Tag: Facebook Ads

Track Our Startup: Sendgrid Dashboards + New UI On The Way

May 17, 2016 by Janine Popick·1 Comment

We’ve been heads down getting releases out, getting our users to be active, getting sales in the door and getting the word out about Dasheroo because every business needs business dashboards!

With our last release behind us, we’re moving on to the next one and this one is NO slouch. We’ll be releasing an integration we’ve had waiting in the wings, Sendgrid, and we’ve enhanced our pay-for-performance dashboards Facebook Ads and Google Adwords.

We’re also working on a brand new user interface! You’ll be able to get around your dashboards even easier than you do today.

We’ve also been hard at work on a larger release for those who need to manage roles and permissions as well as offering a per-user-based pricing. More to come on that as we get further along.

We’ll Take Your Seconds…

Our friendly competitors over at Iconosquare have gone mad! If you don’t know who they are they offer dashboards for Instagram and they’re pretty good. However, they’re moving away from their free version, forcing users to pay, and forcing users to sign up for the new version. I’m sure they have their reasons, but it’s something we may have avoided given the chance. That said, if you’re looking for an alternative to Iconosquare, Dasheroo would be happy to serve you!

Dasheroo Gets Great Press

Social media expert Carl Ramallo, wrote, How to save TIME with these Top Social Media Management Tools and Suttida Yang, that awesome digital marketing consultant and CEO of Fast Markit, included us in her piece 11 Content Marketing Tools You Can’t Live Without. As always we thank you and we’re humbled.

That’s it for now!

Track Our Startup: Dasheroo’s New Dashboard Release is Live!

May 10, 2016 by Dasherooer·0 Comments

We finally got our software release for your dashboard live. Thanks to Josh, Nivi, James, Andrew & Court for an amazing job pulling this one over the finish line.

Here’s what you can expect!

Export Any Dashboard to Google Drive

This is killer. You’ll be able to export any dashboard instantly as a PDF right into any folder in Google Drive.

This is great if you want to share your dashboards with your clients or your team. All in one place all the time.

Simply go to Export, choose Export to Google Drive, connect your Google Drive account, choose a folder and click Export, it’s that easy! You’ll need to have upgraded to Grande or above for this feature.

Scrolling Insights

For insights like this one you can now scroll through your past posts!

We’ve been wanting this for a long time and we couldn’t be more excited about it. For those insights you want to see more information on, you can now scroll to see more posts. We’re adding this to the following insights:

Recent Posts (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram)
Highest Engagement Posts (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram)
Recently Sent Emails (MailChimp, more email marketing platforms to come!)

Insights Now Show Your Country Currency Code

If you track metrics that have a currency value it’s important for you to track your country currency. We’ve always given you the right “currency” but we’ve always had a US Dollar sign ($) in front of it. Now you’ll be able to report on your own country currency code in your metrics.

Go to your Dasheroo account settings, click on Organization and simply choose your currency from the list. Then all of your dollar related metrics will appear with your chosen currency code.

Now that this release is done, more are lined up and on the way, so stay tuned!

Track Our Startup: Release On Its Way + April KPIs

May 3, 2016 by Dasherooer·0 Comments

We’ve got a bunch of releases in the queue and if you’ve been following us we have been wrestling a biggie to the ground. We plan on winning this match this week so stay tuned. Then we’ll be breaking the releases down into smaller chunks so we don’t have too many moving parts to handle. This release we lovingly call “p26.”

For p27 we’ve got a new data source and a few new nuggets on existing data sources. We’ll release Sendgrid as our new data source and we’ve got a host of new Google AdWords insights; one being a drill down to the Ad level. We’ve also got a few Facebook Ads insight improvements and a behind-the-scenes upgrade we had to do for the Mailchimp API.

Mimi, our Sales Director, is starting to pick up traction on QUALITY demos. Demos are expensive and she’s doing a great job of setting pricing expectations in the email she is sending to people that sign up for more information on Dasheroo for Agencies ahead of scheduling a demo so that people aren’t surprised about pricing after the time is spent on both sides. Great job Mimi! So great I wrote my Startup Lessons Learned about it last week.

We’ve beat all of our KPIs last month. We’re tracking KPIs (revenue is one!) very closely on a day-to-day basis so there are not surprises, we’re pretty excited.

We got some great mentions last week in Fast Company 5 Ways to Keep Small Teams Efficient and on the HubSpot blog, 7 Client Reporting Tools That Will Save Your Company Time. Thanks guys!

Gotta run and grab lunch!

Track Our Startup: Upcoming Releases + Premium Support

March 30, 2016 by John Hingley·1 Comment

We’ve been working hard on the next feature release for your Dasheroo dashboards and frankly it’s been a b*tch! We’ve had to push it forward a few times already.

For those insights where we
Track your Dasheroo dashboards with the currency from a specific country.

list Recent Tweets or Posts, Highest Engagement posts, recently sent email marketing campaigns you’ll be able to scroll the last 10, 25 or 50 line items!
You’ll also be able to export a dashboard to Google Drive (connect your drive account, choose the folder where you want the export to go)
We’ve added additional insight types for Push API (and then Zapier when we’re ready) so you’ll get a bar chart, leaderboard, pie and funnel chart and a table for all that data you’re tracking.
You’ll also be able to set the currency code at the org level for any insight that you track currency like Facebook Ads, and Google Adwords.

We’re shooting for next week on this awesome stuff but we’ll let you know when it happens!

A lot of people ask us “how do you make money offering free dashboards?” Well we hope that users “graduate” from the free plan to the paid plans. We’ve been blowing out the self-service help since we simply can’t answer every single inquiry that comes our way. And we try not to have too many “gotchas” with our code. We try get a lot of bugs squashed in our QA process, our man Court is the best. So we’re moving to more of self-service approach to support to see how that works. Alf has been creating a ton of videos and inputting every question we’ve been asked into a searchable database as our first line of support.

We have set up a triage queue and new workflows in Zendesk to better serve our Grande + Venti customers with priority customer support.

Movin’ on!

Track Our Startup: New Dashboards + New Data Sources Coming!

February 3, 2016 by John Hingley·0 Comments

As you know we’ve had a ton going on this quarter already and it’s only the first week of February! We announced our Push API that went live last week. Check out our posts, they’re awesome and great for our growth and scale.

What’s Up Next?

Alerts – We’re so close getting this important feature over the finish line! You’ll get an alert when a threshold you set is reached!
Hubspot – This is a big one for us, we love the folks over at Hubspot. You’ll be able to get all of your important KPIs from Hubspot right in your Dasheroo dashboards.
Sendgrid – If you use Sendgrid for your transactional emails, we’ll provide you how they’re performing and how they’re being delivered.
Facebook Ads & Google Adwords – We’re revisiting our pay-for-performance partners to enhance those dashboards. More to come as we research.
Mixpanel – We’re in research mode here but we love this integration. We are avid users of Mixpanel so we want to make sure we nail it for everyone who uses this awesome product to track users around your site.

Isn’t that enough? No, we know it’s not. The list never ends. If you want to see insights from data sources you use regularly make sure you get them on the list.

Oh and I’m off the grid till next week (in Burma!) but on the grid enough that you’ll hear from me. Speaking of, how is it that “Burmese” people live in “Myanmar”? Should they not live in Burma? I sure think so;-)

Facebook Ads Analytics: 3 Metrics You Need to Track Right Now!

December 16, 2015 by Janine Popick·0 Comments

Are you among the 92 percent of social marketers using Facebook for advertising? If so, here is something to remember: there is more to advertising than spending a few bucks (or more) and hoping for the best.

We’ve talked about the importance of monitoring your Facebook Ads cost per page like before, but there are more Facebook analytics you can be looking at too. If you want to get as much as possible out of your Facebook Ads, it is imperative to track a variety of metrics. This will allow you to make adjustments on the fly, while also saving both time and money.

Here are three metrics you need to track:

Ad Costs

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had an unlimited amount of money to spend on Facebook advertising? Unfortunately, this is not the real world. Regardless of your business, industry, or goals, it is safe to assume you have set an advertising budget.

Tracking ad costs allows you to:

Stay within your budget.
Calculate return on investment (ROI).
Understand your spend over time (daily, monthly, etc.)

Note: dig deeper by filtering costs by account, campaign, single ad, or ad set.

Impressions

What good is a Facebook ad that doesn’t reach your target audience? You need to compare your spend against the number of impressions (defined as the total number of times your ad entered the screen for the first time). This metric does not guarantee your audience will take action, but it does prove that people are at least viewing your ad.

Impressions can be viewed by date, allowing you to see which days of the week generate the best results.

Clicks

It may be important to track impressions, but it is clicks that matter most. This metric allows you to track the total number of clicks on an ad over a period of time.

Depending on what you are promoting, this could include everything from app installs to page likes (and much more).

There are two other metrics that fit within this category:

Cost per click: calculated by the amount spent divided by the number of clicks.
Click through rate: all clicks divided by impressions.

As a general rule of thumb, you want to keep your cost per click low and your click through rate high. This will yield the “most bang for your buck.”

What Now?

Now you’ve got the knowledge (and power!) necessary to track a variety of essential Facebook advertising analytics. When you combine this with organic Facebook metrics, you have a killer strategy that will allow you to achieve success on this platform.

Report: Understanding Mobile Measurement

June 22, 2015 by Janine Popick·0 Comments

The great people over at eMarketer are always posting some relevant information about marketing measurement and this was a really informative one all about what marketers understand about how their visitors use mobile. As eMarketer estimates, “Mobile ad spending in the US will jump 50.0% this year to reach $28.72 billion, or 49.0% of digital ad spending.” That’s huge and more of a reason why people should understand how their customers interact with them digitally.

So they dove into this poll by Adobe and Econsultancy in their Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing: The Quest for Mobile Excellence to find out just how much marketers know about measuring their mobile spend.

Highlights and Our Take

33% don’t even know what % of their traffic is mobile. Easy to see in Google Analytics
34% said they had ‘a defined mobile strategy that goes out at least 12 months’, down from 36% who agreed with this statement last year. Bummer, this number should never go down.
Of those, 30% don’t know the device breakout of their visitors. Easy to see in Google Analytics. See our case study below.
71% say that the desktop website is their top priority when it comes to providing a consistent customer experience, ahead of mobile site (16%), smartphone applications (10%) and tablet apps (3%). We can’t believe that only 16% are considering a mobile site as a top priority considering how easy it is to get one!
With a simple look at the Dasheroo Sessions By Device Type insight we saw a huge spike in mobile traffic and tracked it back to our Facebook Ads!

37% don’t understand how people use phones differently than tablets. Increasingly important as you build out your mobile applications.

A Short Dasheroo Case Study: Measuring Mobile Advertising

One component of our launch in May was a series of Facebook Ads across both desktop and mobile. Why not right? More eyeballs = more users! So we started to see a huge spike in traffic, specifically mobile visitors from Facebook. Many of these visitors signed up to use Dasheroo (great!) However overall our conversion after they signed up to interact with our business dashboards application was very low compared to other channels.

What we found was the since our website is optimized for mobile people signed up expecting to have a great customer experience with our application as well. However we do not yet have a mobile application so our current app is optimized for desktop only.

Dear marketers: with a simple Device Type report from Google Analytics we know exactly what order we need to develop our apps in, looks like the Apple iPhone wins!

Mobile users expected to have a great customer experience across the board but they were stopped short when they got to our application.

What did we do? We pulled the Facebook Ads for Mobile until we launch our mobile application.

We continued running the desktop feed and our conversion rates increased immediately. Did we get the traffic we once got? No way but the quality of it was incredibly better.

Lesson learned on mobile measurement.

Our First Facebook Ads Test – Website Clicks

May 13, 2015 by John Hingley·1 Comment

We’ve been advertising on Facebook since the start of Dasheroo, but really only a “Like” campaign. We tested a few ads but since we were in stealth mode, and didn’t have a product to really promote other than our Alpha and Beta version we wanted to get the word out about what we were doing and start to build our following.

Our Dasheroo Facebook Ad Creative.

But now we thought it would be great to test a different Facebook Objective on our Ads; clicks to our website. So we decided to get some creative together (one which Facebook REJECTED due to their dumb 80/20 rule) and go for it on the day of our launch.

Here is what we did:

Selected a very targeted audience of small business owners and people who were most likely to use an online app like ours.
Made sure people who would see the ad were over 24 and in the U.S. even though we have a ton of people who use us in over 70 other countries as of now. We wanted to restrict the test at this point.
Let it roll with a oCPM (optimized CPM) not a CPC since we thought to let Facebook help us with some targeting of people most likely to click.
Budgeted it for a whopping $100/day for 7 days to see what would happen.

Here’s what happened:

Image of a free Dasheroo business dashboard showing Facebook Ads metrics.

Dasheroo’s Facebook Ads dashboard for our first test.

We got a ton of clicks and a 13.2% conversion rate to new user!

We looked at the users who came in from Facebook Ads and looked at their activity. Did they connect an application? Where they viewing their dashboards? The answer was … they are but at a lower rate than we’d like. Are we quitters? No way.

We’ll be marketing to those who came in through Facebook to see if we can get them to be active or, learn why they’re not.

We’ll keep testing this channel out to drive some traffic but you know how we feel about spending tons of money on advertising ?

Track Our Startup Post Launch: Pricing, Press & People

May 12, 2015 by John Hingley·2 Comments

We got right back into ‘hard at work’ mode after we launched last week. With the new business dashboards launch we gave our users mashups, bundles, dashboard templates, wider date range access, Facebook Ads and email marketing giant Emma insights, whew!

We passed the 2000 user mark and we’re starting to really gain traction with our growing user base! Please tell your friends because advertising gets expensive. PEOPLE ARE EXPENSIVE, however we’d rather spend our money on people working for you rather than ads to get new people.

Up Next?

We’re working on releasing Campaign Monitor and following that up Aweber. A number of users have been requesting these applications so that’s what we’re focused on.

Upcoming Pricing

Did you see our upcoming pricing? Get in on the early adopter special and tell your buds about it, it’s a great deal That leads us to tell you that we don’t have a billing platform in place yet, but we’re excited to be using Stripe.

We got some great press from our launch and hopefully will continue to:

Dasheroo Makes Accessing Business Data Easy, Affordable by Small Business Computing. You guys rock!
The Next Small Business Dashboard, Dasheroo? by AfterNines, you guys wrote a really nice article about us, thanks!
Dasheroo Rips the Beta Label Off by Saascribe, and they’re a user, thanks!
5 Cloud Computing Funding Stories You Might Have Missed by Talkin’ Cloud
The 5 Essential Metrics to Track Social Media Success is a great article we wrote for The Self Employed.
John gave a great interview to CEO/CFO Magazine, look for that in the upcoming weeks.

We’re hiring!

Does it matter where you live? Nope. We do have an office in Austin so if you’re an engineer in the Austin area even better but not necessary. We’re also looking for Product Managers and Sales too.

We’re off to Market New York to show Dasheroo off and get some really great feedback! Great feedback = positive OR negative to us. Stop by we’re at booth #200.