This wiki is maintained by Dave Chaffey of SMARTinsights to help keep marketers up-to-date with developments in digital marketing

From Marketing Online

Marketing and web analytics software always include their own standard dashboards to summarise performance and trends, but they may not offer the customisation or alerting required for all businesses.

To offer more customisation and greater insight there are now many specialist tools to help create dashboards. This is our summary of the main software and web services available from dashboard vendors.

We have also added guidance on creating your own dashboards.

Most popular marketing dashboarding tools

These are the most established tools for marketing and business dashboards.

• Crystal Reports (reporting) and Excelsius (dashboarding) Includes desktop and server versions (Crystal Reports used to be a good choice for small / medium businesses but now owned by SAP with associated price increase). SAP also own Business Objects which is more suited for larger enterprises.

• Cognos For many years Cognos (alongside Business Objects was one of the best known tools for analysis and reporting of company databases and data warehouses), now part of IBM with trial download available, but no pricing.

• Microstrategy Another established business analytics and dashboarding solution

• Zoho A new online service from this web analytics startup providere.

Dashboard tools for Web Analytics

Web analytics systems have their own specialist dashboards.

• Excel dashboard tools for Google Analytics I have produced a compilation of tools for accessing Google Analytics data through the Google Analytics API including the open source Excellent Analytics and the Tatvic Excel Plugin, both of which I recommend. The native features of Excel can then be used for creating dashboards, perhaps automated by VBA

• Analytics View Tailored dashboard reports from Google Analytics from Epik One

• Trakkboard Useful for reviewing Google Analytics for different sites with different accounts / logins so useful for consultants / agencies

• Quantivo Dashboards and additional analytics tools for large-scale web analytics implementations including Webtrends and Omniture] Includes a whitepaper from Jim Sterne on Accelerating Business Insights.

Directory of dashboard software tools

• Directory of dashboard software and tools Software catalog from Dashboard Insight

Guidance on creating dashboards

• Designing great dashboards 3 part series from Juice analytics - register once to get access to all parts

Guided Analytics

• Guided Analytics from Spotfire] This is a proprietary term describing "'best practice' guided analysis for all levels of user by capturing and packaging analysis workflows configured for specific business processes… Guided analytics allows technical users to exchange best practices, while enabling non-experts to conduct their own data-driven guided analysis. Guided analytics delivers efficient and standarized guided analysis applications that can be used and reused by other group, team and department members."[[Category: Web Analytics Systems]