How to use dashboards and reports

The major difference between the reports and the dashboards is in the outputs, but the module doing the calculations is actually the same. This article highlights the differences in output.

When should I use reports vs. dashboards?

The main difference between dashboards and reports is that your dashboards are personal drag and drop items that are placed in your start view. The reports can be created as either public or personal reports, where the public reports can be accessed by other admin users, and the personal reports are only available to the user who created them. When you save your report, you can select whether it should be private or not.

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These two options are also a little bit different in that the dashboards are intended to create a clean good overview, while the reports are for handling heavier data, and working dynamically with the data. It is of course possible to have a large dashboard of a 3000 line table if that's what the user desires, in most cases, large tables are more suitable for reporting purposes. All reports can be exported as CSV files. The option to export can be found at the bottom of each report.

Each report and dashboard can utilize different types of graphical outputs, such as line/bar charts or pie charts. The best choice for each case depends on the amount and type of data you wish to display. Charts work well for single or possibly dual-dimensional presentations, but for more complex scenarios, we recommend using tables to avoid cluttered graphical outputs. Here's an example of an effective way to represent a single dimension (sites) in a pie chart, showcasing the distribution of revenue among different websites:

 

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The Dashboard:

The dashboard is intended to give the user a good overview of what is happening in the system, using multiple dashboards, that are set up by the user to cover the areas most relevant for that particular user. As such, the dashboard tends to be more graph heavy, but of course tables can also be used (or a combination of both). As the dashboards are dynamic, and you can change them on the fly, making minor changes without saving is also a good usage option if you just need a quick additional breakdown.

There is really nothing wrong or right in terms of setup, but from experience these might be good Dashboards to start with:

  • A revenue graph dashboard showing revenue per day over the last month.
  • A revenue graph per SSP dashboard, broken down per day for the last month.
  • A revenue table showing revenue levels per site for the current month. (If you are an programmatic adOps, you maybe want to go even deeper by breaking this down per placement, and have a longer list, but maybe only cover the last 3 days or similar; to catch temporary drops)
  • An advertiser trend table showing the top advertisers performance, and how they are currently trending

All of these are just examples, and we encourage you to experiment with your Dashboard setup, so you can get the dashboards that are most useful to you.

The Reports:

The reports are intended to cover more in-depth reports with a lot of data, or reports that you intend to share in the organization and make public with other users. Just like with the Dashboards, it is very dependent on what tasks you are supposed to fulfill, and no report is really wrong; but these might be good examples of reports that you might want to work with continuously:

  • An end of month report, showing all the revenue levels per publisher and per website; can be broken down per revenue type also. If you are a programmatic network, this information can also be exported and shared with your finance if they want to send out statements (if you are not using the built in statement generator). By reusing the same report, you can just update the dates, and save, to get an update report every month.
  • A start-to-end report, showing the revenue per publisher per month, since you started working with the tool, so you can always report on a holistic full scale development. By adding a dynamic end date, and a fixed start date, the report will always be up to date, when needed.
  • Large and complex reports in general. Reports that are complex in setups, and that you want to reuse, should be saved, so you don’t have to redo the setup multiple times. 
  • Large advertiser reports. These reports fit better as tables and lists and because of that they are usually used more through the reports. As a dashboard these could be very large especially when folded out. But it can of course also be used through the dashboard whilst not expanded and broken down into more “pages”.

Then you of course have the day to day, investigations and optimisation reports. You might not want to save these but rather work with on the fly. As these reports may or may not require deep “drill-downs”, they can be quite large, and as such in most cases it is easier to use the tables and graphs for these. However, you will find the best setup for you only through experimentation and use.

Customizing the graph view

The dashboard and report views can be customized to allow more graphs to be shown in the same view. This will help you easily compare data side by side at a glance. You can find the settings for report customization next to the report/dashboard.

report_adjustment_button

You can have a maximum of 6 graphs in one row. Additionally, you can adjust the graph views to display either lines or bars, as well as the orientation of the graph. In the same adjustment view, you can also make your events visible on the graphs.

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