New Blog KPI Dashboard!
March 9, 2008 – 4:43 pm
For those of you that have visited my old “Blog Metrics” page, you may have noticed that it’s a pretty sad excuse for a dashboard.
No use of KPIs or anything that really lets you know how the blog is performing.
Well I’m slowly but surely aiming to change all that.
Please take a look at this blog’s new and improved dashboard!
The KPIs that I’ve selected are largely based on a previous post relating to the most important metrics for content-based sites. I’ve also made the dashboard downloadable in Excel if you’d like to compare it to your own results (not to mention adding a few slick sparklines for basic metrics 
).
My reasons for producing this dashboard are really two fold:
- Help other fellow bloggers with relative metrics in order for them to know if their performance is “good” or “not so good”
- Provide a demonstration of the power of storing your KPI information in a relational databaseOn that second note, all the data you see in the dashboard is stored within a database on my web server. The benefit of this of course is that I’m able to pull from this datasource anywhere I want! The web-based dashboard you see is only one incarnation, I also am pulling this information into an Excel spreadsheet I plan to publish soon.
Thoughts and opinions are always welcome!
4 Responses to “New Blog KPI Dashboard!”
I like that you have an excel download. Do you think you could easily export this info into a one page report for easy viewing as it is formatted on your website? If, lets say you would like I can format this into a db and let you have the file. So that you can query this data as well as print a nice report. When you have the chance check out our site which is growing all the time. We currently refer people to webanalytics demystified but will have a counter book coming out soon. In the pdf version we will have a nice one page report available for metrics. At any rate it looks like your blog is doing well so keep up the good work.
By KPI List Maker on Jul 8, 2008
In response to KPI List Maker’s comment…
Thanks for taking the time to provide some feedback!
The dashboard report itself is actually produced from data stored in a MySQL database in the back end.
Creating a downloadable PDF/Word report that resembles the online version isn’t something I’ve seriously considered just yet but it’s a great feature suggestion and I’ll be sure to look at it now.
As for the book, can’t wait to check it out please make sure to leave a comment or send me an e-mail (mike.sukmanowsky@oddinteractive.com).
Best,
Mike
By mike.sukmanowsky on Jul 8, 2008
I think it is great that you are trying to work at dashboard and also sharing it.
I think the little graphs really help. Have you thought of putting in suggested actions or meanings for the kpis?
Like if (dramatic change up) = you have made x better
if (dip in pages per view and search up) = you may be getting new visitors or traffic not best targeted to you
As what is missing from most dashboards is suggested actions, that can then be back checked into the fuller data for people in the rest of the company to use.
Have you seen Dennis’s article:
http://visualrevenue.com/blog/2008/09/google-microsoft-yahoo-web-analytics-dashboards.html
Are you manually adding the data to a database? I would love to get google analytics monthly exports into mysql so i did not have to use Excel.
By tristan bailey on Oct 8, 2008
While I agree with the concept of KPI\’s I feel very strongly that the use of them in business is, in many, cases damaging. This is a very long discussion and covers a wide area, but I know of many managers who cheat when producing figures because their remuneration can depend on the \”reported\” results against KPI\’s. This can result in a loss of vision of the real problems in the organisation and lead the most senior managers to believe that all is OK, while that is not really the case
By David Bone on Mar 29, 2009