What are KPI dashboards?

KPI dashboards are tools that unite data sources and provide at-a-glance visual feedback showing how your business is performing against your key performance indicators (KPIs). They benefit users by providing:

• A fast, easy solution to tracking KPIs and other business metrics.

• A unified view of data that improves visibility into company health.

• Customizable data visualization with performance and status indicators.

Benefits of a comprehensive KPI tool

By building your KPI dashboard with the same tool or platform that you use to define your KPIs, you’ll have everything you need in the same place. As you modify your KPI definitions, data sources, or targets, these updates will populate automatically into your dashboards—saving you valuable time and effort.

Get to know the different types of KPIs

Identifying which KPIs you should track becomes easier when you have a better understanding of the types of KPIs that are most commonly used to measure progress.

• Quantitative KPIs are all about measurable facts that can be represented with a number. Think stats, percentages, and dollar signs.
• Qualitative KPIs involve human interpretations and can’t be quantified with numbers. Think opinions, feelings, and experiences.
• Lagging KPIs measure what’s already happened in the past to predict success or failure. Think of looking back at what you’ve already accomplished, or where you’ve struggled.
• Leading KPIs measure performance to predict future success and long-term trends. Think of looking forward to where you’re headed.

Leading and lagging KPIs are commonly used together. Along with quantitative and qualitative KPIs, they’re a good place to start.

For each KPI that you choose to track, assign an owner and agree on tracking frequency. Whatever KPIs you decide to track, using a KPI platform or tool is key for collaborating with your team on KPI definitions. By collectively defining each KPI, then capturing contextual data and unifying it into a single view, you enable spot-on, real-time actions.

KPI dashboard examples

Effective KPI dashboards bring together all the KPIs you need to track your strategic goals, establishing a visual representation of all your relevant metrics side by side, in one place. Take a look at these KPI dashboard examples and consider some of the key associated metrics you’d likely want to track:

Marketing effectiveness

• Keyword performance
• Average time on page
• Conversion rate
• Average lead score
• Website traffic lead ratio

Customer service

• Customer satisfaction score
• Cost per call
• First response time
• Customer retention rate
• Average resolution time

Financial health

• Profit and loss
• Current ratio
• Operating cash flow
• Burn rate
• Vendor expenses

IT performance

• Mean time to repair
• Server downtime
• IT ROI
• Unsolved tickets per employee
• Projects delivered within budget

KPI reporting

KPI reports take the information presented on the KPI dashboard to a new level. They go deeper into the data to pull out more detailed insights and analysis.

A KPI report helps stakeholders and team members identify trends or bottlenecks over a specific time period, so that they’re able to make better decisions. Reporting topics could include:

• Insights into the company’s day-to-day operations.
• Financial health of the company against targeted KPIs.
• Notable trends or patterns presented by the data.
• Deeper analysis of the data to assist with strategic decision-making.

To create your KPI report, first determine your audience and the objective for the report. For example, you might want to show company stakeholders Q3 progress toward your revenue target. Make sure that all the KPIs featured in your report point back to that central theme.

Additional considerations for creating your KPI reports include:

• Exploring KPI report templates that may be already included in your KPI tool or platform.
• Setting a cadence for reporting frequency.
• Deciding whether your report will be static or interactive, for more dynamic drilldowns into data.
• Presenting only the relevant KPIs so you don’t overload the report with KPIs that don’t map back to the reporting goals.
• Making sure your reporting is clear, easy to understand, and actionable for the intended audience.