Analytics Dashboard vs. Marketing Dashboard. How do they differ?

The Analytics Dashboard helps an analyst understand large volumes of data. It should help the analyst form a plan. This plan will involve exploring the data to create new insights.

A detailed exploration may involve specialist approaches (like machine learning and business intelligence). Some of these will be pre-packaged. But others may involve code and scripts that need to be developed to dig into the data. The exploration may take many hours or more. So the analytics dashboard isn’t really a tool for end users. Nor it generate insights for a non expert audience on demand.

The Marketing Dashboard should present ready formed results and insights to an audience. As explained in “who uses a marketing dashboard“; the audience will determine the content. The dashboard should include some insights and exploration from analysts and other experts. This all requires time, so marketing reports are not normally real time. To show the difference let’s compare a stock price chart with a stockbroker’s reports.

The stock price chart will have details – but the context may be well hidden. It may be real time – or close to it. Data may be dirty and in need of cleansing.

The stock broker’s report should explain in lay terms why important events happened. A glossary and explanation of anything unfamiliar will be important. Cleansing should have been part of transforming data into valuable information.