Dasheroo Delivers Insight into Critical Business Metrics

There’s certainly no shortage of social media outlets, emarketing sites and online services to help you reach the Internet masses and grow your small business. But there is a shortage of time to track your business’ performance on them all. Sure, you can log into Google Analytics, then Facebook, then Salesforce, then MailChimp and so on to check the performance snapshots that each service offers. But what you really need is a dashboard for your dashboards—which is precisely what Dasheroo delivers.

Dasheroo: dashboards for small business metrics

Figure 1: Dasheroo can collect metrics from 18 leading social and e-marketing services, with more in the works.

The Dish on Dasheroo

The concept is simple: In one browser tab and with a single login, Dasheroo keeps you connected to your “connected apps” so you can see how your website traffic’s trending, the number of people following your business on Facebook and Twitter, the click-through rate of your latest ConstantContact email campaign and more. The system pulls what it deems to be the most important metrics from the sites it supports and places them in graphical tiles—called “Insights”—that let you see those metrics at a glance.

For example, if you use and link to Google Analytics, you’ll see tiles showing site visits for the timeframe selected, sessions by device type, and where the traffic came from. Sure, you can see the same information (and more) by logging into your Google Analytics account and checking its dashboard, but Dasheroo lets you scroll down the page and see similar Insights for your other connected services.

The Facebook Insights show you the engagement rate for recent posts; new and total fans; the number of Likes, Shares and Comments your page has; and so on. And if you’ve linked email marketing apps such as ConstantContact, MailChimp or VerticalReponse, you’ll be able to check statistics—messages sent, the number opened, the click-through rate, the number of bounces—for campaigns and newsletters sent in the chosen time period. If you need more, simply click on the name of the campaign to launch the service in a new tab.

Dasheroo custom dashboard

Figure 2: Dasheroo lets you build your own custom Dashboard by mixing and matching Insights from the various supported services.

At the present time, Dasheroo lets you choose from a solid selection of 18 popular online services (with more Insights in the works) that includes Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter, Google Sheets, YouTube, Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, Instagram, Salesforce, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey, Vertical Response, Constant Contact and others. Simply select the services you want Dasheroo to track, enter your log-in info for each (you only have to do that once), and you’re ready to construct your custom Dashboard.

Dashboards Your Way

You can build a Dashboard from scratch, or you can start with one of the five templates that mix-and-match popular Insights, such as the “Marketing Maven” template that combines stats for Facebook, Google Metrics, MailChimp and Twitter; and “Socialite,” which surfaces Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube tiles. And you aren’t locked in: You can start with a template and add other Insights at any time to wind up with a Dashboard that suits you.

More importantly, your team members can select their own Dashboard layouts that surface the Insights that matter most to their roles. For example, your social media director can keep tabs on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter in his Dashboard, while your sales and marketing chief monitors Salesforce, Google Analytics and VerticalResponse in her Dashboard.

Dasheroo's Google Analytics traffic tile

Figure 3: Dasheroo’s Google Analytics Insight shows the pertinent info you need in a format that’s easier to digest than the dashboard Google offers.

If Dasheroo stopped at that aggregation of data, it would certainly be worth signing up for that handy convenience. But the system goes a couple steps further. Most notable are the custom “Mashup” matchups. These let you pair metrics from different services to see if there’s a correlation between the data and to spot trends you might otherwise have missed. For example, you can track your business’ Facebook fans and Twitter followers (represented as line graphs) in one Insight, or your Google AdWords impressions and website sessions (as measured in Google Analytics) in another. Dasheroo currently offers six Mashups, and encourages subscribers to suggest others for its development team to build.

Of course, once you’ve got your Dashboard brimming with Insights (and insight), you’ll want to share that data with other team members. Dasheroo makes that easy, too. Simply select Share from the top menu and select your colleagues who have a Dasheroo login, or you can send an email to invite someone to join. They will then be able to see the Dashboard you’ve created, and post and reply to comments on the Dashboard or individual Insights.

Dasheroo Mashups

Figure 4: Dasheroo’s Mashups let you create an Insight that melds data from two different services.

Pricing Dashboards in the Cloud

As you would expect of a service that tracks online services, Dasheroo is cloud-based, so you can access your Dashboard from any device with a browser (native Android and iOS apps are in the works).

Borrowing phraseology from Starbucks, Dasheroo offers three pricing tiers—Tall, Grande and Venti (plus a custom level for large, distributed enterprises).

  • Tall: Free of charge (no credit card required) and supports unlimited users, up to four Dashboards and 12 data Insights showing up to 30 days of data, the sharing/commenting features, Presentation mode, and support via the community knowledgebase.
  • Grande: Costs $25 per month for an unlimited number of users and provides up to 12 Dashboards and 30 data Insights that show up to 6 months of data, plus Mashup Insights and email support.
  • Venti: Runs $75 per month and delivers everything Grande does plus an unlimited number of Dashboards that can draw from up to 60 Insights.

For business owners that rely on several of the supported services, Dasheroo is a true timesaver. It lets you see where you stand in the online scheme of things without jumping from service to service, which is likely to keep you and your team better informed. And as the rest of the world struggles to make sense of big data, your Dashboard delivers just the right dose of manageable data.

Jamie Bsales is an award-winning technology writer and editor with more than 20 years of experience covering the latest hardware, software and Internet products and services.

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