contextualization. There’s simply too much data for even the brightest analytics whiz to be able to connect the dots between disparate data points in their raw state.

Just pull up Excel and quickly skim through a spreadsheet. Do they scream actionable insights? If that happens so, hats off to you and your statistical prowess. But our guess is that your spreadsheet won’t mean much more than a random concoction of metrics nine times out of ten.

Once they are turned into bar charts and other types of data-driven visual elements, though? It’s a whole other story. That’s the power of visualization. Whether it’s your team, board members, or external stakeholders, presenting the data through intelligible graphics primes even the most boring of datasets to be readily processed and utilized regardless of who’s on the receiving end.

Needless to say, once your dashboard puts actionable insights on full display, it makes it that much easier for decision-makers to drill down key performance metrics and reach data-driven decisions.

The scary thing is that there’s much more to a BI dashboard than just visualization. First off, equally as valuable is automation. It takes out manual workflows that would otherwise eat up a great deal of time and prevent your team of marketers and analysts from working on needle-moving tasks.

As a cherry on top, self-service BI dashboard software like Adriel offers a white-labeled reporting feature that allows both business users and end-users to put together reports packed with real-time insights and intuitive data displays.

Related: Complete Guide to Marketing Dashboards: Software, KPIs, Reviews

How do you create a BI dashboard?

With BI dashboards, you can tell meaningful data stories. Creating one using a cloud or on-premise digital marketing reporting dashboard will make life easier, empowering you and your marketing teams to make informed data-led decisions.

This is why the best BI tools are highly customizable, designed for the right target audience, and contain only necessary data visualization.

You can create your own BI dashboard using this step-by-step process:

1. Set up your workspace with data connections

First things first. You’ll need to connect to your marketing campaigns on analytical and paid media channels like Facebook, Google, and Instagram in one place. On Adriel, you can do so by just choosing from a drop-down menu, and voila, you’ll have all your data in place. No code, no dev, just plug and play.

If you don’t have the requirements to connect an ad account, you can do so by sharing a link with someone who does. Using this link will display your ad account ID on the Connections page.

2. Select visualization for your data

Once the data sources are connected, you can use widgets to customize which KPIs you want to visualize. Create tables to compare performance across different time periods and visualize insights from data in multiple graph and chart types.

3. Build pivot tables for A/B testing

A/B testing on a BI dashboard? Yes, it’s possible–if you have an automation platform that shows you granular performance data, right down to the ad creative level.

Use the ad creative insights on Adriel to conduct A/B testings and determine which variations of certain ad creatives lead to better conversions across separate marketing channels.

4. Set up real-time alarms

Setting up alarms will save a lot of time and automatically track data from all channels. On Adriel, there are alarms for anything you can think of, including performance falling under KPI goals and overspending. Alarms can be triggered in real-time, allowing you to gain critical insight into ROAS with real-time transparent data from multiple channels, and maximize returns.

5. Take action

An editable BI dashboard lets you switch ad campaigns, ad sets, individual ads, and Google keywords on and off directly with one click. On Adriel, you can also reallocate your campaign budget across different platforms or change campaign schedules, in one place.

BI dashboard best practices

A good BI dashboard should be easy-to-follow and provide data-driven answers to critical business questions.

You can ensure your dashboard design represents your data in a simple and effective way by taking note of these best practices:

1. Use appropriate visualization

Keep in mind what you aim to communicate with your insights, and assess which forms of visualization work best in context. For example, colors can make the difference between good and bad dashboard design, and are one of the first things people notice. Using too many colors in a dashboard can be distracting, so aim for fewer than six colors per visual.

2. Target your audience

The best BI dashboards always begin with their intended audience in mind. Users want to see dashboards that summarize and consolidate KPIs over time so they can make informed data-driven business decisions. As such, separate dashboards should be tailored to specific audiences.

3. Accentuate important information first

Just like a journalist puts the most important information at the start of an article, your BI dashboard should begin by highlighting your most significant data insights first. This saves the user time and cuts through the junk by giving main takeaways at the start. The most important information is followed by secondary, granular details that dig deeper into your data.

Related: 12 KPIs Your Marketing Attribution Dashboard Must Track for Multi-Channel Success

Wrapping up

The silver lining here is Adriel has been ramping up its visualization stack with new offerings these past few months. Soon, users will be able to set up complex visualizations that were found exclusively on well-established tools without performing SQL commands or manual configurations.

At the end of the day, if there’s anything we learned from serving thousands of brands and agencies, it’s that seeing is believing.

So, head over to our workspace to try Adriel on your own with a free 14-day trial.

Get a demo to get started!