From Black Friday early bird specials to last-minute holiday purchases, you need a strategy that recognizes the customer is in charge.

Your company's success rests on your ability to track customer activity in real-time and identify issues fast. Especially on those crucial shopping days. You either act - or else you risk losing big.

Consider a scenario where your Black Friday sales are off for the season's hottest toy. A sluggish response on any other day might mean big losses, but on the busiest shopping day of the year, it's retail suicide. You must isolate the problem on the spot, pivot to make changes, and check impact in real-time. And before choosing a course of action, you need to know all the facts - see the big picture. For example, in the earlier scenario, were sales off everywhere or only at one site?

Dashboards

With the following Digital Analytics dashboards, you have real-time insight across the enterprise:

• The real-time dashboard shows you data throughout the day allowing you to understand how sales and promotions are progressing on critical days, like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If you see something that looks off for sales on a particular product or promotion, you can quickly make changes and see the impact in real-time. With Real-time dashboards, you see information about your site in real-time (< 5 minutes) so that you can evaluate your site's performance on the fly. You can view existing Standard dashboards and create new dashboards.
• Enterprise dashboard provides a roll-up view of all your sites combined, with the option to compare how specific sites are performing against others. The multisite interface provides a view of real-time and historical information across all sites in an enterprise. You can view existing Standard dashboards, create new dashboards, and control the time periods for data that the Enterprise dashboard displays to compare data from two different days, weeks, months, or quarters.

Note: This dashboard is only available for Acoustic Analytics enterprise clients.

In addition to creating and viewing dashboards, you can have several options for accessing and distributing data outside of the application, including:

• Download by the widget to view and modify data offline.
• Download by the dashboard to view and modify data for all widgets that are in the current dashboard view.

Let’s get started

To get started with dashboards, click Dashboards under Standard Workspaces in the main navigation of Digital Analytics.

A new browser tab opens and displays the Dashboard window. The Dashboard panel is displayed in the main navigation on the left, and on the right, the Dashboard view shows the last dashboard that you opened. If this is your first time accessing dashboards, Create your first dashboard is shown.

Organize your dashboards and folders

In the Dashboard panel, you use folders to organize your dashboards into manageable groups. The Dashboard panel contains the following folders: 

• Enterprise - Standard Enterprise dashboards (Standard dashboards) and Enterprise dashboards that you create (My dashboards).
• Real-time - Standard Real-time dashboards (Standard dashboards) and Real-time dashboards that you create (My dashboards).
• Shared dashboards - dashboards that other users create and share with a user group to which you belong.
• Public dashboards - dashboards that other users create and share with all users.
• Admin dashboards - dashboards that only admins can access.

Check out Standard dashboards

To get you up and running fast, Digital Analytics provides preconfigured dashboards with preprocessed data. For details, check out Standard dashboards.

To find dashboards and folders in the Dashboards panel:

• Browse folders and dashboards by expanding folders and subfolders.
• Search for dashboards by entering search criteria.

The following animation shows how to find the KPI Trends Standard dashboard in the Real-time folder.

Create dashboards and folders

You can create Enterprise and Real-time dashboards and folders. When you create a dashboard, it's added to the My dashboards folder under the Enterprise or Real-time folder. To create a dashboard or folder, click Create.

Enterprise dashboard

To open an Enterprise dashboard, click on the dashboard in the Dashboards panel. The dashboard opens in the Dashboards view and displays a combination of the following widgets:

• KPI shows top-line trends for specific metrics for select sites.
• Conversion & marketing shows conversion funnels for selected sites in graphical and summary form.
• The Report shows the Topline summary, Marketing vendors, and Channels summary reports.
• Text shows descriptive text or explanatory labels.

The following image shows the KPI Trends Standard Enterprise dashboard.

Real-time dashboard

To open a Real-time dashboard, click on the dashboard in the Dashboard panel. The dashboard opens in the Dashboards view and displays a combination of the following widgets:

• Report shows detailed information for Conversion Events, Marketing Programs, Products, Search Engines, and Marketing Vendors. You can also see a list of the most recent results for selected metrics in the Recent Items report.
• KPI shows visualizations of select KPIs from Top Line Metrics. Visualizations include trend line, cumulative trend line, hourly bar chart, progress bar, and the option to only show the number.
• Text shows descriptive or explanatory labels.
• Conversion Funnel

  shows a 3D representation of your site's session conversions that shows how visitors are currently progressing through your site's primary conversion points in real-time. Conversions are displayed by the marketing channel (Direct Load, Marketing Program, Natural Search, Referring Sites) and by all marketing channels (All visitor sessions).

The following image shows the KPI Trends Standard Real-time dashboard.