Optimize ad spend with a
small business dashboard

Why You Should Ditch Spreadsheets
For Small Business Dashboards

Social media is the future of eCommerce. While this means that small businesses need to be present on various social media platforms and run ads, it also results in a large volume of data from different ad management and reporting tools.

Since many small business owners still use spreadsheets to track their metrics, keeping up with the sheer volume of data and deriving meaningful insights from it can get challenging as they start scaling up.

Plus, it’s not possible to present data in a user-friendly manner when you’re using spreadsheet software like Excel.

What you need is a business dashboard that can help you better organize and view you data, identify trends and patterns, and make informed decisions.

What is a small business dashboard?

A small business dashboard is a business intelligence tool that aggregates data from different sources and represents them using visual elements like charts, tables, and graphs.

By presenting business data in a visually appealing and understandable way, business dashboards help you understand your key performance indicators (KPIs) at a glance, enabling you to make data-driven decisions that improve your revenue.

What are the benefits of a business dashboard? 4 Key Perks

Small business dashboards offer numerous benefits for business owners who want to gain valuable insights into their business operations and make data-driven decisions.

Helps make informed decisions

Even the most efficient data analysts are going to miss out on critical insights and trends when they monitor ad campaigns using spreadsheets. Plus, there’s no way to know if the information you're working with is stagnant or incomplete.

However, business dashboards like Adriel give you real-time insights and historical data, so you can easily spot positive and negative trends over time.

This allows you to make informed decisions based on reliable data and stay competitive in a cutthroat market.

Optimizes ad spend

When you have a limited marketing budget, it’s crucial to make the most of it. You don’t want to be wasting your ad dollars on campaigns that are falling behind your goals.

On a small business dashboard, you can get an overview across all platforms of how much money is spent on which campaign, and which ads and creatives are performing the best.

When you have this important data, you can reshuffle your ad budget and invest more in high-performing campaigns, while spending less or completely turning off underperforming ones.

Improves marketing attribution

Marketing attribution is the process of analyzing and identifying marketing strategies and channels that improve your business performance. It enables you to understand customer journeys and touchpoints that lead to conversions and gives you all the information you need to create personalized marketing messages and increase conversions and ROI.

However, running ads on multiple platforms can make marketing attribution challenging, so marketers seek a unified data source.

According to an Ascend survey, 95% of marketers either strongly (39%) or somewhat (56%) agreed that having a single source of truth (unified data source) improves marketing attribution.

This is where dashboards like Adriel come in. Adriel integrates with more than 600 platforms with a single click, so you can easily view which platforms and ads are bringing in the most revenue.

For example, if you want to view data from Google Analytics, log in to the platform from Adriel, and you’ll be able to see all of your data within an hour.

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

Saves time

Creating reports in Excel is a cumbersome process that may take days or even weeks. However, with business dashboards, the whole process is automated, ensuring you can access the right data when needed.

Adriel, for example, provides real-time data from multiple channels in one view and compares results from different ad channels, enabling you to view all the important business metrics at a glance.

Other time-saving features of Adriel’s dashboard include:

- One-click reporting: Generate a report with just one click and share it with stakeholders as a PDF or an interactive link.

- Drag-and-drop interface: Create a dashboard using widgets without any coding experience.

- Template library: Never build another report from scratch again.

Reduces stress

Business dashboards provide a centralized view of KPIs and metrics from multiple sources in real time, greatly reducing the stress of small business owners.

In other words, you can easily identify what's working with a quick glance and focus your efforts on areas that need improvement, leading to improved results.

In addition, some dashboards like Adriel offer in-app or email notifications based on trigger events. You can also customize the frequency of alerts – real time, daily, weekly, or monthly.

For example, if you’ve set up an alert to notify you when you’re about to exhaust your ad spend, Adriel will send you a notification, and you can take action on time.

What are the best dashboards for small businesses?

Small businesses often rely on manual spreadsheets to track their data or use tools like Google Data Studio and Klipfolio to create analytics dashboards and view their KPIs.

However, these solutions require a lot of manual work or increase in complexity as your needs evolve.

For example, Google Data Studio may be free, but it’s not built for heavy-duty use cases. So, your dashboards may become slow, and important data can go missing. Plus, if you want more advanced features like data blending and custom integrations, you’ll have to upgrade to their paid pricing plans.

But, sticking to manual reporting on Excel is not a good option either, as you’d need to spend days putting together a report. Klipfolio, on the other hand, requires HTML and Javascript for dashboard customization, which may not be suitable for every business.

So, when you’re choosing a dashboard software, it's important to consider a few features such as:

Data visualization

A good dashboard should present data in a visually appealing manner so anyone can understand it easily.

Adriel’s cross-channel dashboard provides multiple chart types and allows you to create multiple dashboards tailored to different team members.

For instance, you could have a management dashboard for the top brass and a reporting dashboard for marketing teams.

A.Vahl, Founder and CEO, Vahl Ads, explains how Adriel’s data visualization features positively impacted their organization.

“Given how easy it is to learn how to use Adriel’s dashboard, the fact that its visualization features are so powerful is sometimes beyond me. Adriel has been a life-saver in terms of turning our client data into storytelling reports.”

Read more: 10 Data Visualization Dashboard Examples for High-Impact Marketing Reports

Real-time data

Real-time data is crucial for businesses as it enables you to make quick, low-risk decisions when market trends change.

Adriel's dashboard and interactive links are updated in real-time, ensuring that you always have the latest data at your fingertips.

Furthermore, Adriel can also send real-time alerts when specific events are triggered, helping you stay on top of your performance metrics.

“I was always asking for reports from my teams but by the time I got them it was too late to capitalize on some of those insights. Now I just sign in to Adriel and see everything for myself as it happens,” says J.Riley, Founder and CEO, Edge.

Robust integrations

A business dashboard tool should be able to integrate with other tools to allow for better data analysis, decision-making, and collaboration.

Adriel offers more than 600 integrations, allowing you to connect with your ad accounts on Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and Amazon Ads.

It also provides connections to social platforms such as LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Reddit, as well as analytics tools like Google Analytics and mobile analytics like AppsFlyer and Adjust, and other sales and CRM tools.

If there are any connections that Adriel’s dashboard does not support natively, it will build one for you. The ease of setting up connections is a significant differentiator between one dashboard software and another.

On Adriel, you can choose the platform you want to connect to from a drop-down list, and your data will automatically flow into the dashboard without any coding requirement.

If you are enrolled in Adriel's enterprise or agency plans, a dedicated customer support manager will guide you throughout the process.

“Adriel brings in all the data I need to make effective decisions as a business owner,” says Ingrid Carney, Founder & CEO, Ingrid & Isabel.

What should a dashboard visualize?

The metrics that a business dashboard should track depend on the goals and objectives of the business. However, some commonly tracked metrics include:

Conversion rate: The percentage of website visitors or leads that have taken a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The cost of acquiring a new customer, typically calculated by dividing the total amount spent on sales and marketing by the number of new customers acquired.

Lifetime Value (LTV): The total value of a customer to a business over the course of their relationship.

Website traffic: The number of visitors to a business's website.

Social media engagement: The level of interaction and engagement on a business's social media channels, such as likes, shares, and comments.

Return on Investment (ROI): The amount of return generated from a specific investment, such as an advertising campaign or marketing initiative.

Customer satisfaction: The level of satisfaction or happiness of a business's customers, often measured through surveys or other feedback mechanisms.

Churn rate: The percentage of customers who stop doing business with a company over a given period of time.

However, in addition to this, Adriel also has a creative intelligence suite that centralizes your creative data and gives insights on which copy, color, or emojis will perform better.

How do I create my own dashboard?

With Adriel, creating a dashboard for your business is simple as it uses widgets. Adriel offers over 30 types of widgets and different chart types to present data in an organized manner.

To build a dashboard, all you have to do is drag and drop the widgets onto the screen. But if you don't want to start from scratch, you can choose from one of its ready-made templates.

Once you’ve created the dashboard, you can also send interactive links or export it as a PDF to team members so they can make informed decisions.

Related: 10 Data Visualization Dashboard Examples for High-Impact Marketing Reports

Wrapping up

Data from numerous ad management and reporting tools is overwhelming, making it challenging for small to derive meaningful insights from it.

To tackle this, businesses need to adopt a small business dashboard that can help them better organize and view their data, identify trends and patterns, and make informed decisions.

Adriel is an excellent example of a dashboard software that offers all these benefits. It can collate data from more than 600 data sources in real time.

This helps you identify the best performing channels and ads, and optimize them to improve revenue.

Book a 1-on-1 demo call with our product specialist today.