An executive dashboard is an overview meant to answer the owner's or management's question of whether things are going well and what is happening. The most common mistake is to put onto it everything the tool is capable of displaying, which produces a wall of charts that nobody reads. A usable dashboard has a single screen and a handful of figures tied to business goals: enquiries or orders, their cost, revenue, and comparison against the plan and against the same period last year. Every figure has a stated source, period and a clear definition. Show the trend over time, not as an isolated value, and add a short comment on what caused the change – it is precisely the comment that turns the overview into a basis for decision-making. Vanity metrics such as reach and likes do not belong here.
See also: KPIs for a marketer, Reporting cadence, Data dictionary.
