Category: KPIs

KPIs vs. Metrics: Know the Difference

March 13, 2017 by Chris Bibey·0 Comments

Many business owners don’t take the time to understand the difference between key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics. Instead, they believe these to be one in the same. This isn’t exactly true.

At Dasheroo, here’s what we have to say about KPIs:

“Many companies use key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure performance of a specific business metric that is valuable to the business growth. These performance indicators are usually measured over time and are very different from department to department.”

With this in mind, it’s easy to see that a KPI can be considered a metric, however, a metric is not necessarily a KPI.

Still confused? Check this out:

A key performance indicator is used to measure performance and success.
A metric is nothing more than a number within a KPI that helps track performance and progress.

A KPI should be based on the following principles:

Implement a specific objective for each KPI.
You must be able to measure your progress (or lack thereof) over a specific period of time.
The best KPIs are those that can be attained with a reasonable level of effort.
Results (such as the metrics you measure) should be related to your goals.

Dig Deeper

Now that you understand the difference between KPIs and metrics, here’s something else to think about: you can dig deeper than what you see on the surface.

Dasheroo Instagram Engagement Rate

For example, many companies are focusing more resources on social media and related key performance indicators.

While it’s only natural to turn your attention to reach related KPIs – such as the number of active fans, followers, and connections – other details that deserve your attention include:

Engagement rate calculations
Return on investment

Conclusion

It goes without saying that KPIs and metrics are both essential to the success of your business.

Once you sign up with Dasheroo you can create your first dashboard, settle on the most important KPIs, and set your sights on the future!

Great News: Dasheroo Has Been Acquired!

November 30, 2016 by Team Dasheroo·3 Comments

I know we’ve been quiet since announcing that we were winding down, but some great things have happened since we made that announcement in early October.

It turns out we got a bunch of interest from companies wanting to acquire Dasheroo for our expertise in helping businesses manage their KPIs. But the exciting news is that one very special company, led by long-term leaders in the small business marketing space, decided that Dasheroo was a great match and fit really well with the services they provide. We couldn’t agree more!

Yep, Dasheroo has been acquired, and we couldn’t be happier.

We want to give you a heads up, but an official announcement with more details will be made on Tuesday, December 6.

We both share a passion for helping small and mid-size businesses thrive, and now this combined company will help you take advantage of even more ways to grow your business.

So what does this mean for Dasheroo users?

Most importantly, your dashboards will live on and you’ll be able to keep tracking your important KPIs within Dasheroo!
Dasheroo will be a key part of a broader suite of amazing marketing automation & customer retention tools.

There’s going to be significant investment to support and grow the Dasheroo product so you’ll see more enhancements and new features.
For Dasheroo users who were previously on a paid plan prior to September 30, we’ll be extending our original promise of free service to December 15 until December 31st, 2016. After that, we’ll resume billing.

More details soon, we’re ironing out a bunch of stuff!

New Release: ActiveCampaign Insights for Your Dasheroo Dashboard

September 20, 2016 by Dasherooer·0 Comments

It’s finally here, our newest software release. Big thanks to James, Josh, Court, Nivi and team for killing it with this one. ActiveCampaign is a massive marketing automation tool for businesses of all sizes. It’s been close to the number one integration we’ve been hearing from our users and now it’s live.

New ActiveCampaign Integration

Check how many contacts you have at any given moment!

Here’s what’s on the list with more to come:

Contacts Growth – Using this insight you’ll be able to track the number of contacts in your ActiveCampaign account and see how this is trending over time.

Campaign Engagement – This insight allows you to view Open, Click, and Reply rates for all or specific campaigns in your ActiveCampaign account.
Automation Engagement – Now you can view the engagement of an automation series and see how it trends in a given time period.

See how fast your sign up forms are growing in size!

Bounces and Unsubs – Track your trending bounce and unsubscribe rates by day based on all the emails you’ve sent.

Form Performance – View the number of sign ups from forms and see how it trends in the given time period.

So if you’re using this awesome tool for your CRM and marketing automation now you can view your KPIs right alongside all of your social media and Google Analytics metrics.

Track Our Startup: Track KPIs Faster + Update on Next Release

September 14, 2016 by Team Dasheroo·0 Comments

The kids are back to school and team Dasheroo is cranking away at all of the things we need to do to finish out the year with a BANG. We want tracking KPIs to be the best experience ever!

Face-to-Face

James is coming to the Bay Area in a week (he’s in Austin if you didn’t know) and we’re getting together to chat about the future of Dasheroo. I mean we do standups every day and we have weekly meetings on Zoom, but there’s nothing like looking at each other while you talk about important stuff. Should be a great time and ideas will flourish. Probably some great food will be consumed as well if you know us.

Next Release

We’ve been wrestling with the decision of releasing the next performance upgrade so tracking your KPIs will be faster, or focus on getting new insights for Active Campaign and Google Analytics out the door. And even though James made some good progress on performance upgrades through the weekend he did hit some snags. Par for the course. We decided to refocus on remaining work that needs to be done on Active Campaign. So we’re working hard to try and get a release out this week.

Sales & Customer Success

September is off to a good start on the sales front. We’ve got an active pipeline of sales and it’s looking good to grow month over month. (See we’re tracking our own KPIs!) We already told you that Alf was working to get our newest customers trying to set up appointments with him using Calendy. It’s not totally working as good as we like so now he’s going to try to reach out to users who signed up but aren’t active. We’ll see what happens there. Maybe we’ll get some users becoming active after they chat with him. Alf is super friendly!

Thanks Agency Users!

We’ve been meeting with a few of our Agency users over the last few weeks. They are giving us hugely valuable feedback on what they like and what they’d like to see in Dasheroo. Thank you!

New Release: New Google Sheets Feature + QuickBooks Online!

August 25, 2016 by Team Dasheroo·1 Comment

We’ve been talking about it and it’s finally here! Check out all of the new insights and dashboards Dasheroo has to offer.

New to Google Sheets Dashboard

Now you can track multiple KPIs on ONE chart in your dashboard, up to 5 in fact. So if you want to see how one metric is performing right alongside others, this is the way to do it.

QuickBooks Online (QBO)

We familiarized ourselves with yet another integration that we think is strategically important, QuickBooks Online! After all it is one of the leading small business accounting software packages out there. We already show you what’s happening with Sales and Marketing on your dashboards from a myriad of integrations, but tracking money out and revenue in for marketing and sales is also important. So to start we’re giving you three insights from QuickBooks to add to your Dasheroo dashboard.

Profit and Loss – View a trending line of income and expenses for your business in the given time period.
Customer Balance – View the amount owed by your customers broken down by due and past due.
Income and Expenses – View your high level profit and loss details for the given time period.

What’s New?

Ever wanted to know what we’ve been working on right from within the Dasheroo application? I know, sometimes you’re too busy to get yourself to the blog…well we’ll get you there! Just click on “What’s New” in the app and you’ll see exactly what we’ve been up to.

More to come!

Track Our Startup: New Release On the Way

August 16, 2016 by Team Dasheroo·1 Comment

As we told you last week we’ve been busy on our next release for your dashboards due out later this week. What’s new? A bunch!!

New Features for Tracking KPIs On The Way!

The biggest request we get from those who track KPIs on a Google Sheets dashboard is support for tracking multiple KPIs on one sheet. Well in the next release you’ll be able to support FIVE!!

You’ll also get access to these new features right from within your dashboards so every time we do a release it will be even easier to find out all the goodies you’ll have access to.

We’ll also have a few Quickbooks Online insights to add to your dashboards. Now you’ll be able to track KPIs like your P&L right from Dasheroo.

We’re also working to get our Active Campaign dashboard out so you can track all of your marketing KPIs in one spot. That will likely make the release after this one. Great job guys!

We’ve been doing pretty good with our SEO lately. We use a tool called SEM Rush which we really like. It gives us great competitive intel for keywords that other businesses in our space are ranking for. We can easily see where we are plotted next to other businesses. In the chart on the right you can see that we are ranking for the most organic keywords that drive the right targeted traffic. Can you tell we love our graphs and charts here at Dasheroo? ?

Alf, our VP of Customer Success, has been busy recovering from the awesome onslaught of user questions and suggestions (which we love) from the Social Media Examiner article last week. It was an awesome article, How to Monitor Multiple Social Media Metrics in a Single Dashboard, thanks again @SMExaminer! We also had a record number of purchases we’ve ever had in a week.

Back to work!

Track Our Startup: Up Next? Google Sheets & Quickbooks Online

August 10, 2016 by Team Dasheroo·0 Comments

Thanks to a HUGE mention in a Social Media Examiner article entitled: How to Monitor Multiple Social Media Metrics in a Single Dashboard, we got hundreds of users, a ton of quality leads (Mimi had 8 demos yesterday!) and we’re half way to our new customer goal and it’s only the 10th. Thanks Brandon Olson! He’s the Content Marketing Manager at AWeber, one of our email marketing partners.

UP Next?

Josh and Nivi have been working with James and our developers closely to gear up for our next release which will probably include a bunch of Google Sheets improvements. This will be great to add more metrics to a Google Dashboard along with Google Analytics KPIs and Google Adwords KPIs. We’re also working on a whole new integration with … Quickbooks Online! More on that as we finish up development but it’s going to be cool, very cool.

After that one of our most requested integrations will be released and that’s Active Campaign. For those of you who don’t know them they’ve got a killer marketing automation product which includes email marketing and CRM.

Nivi is going to spent this week looking at the Microsoft Excel API. Even though we’re huge Google Sheets users, there’s a ton of you who still heavily use Microsoft. Sigh.

There’s Chef Rabin of Muy Delicious!

Austin Food Truck!!

Our own Director of Sales Mimi and her husband have opened up an awesome FOOD TRUCK in Austin called Muy Delicious and boy does it live up to its name. Food trucks are popular there, all kinds of amazing chefs have opened them. What to eat? The Giddy Up’s Burger is to die for, the chicken Rich Ranch Tacos are amazing and My Butler’s Boneless Chicken Wings are a must-eat. If you’re in Austin on Manchaca Rd., you need to stop.

Bye for now!

Social Media Examiner: Monitor KPIs In a Single Dashboard!

August 9, 2016 by Janine Popick·1 Comment

We just got HUGE ink in a great article from Social Media Examiner and we couldn’t be more excited. It’s all about tracking KPIs from a single spot. It’s an awesome read: How to Monitor Multiple Social Media Metrics in a Single Dashboard.

Writer Brandon Olson who is the Content Marketing Manager at AWeber, one of the world’s leading email marketing providers, walks you through how to choose the right tool for your business (so yes our competition is in there, we like them!) how to connect Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and LinkedIn social media KPIs.

And it’s not a surprise Brandon also talks about how to tie in Google Analytics KPIs as well as an email marketing dashboard.

Also check out his other Social Media Examiner article: How to Generate Leads With Social Media Quizzes

Twitter Analytics: What’s Your Primary Focus?

August 3, 2016 by Janine Popick·0 Comments

Can you believe that Twitter has approximately 310 million monthly active users (as of March 31, 2016)? Or how about the fact that 83% of these users are active on mobile?

With statistics like these, it’s important for Twitter analytics to be a big part of any social media strategy.

Of course, there is more to Twitter than posting updates and hoping for a steady increase in your number of followers. You must focus your time, energy, and effort on the areas that have the best chance of making a positive impact on your company.

With this in mind, here are three details that deserve your attention:

1. Follower Growth

There is a big difference between hoping you grow your follower count and taking steps to make this happen.

This chart displays day over day and week over week growth.

But don’t stop here. Make note of the days when the biggest increases occur. What did you do differently? Did you post more updates? Did you share an interesting blog post? Dig deep to find out which actions have the biggest impact on your follower count.

2. Highest Engagement

You can make as many updates as you want, but remember this: engagement is what matters most.

You want your audience to engage with your content, whether it be through a retweet, reply, or like. When this happens, you know you’re on the right path. You also know what types of updates to share in the future.

3. Amplification Rate

Often overlooked, at Dasheroo we define this as follows:

“Rate that followers share your Tweets with their followers (amplification = number of RT’s per Tweet).”

This goes hand in hand with engagement, as you want your amplification rate to be as high as possible. In short, this means your followers are sharing your updates with their followers. In other words, your content is amplified!

Now what do you think about Twitter analytics? Will you spend more time on this part of your social media marketing plan in the future?

Startup Lessons Learned: Customer Segmentation Exercise, Fun!

July 30, 2016 by Team Dasheroo·0 Comments

The other day, I realized with all the hubbub that happens in our small & growing startup Dasheroo, that I had lost touch a bit with just whoour customers are. Sure, I could talk about “here’s how many we have, this % are agencies, that % are consumer brands, here’s the ARPU and this % are outside the US” type crap, but it bugged me I hadn’t done a deeper dive for awhile.

Dasheroo customer segmentation research in Google Sheets

I put our customers into Google Sheets on my Dasheroo dashboard so everyone could see!

So on yet another gorgeous San Francisco day I hauled my dog Dwight, a beer and my MacBook out on our patio for a little customer segmentation project. I took 100 random paying customers that are from our ‘sales assisted’ category, meaning they pay us enough $$ to have a sales person work with them, as opposed to our lower ARPU ‘auto convert’ biz. Not saying the auto convert biz is in any way less important, but I needed to focus where to point or limited resources for outbound sales efforts.

One by one, I hit their websites and built on a Google Sheet with a simple ‘who – where – what’ layout; the customer name, where they are based, and what type of business they are.

OK, maybe it took a beer or so more to complete but as I progressed I got more and more excited. I mean, it’s so easy to go from one sale to the next, always focused on ‘the next’ that you can begin to miss some key trends and customer profile types.

In this case, a few really interesting, and I hope actionable, trends were spotted with my customer segmentation research:

Agencies that target the SMB market. Regional in nature, and a good concentration in the Southeast US and Australia
These agencies aren’t ‘we’ll do everything for you’, a huge % focus on social media and influencer campaigns and measurement only.
A few decentralized departments of pretty large, well known consumer brands.

So what? Here’s what: we’re gonna re-focus our lead gen budget with these geos and a closer match to the ‘social media’ agency markets vs. a more broad targeting. Next, we’re thinking about launching an outbound effort to “land & expand’ to grow within the large consumer brands, working our way across geographic departments first and hopefully further across functional departments within each location!

Sure, I could have ditched this project off to someone else. But sometimes rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands a little dirty with customer segmentation can really help put your focus back where it matters. Next, a similar exercise with our auto convert buyers!