Improve Insights with a Custom Dashboard

Overview

In this lesson, you'll learn how to create actionable custom dashboards that allow you to keep a pulse on key metrics in your app. Easily share this information with your team, board, and other stakeholders for data-driven decision making.

Why it matters

Visibility of your most important metrics helps teams stay on the same page, monitor trends over time, and make changes to the app based on actual user data. Comparing custom reports side by side in Custom Dashboards allows you to uncover insights and draw new conclusions.

In addition, Custom Dashboards are easily shared, and can be automatically emailed on a daily, weekly or monthly cadence to keep stakeholders in the know.

How-to guide

The following steps will walk you through saving a Custom dashboard.

Step 1: Navigate to the chart you want to add

Select the chart you'd like to save to a dashboard. Add any splits or filters to hone in on exactly the information you'd like.

Step 2: Add the chart to a dashboard

Click Save and Add to Dashboard. Add to an existing dashboard or create a new one. Add a title to your new dashboard and save.

Step 3: Organize dashboards by use case

Quality data and insights are only valuable if they are accessible to the decision makers on your team. In this section we will highlight three methods of organizing your custom dashboards that have been successful for us at Localytics and for our customers.

Use these dashboards to track key metrics and ROI. Add new charts to each dashboard as desired. Resize, reorder, and customize your dashboard until it displays the information you want to see.

The simplest way to breakdown custom dashboards across departments is to segment between Analytics and Marketing metrics. This will allow you to have a high level view of key performance indicators as well as a sense of how active campaigns are performing and driving in-app behaviors.

Here are a few examples to get you started with an Analytics dashboard:

• Users by day
• Users by day split by New vs Returning
• Top Events
• Users and Sessions
• Customer lifetime value
• Engagement: Session interval

Here are a few examples to get you started with a Marketing dashboard:

• Performance reports for all active recurring campaigns
• Event-based retention: Open push then complete Conversion Event
• Revenue by day by acquisition source
• Conversions by day for push enabled users

Creating custom dashboards focused around app goals and metrics makes it easy to keep a pulse on your overall app performance. By focusing on driving your users through the app lifecycle, you will be able to keep high-value users engaged and prevent at-risk users from churning. The following are several example dashboards based on the app lifecycle stages: Acquire, Engage, Grow and Retain.

An Acquisition dashboard allows you to instantly see how new users are interacting with your app. Below are suggested reports that will allow you to have great insight into new users and the type of experience they are having:

• Attribution: New users by day split by acquisition source
• Onboarding Funnel: App launch, Sign-Up, Sign-In, etc.
• Cohort Retention for paid attribution sources
• Lifetime value split by attribution source

User Engagement is fundamental to driving continued usage of your app. Below are examples of reports that will give you a sense of how engaged your users are:

• Session length split by attribution source
• Campaign performance for onboarding experience message
• Campaign performance for new content message
• Onboarding week one funnel
• Users split by "New"

Helping Grow your newly acquired users into valuable lifetime users is essential for long-term app success and monetization. Below are example reports that give insight into how users are navigating to and executing chosen Conversion Events, as well as how this affects LTV:

• Upgrade / conversion funnels
• Usage: Users by day filtered by a segment of "Premium" users
• Campaign performance: Special offer campaign
• Lifetime value: Average revenue per user
• Lifetime value: Average revenue per paying user

Depending on which study you believe, and what industry you’re in, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. Retention has never been more important. Here are a few reports to track your user retention:

• Event based cohort retention: Clicked push and then opened app
• Event based cohort retention: In-app displayed and upgraded to premium
• Campaign performance report for retention messaging campaigns
• Engagement: User loyalty report

Aggregate relevant information for different members on your team by creating a dashboard for each role within your organization. Here are some suggested reports to add to each dashboard:

 

Role	Dashboard Information	Value
Marketer	Performance reports for each recurring in-app and push campaign NPS rating results Users by day split by push enabled Attribution: New Users by day split by acquisition source	Having instant access to the relative performance of active campaigns, enables Marketers to understand which campaigns are leading to conversions and other preferred actions in app.
Product Manager	Best case scenario funnel Conversion funnel First run experience funnel Retention by weekly cohort Users by day split by app version Users by day split by daypart Event based retention for key features	Knowing how the latest app release is performing or how users are utilizing a new feature gives Product Managers the insight they need to build a data driven app roadmap.
Developer	Users by day split by: OS Version, Device, Platform, Jailbroken, App Version App errors by screen	Knowing which app versions still need to be supported and where errors are occurring in your app empowers Developers to make decisions around release cycles and handling escalations.
Executive	Usage stats (top summary of Usage report) 30 day Sessions/users by day Monthly occurrences by Event name (table) Retentiony by weekly cohort Various attribution reports Revenue by day split by acquisition source Purchases - Transactions by day Basket Size - Revenue per transaction by day	Having a daily pulse of key performance indicators empowers Executives to make strategic decisions by eliminating the need to dig into the weeds of app data.
Business Analyst	30 day Sessions/users Sessions by day split by device Monthly occurrences by Event name (table) Revenue by day Transactions by day	Having a sense of trends over time and being able to address what is driving changes in app data is crucial for Business Analysts to point team members in the right direction.
Growth Hacker	Users by country App opens/Sessions (hourly) LTV by acquisition source Purchases - Transactions by day Session length split by platform Virality - Share Event (hourly)	Knowing the next opportunity for a marketing campaign, or finding an untapped audience in your user base is essential for promoting app growth as a Growth Hacker.

Key takeaways

• Create custom dashboards that work best for your existing workflow and put relevant reports in the right users' hands
• Set up scheduled email reports to put an emphasis on the importance of your metrics and keep people on the same page
• Get feedback on what metrics are important to various groups and iterate on the dashboard designs