Product Analytics Dashboard: How to Build It and Examples

Tracking your KPIs and performance is crucial for the growth of your business and product. The evidence stands that 90% of organizations that leverage data analytics have historically achieved measurable growth.

‍

A product analytics dashboard helps you do this more effectively — in a streamlined manner. It offers a view of your KPIs, performance, user behavior, and highlights valuable insights. A great dashboard often uses visualizations like charts, graphs, tables, and heatmaps in a single, easy-to-understand view. These dashboards, particularly product analytics, help you review crucial product and growth related information at a glance.  

‍

This article shares an overview of product analytics dashboards with examples. It also shares a short guide on creating a product analytics dashboard according to your objectives.

What is a Product Analytics Dashboard?

A product analytics dashboard is a consolidated view with data focused on key metrics, used for tracking product performance at a particular time. It offers a centralized view of product data, such as customer acquisition, user behavior, engagement, sales activity, etc.

‍

Here is an example of one such product analytics dashboard in Houseware.

Let us now understand why you should use a product management dashboard.

Importance of a Product Analytics Dashboard

Product analytics dashboards present raw data and complex information simply and attractively. Here are a few more benefits of using analytics dashboards for your products.

‍

1. Offers at-a-glance data visibility

Product analytics dashboards make reading and interpreting complex data easy and offer valuable insights. They display up-to-date product information in real-time so that you can study user behavior patterns, preferences, and friction points.

‍

2. Monitor product performance

With a product dashboard, you can constantly monitor your product metrics. You can detect changes in user behavior and monitor sudden peaks or drops in your data visualizations to identify issues before they escalate to major problems. You can monitor the effectiveness of your product, campaigns, and other tactics to identify areas for improvement.

‍

3. Facilitates data-driven decision-making

Using a product analytics dashboard, you can access all important information and spot areas for product growth. The dashboard could be easily shared with your other team members, making it easier to collaborate and create transparency.

What Should a Product Analytics Dashboard Contain?

An effective product analytics dashboard should showcase helpful information at a glance. It must be easily customizable, with data displayed clearly in a visual hierarchy on one centralized screen. It must display information in a minimized view that can be later drilled down for a detailed view in a modal window or a new page altogether.

‍

However, presenting the most relevant data on these dashboards is often challenging. The more information is displayed, the harder it is for users to find what they need. Hence, an effective dashboard design can be divided into three major elements.

1. Events

Events are user actions or their interactions with your product. Event tracking is an important component of product analytics as it offers deep insights into how your users use your product. Some of the most common yet impactful events you ought to track are:

• Clicks: tracking clicks on buttons, links, or any other interactive elements.
• Form submissions: tracking submission events like sign-ups, logins, checkouts, or feedback submissions
• Custom events: tracking events tailored to certain functions/features of your product.

2. Report

A report is a visual representation of the data derived from various events. It shares insights into various product metrics, such as active users, conversion rates, churn rates, etc., demonstrating a high-level overview of product performance. This information is usually showcased as charts, graphs, heat maps, or statistical product data tables.

3. Board

A board is a visual dashboard sharing reports, KPIs, and more that collectively offer a concise data representation. It enables you to spot issues, identify patterns, or notice emerging trends to gain a thorough understanding of user behavior. Being interactive, it allows you to gain deeper insights into product performance by adjusting the period or granularity of the data.

Analytics Dashboard Examples

Analytics dashboards can be customized based on your teams' needs and goals. For example, a product manager would be interested in tracking feature and events metrics, while a marketing manager would want to monitor SEO performance. Here are a few examples of various analytics dashboards.

1. Product Analytics Dashboard

A product analytics dashboard reveals a lot about user behavior in your product. It provides insights into how your customers utilize your product to track crucial product metrics for data-driven decision-making.

Why You Need It

With the help of this dashboard, you can gain insights into -

• Which features are your users leveraging the most?
• Which features or workflows are causing friction?
• What are the potential churn triggers?
• How do customers behave post subscription upgrades or downgrades.

What It Measures

Some of the common product metrics this dashboard helps you track include -

• User activation metrics like the number of activations and percentage of activated users.
• User engagement metrics like daily active users, time spent on the product, and more.
• User retention metrics like retention rate and churn rate.

2. Web Analytics Dashboard

A web analytics dashboard monitors and tracks the performance of your product website. It plays a crucial role in streamlining your marketing efforts for increasing traffic and boosting conversions.

Why You Need It

With the help of this dashboard, you can gain insights into -

• How much traffic you are receiving on your website.
• Which channels are fetching the maximum traffic?
• How much time your visitors spend on your website?

What It Measures

Here are a few web analytics metrics your dashboard tracks -

• Page views and number of sessions.
• Bounce rate.
• Conversion rate.
• Goal conversions and goal value.

3. Mobile App Analytics Dashboard

A mobile app analytics dashboard tracks user behavior in your mobile app. It helps you spot performance issues, such as app crashes, app slowdowns, and more, that can adversely impact your app's user experiences.

Why You Need It

It offers you insights into -

• How your users are interacting with your mobile app.
• Why users are leaving your app.
• How your mobile app is performing across various devices.

What It Measures

Here are a few mobile app KPIs you must track.

• User acquisition metrics like new users and app downloads.
• User engagement metrics like daily/weekly active users, stickiness, average session length, app churn rate, and uninstalls.
• App performance metrics like app uptime, load time, and app crashes.

4. SEO Dashboard

SEO dashboard offers incredible insights into your website's overall search engine optimization performance. It helps you analyze your website's visibility on search engines.

Why You Need It

You can use SEO dashboards to -

• Learn about your content performance.
• Monitor your keyword rankings over time.
• Conduct a comprehensive backlink analysis to assess the quality of incoming links.
• Monitor organic traffic to identify channels driving the most website visits.

What It Measures

Some of the metrics included in the SEO dashboard are -

• Website visitor sessions like the number of organic visits, page load times, and bounce rates.
• Keyword rankings and top-performing keywords.
• Traffic to your website from organic and paid sources.

5. Retention Dashboard

A retention dashboard tracks key customer success metrics for maintaining and retaining your customers. It helps you identify high churn risks and concerns before they escalate. It is a must-have dashboard for SaaS businesses.

Why You Need It

A customer retention dashboard helps you understand -

• How many customers are continuing their subscription for your product.
• How many customers have ended their contract with you?
• How many customers have upgraded or downgraded their subscriptions?
• How many customers have opted for annual pricing?

What It Measures

A few metrics this dashboard measures are -

• Churn rate and its reasons.
• Retention rate.
• Customer lifetime value.
• NPS score.
• Revenue growth.

6. Features and Events Dashboard

As the name suggests, a features and events dashboard helps you monitor and track your product's feature usage and engagement metrics. It allows you to track your features and their corresponding events to extract valuable feature-related insights.

Why You Need It

Some of these insights include -

• Where your users spend their time on your product.
• What features are your users interacting with?
• How certain changes in features are impacting your user behavior.

What It Measures

Some of the key metrics a feature and events dashboard must track are:

• Active users and companies.
• Popular product features and trends in their popularity.
• Features that are not popular among the users.

7. Social Media Dashboard

A social media dashboard helps you track and monitor various social media metrics on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube in one place. It also helps understand the social sentiments of your followers.

Why You Need It

It gives you clear insights into -

• Which social media channels are working the best for your product.
• How your social media pages are performing concerning attracting a target audience and publishing content.
• How various audience demographics are engaging with your content.

What It Measures

Some of the vital metrics that a social media dashboard must track include -

• Follower growth rate.
• Reach and impressions.
• Engagement rate - likes, comments, and shares.
• Retweets and mentions.

Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Product Analytics Dashboards

Building a product analytics dashboard is not as simple as choosing a template and connecting it to your data sources. You must follow certain steps to ensure they align with your business goals and share valuable product insights.

‍

To build good product analytics dashboards, follow the below-mentioned steps.

1. Identify Your Goals

Defining your goals is the first step in building an excellent product analytics dashboard. Figure out the dashboard's purpose and set SMART goals for your product. Ask yourself the following questions -

‍

1. What do I wish to achieve using this dashboard?
2. What metrics matter the most for achieving this goal?
3. How long do I need to track these metrics to measure the change effectively?

‍

2. Shortlist the Key Metrics That Align with Your Goals

The metrics and KPIs are the numbers you will track to measure your progress toward your goals. Choose qualitative and quantitative metrics that offer a complete view of your product's performance. For instance, user acquisition, engagement, revenue, retention, and more. These metrics should help you to make informed decisions to improve your product.

‍

3. Select Your Analytics Partner

Select an intuitive analytics platform with the right features to collect, analyze, manage, and visualize your product data. Opt for a platform that can collect data from various sources, such as web analytics, mobile apps, and product databases, and present them in a centralized dashboard without losing important data.

‍

4. Design a User-Friendly and Visually Appealing Dashboard

You can design your dashboard once you have the required data and analytics platform. Follow a structured and clean layout, with clear text and visuals. Utilize different types of visuals like charts, graphs, and tables to present your data. This will make it easy for your users to access and understand the data.

Offer options like filters, drill-downs, and more to encourage users further to explore the data findings. Ensure the dashboard follows a responsive design and can be accessed from various devices and screen sizes without hassles.

‍

5. Update Your Dashboard as You Add More Features

Review your dashboard regularly and update as you add new product features or receive additional data for tracking purposes. This will ensure your dashboard stays relevant and aligned with your goals. Ask your users to share feedback on the dashboard and incorporate the changes to make it more user-friendly.

Expert Advice: Remember that your analytics dashboards should offer a bird's-eye view of data as quickly and efficiently as possible. Like a car dashboard that displays driving speed, RPM, fuel limit, etc, in one glance to the driver, your dashboard should be quick and efficient for all stakeholders.

How to Select Your Product Analytics Tool?

Several tools will help you build an excellent product analytics dashboard. However, a great analytics tool will offer you the following capabilities -

‍

• A warehouse-native product analytics solution that works directly with your existing data warehouse. It eliminates the need to move your data from one system to another as it plugs directly into your data, thus saving time and resources.
• A zero maintenance solution that takes away the worries of managing data architecture as your product scales. Legacy analytics tools are designed to accommodate lower event volumes that might fail when you have higher user-base event volumes. Opt for a fully scalable solution supporting your evolving data stack.
• An easy-to-use interface so that even a non-technical person can access and work around your product data.

Expert Advice: Leveraging a solution that minimizes ETLs helps product teams apply a complete context of user behavior to product analytics with fewer resources. This results in high-quality, economical, and valuable insights across all digital touchpoints.

Wrapping Up

Product analytics dashboards allow you to visualize crucial data for better product development and growth. It helps you make smarter decisions for your product.

‍

With Houseware, you can build customizable dashboards for your product to fit any use cases mentioned above. Being a warehouse-native platform, you do not have to spend weeks or months just getting your data transferred before leveraging valuable insights. It resides in your data warehouse, and Houseware lets you quickly create intuitive dashboards.

‍

Book your personalized demo to see how to get up and running with product analytics in under 30 minutes!