Scorecarding has been an analytic passion of mine for a few years now.  In my last position before I started working here at WebTrends I developed an extensive scorecard that stretched across multiple channels and was so rich in data that it was in fact intimidating to nearly everyone but a data freak like me.  What I forgot to do then and what I am working on now as I move forward with scorecarding is to condense the wealth of data down into an easily digestible format and customize it to the specific business users.

Who is your audience? When it comes to dashboards and scorecards one size does not fit all.  Learn from my experience, before you go about developing one first figure out who your audience is and what it is they want to know. The information an executive team is interested in is far different than that of the marketing team and ecommerce certainly has different needs than IT.  Everyone one wants (or should but that is another blog) the data.  The key point for each business user is this data you are presenting to them will help them make decisions.

What questions do they want answered? When I was deciding today between writing either about gathering business requirements or scorecarding I had one of those ah ha moments realizing you really can’t be successful with your scorecard if you don’t first gather your business requirements so let’s take a look at what that looks like.

Your business users are your clients and they have come to you with a problem, a question and/or a set of needs they what answers to or a solution for so talk to them.  Get to the root of what it is they need.  Executives are the easiest and nearly always what they want is a summary or overview of the key metrics, they want bullets and usually not a lot of analysis to go with it. What is the bottom line?

The marketing team though is going to want a lot more information specific to the visitor from where they are coming in from (referrer, campaign, advertising, PPC, organic search) through what they did while they were on the site on to conversion.  Did the visitor buy or download, sign-up or send an invite to a friend, whatever it is that marketing considers the goal.

Easy to digest. Once you know who your audience is and what they want then the creativity enters.  How are you going to present this scorecard of information to them? I love Excel but I’ve known business users who prefer a pdf, a word document or even a Power Point. If you are like me whatever the final outcome you will want to start in Excel and move it to the preferred format.

Delivery and Date Ranges – How often to deliver and what are the date ranges? Are your business owners looking for daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly scorecards?  Do they want a weekly report with trends providing a roll up of the quarter or year?  Do they want to compare the past two months?

WebTrends Connect™ - Are there other data sources you need to pull into your scorecard? With the release of the WebTrends Connect™ framework pulling in data from other standards-based systems will be much easier. Not enough space to talk about that here and now but stay tuned there will be more discussions about WebTrends Connect™ here.

A snapshot of the data – Don’t expect your scorecard to provide business users with all the data they need.  Encourage them to accept your scorecard as a summary and suggest they come to you for a drill down or fuller analysis.

Graphs? Oh yes a picture in the case of a scorecard really is worth a dozen sets of numbers.  Nearly all business users prefer the visual impact of the graph over a list of numbers especially when looking at trends.  Don’t overuse them though and try to select data points where a graph will add the most pop to your scorecard.

I’ve just touched on the high points of scorecarding here. You will likely hear more from me on the subject as the months move along. Don’t hesitate to ask questions or share your own insights, we really do want to hear from you.

Tags: dashboard, data collection, scorecarding, scorecards

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under Best Practices, Data Portability, Industry Perspectives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.