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46 QUESTIONS TO ASK PROSPECTIVE DASHBOARD PARTNERS
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CONTENTS
STAGE 0: ENTERPRISE-CLASS SECURITY, PERMISSIONS AND CONTROLS 3
STAGE 1: DATA INTAKE 4
STAGE 2: DATA CLEANSING AND NORMALIZATION 5
STAGE 3: DATA ENRICHMENT 6
STAGE 4: DATA STORAGE 6
STAGE 5: REPORT DESIGN 7
STAGE 6: DATA VISUALIZATION 8
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As you shop for a marketing dashboard, use this list of questions to vet
individual vendors. By discussing these points with your candidates in detail,
you’ll end up with a complete picture of what’s required from both parties to
get your new dashboards launched.
ASK:
1. Do you support permissions and controls for data at the metric-level?
Channel-level? Campaign-level?
2. Do you offer role-based permissions and controls for who can see and
edit select dashboards and scorecards?
3. Can we create custom permission schemes or are we limited to
predefined roles and permissions?
4. Do you offer single sign-on through Active Directory, SAML or another
solution to make it easy to manage user access?
5. Can we implement approval workflows before new data goes live in
the system?
6. Will we have access to data audits and completeness reports to ensure
that we can trust the underlying data?
STAGE 0: ENTERPRISE-CLASS SECURITY, PERMISSIONS AND CONTROLS
Key objective: Determine which vendor(s) deliver
the security, scalability, and flexibility your
organization requires.
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ASK:
7. Can you take all the data we have, or do you have a menu of APIs we
need to choose from? (If they only offer API access, be sure all the tools
you use have APIs available, otherwise you will have blind spots.)
8. How do we get data into the system? Can you pull from APIs? Can we
publish to a secure server, which you then pull down? Can you take
spreadsheets? .CSVs? Can our team email files straight into your system?
9. Do we need to upload data in neat rows and columns, fully tagged?
10. How do we know if data is in or not? Is there a confirmation process?
11. What metrics do you recommend we pull in from each of our priority data
sources and channels? Can you provide us with guidance?
12. What if a data source has a value that we don’t want to pull in? Can we
pull in some data but not other data from a single data source? How does
that work?
STAGE 1: DATA INTAKE
Give the vendor a list of all your data sources—
online, offline, business outcomes (sales), revenue
data, and brand/equity outcomes (brand tracker
or survey data).
Key objective: Determine whether there are
any restrictions on the types of data that can be
entered into the system, and how the uploading
process is accomplished.
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ASK:
13. What is our role in fundamental data cleanup? What is your role?
14. Who determines what marketing metrics and KPIs to pull in? Do we need
to define our complete and final data schema from scratch when we get
started with your tool, or do you have a starting point for us?
15. Can you transform messy Excel files into a structured format?
16. Who is responsible for de-duping, normalizing and reconciling variations
in field names, etc., before we start looking at dashboards?
17. Can you make metadata consistent? For example, if we have varying tags
such as “Southern California”, “So. Cal.” and “So_Calif” how does your
system know these are the same thing?
18. If you don’t make metadata consistent for us, do you have ETL tools
that allow our team of data architects and analysts to perform data
transformations within your application?
19. If multiple datasets contain the same metric name but different values,
how do you determine the source of truth for the metric?
20. How do you ensure that metrics have common definitions and are well
understood by all users who later access the dashboards?
21. Do you maintain a glossary of all metric definitions and properties so that
metrics always mean the same thing?
22. When someone is viewing a chart, will each metric’s definition and
properties be readily available to users?
STAGE 2: DATA CLEANSING AND NORMALIZATION
Key objective: Determine who is responsible for data
cleanup and normalization, and precisely what each
responsible party needs to do.
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ASK:
23. Do you offer strategic advice on best practices for using metadata to
enrich our dataset?
24. How can we create aggregates of data—for example, tag all paid media
mentions as “paid” for future paid and earned media analyses? How do
you support adding metadata to underlying metrics?
25. How are formulas and derived metrics supported in your platform? Can
we create formulas (e.g., run rate, average, rate) based on underlying
metrics and KPIs in the application? Or do we need to calculate those
metrics before they go into your system?
ASK:
26. Do you warehouse the data—the structured files that we upload into your
system—or do you just allow us to visualize “snapshots” of our data?
27. What happens if people upload different and conflicting datasets?
STAGE 3: DATA ENRICHMENT
Key objective: Determine who is responsible for
data enrichment, and the specific responsibilities
each party has in the process.
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STAGE 4: DATA STORAGE
Key objective: Determine how accessible your data is
and who maintains ownership and control over it.
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28. Can we easily export all (or subsets of) historical data from your system
in order to merge it with other datasets or run analyses outside your
platform?
29. Do you have an API so that we can pull data out of your tool?
ASK:
30. Do you offer standard reports that reflect marketing best practices? And/
or suggestions for analyses to run based on best practices?
31. Do you offer templatized reports based on marketing best practices that
we can customize?
32. How user-friendly is your chart creator/querying tool? Is it designed to be
used by marketers or advanced analysts?
33. Do you offer flexible permissions and roles for who can see select data in
reports?
34. Will we have an account manager who provides guidance on dashboard
and scorecard design and trains all our users? Does our account
representative have a marketing background?
35. Is training and support included in the price or does it cost extra?
STAGE 5: REPORT DESIGN
Key objective: Determine the reporting capabilities,
customization and training the vendor offers.
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ASK:
36. Are your data visualization and exploration tools designed for IT
professionals, data analysts or marketers?
37. Are there many chart types available? Does the system suggest chart
types based on the selected data?
38. Can we visualize omnichannel datasets—data that comes from many
disparate sources?
39. Will our dashboards have the ability to show us what’s happening across
the buyer’s journey in terms of awareness, engagement, purchase,
advocacy, etc.?
40. Do you offer drill-in and drill-down capabilities?
41. When looking at a dashboard, can we easily slice the dataset in a different
way or otherwise creatively explore our data, or are we limited to viewing
canned reports?
42. Are dashboards shareable, and are there varying levels of access we can
grant?
43. Can we view our dashboards on web and mobile?
44. Are we able to easily export dashboard charts and graphs into
PowerPoint for other types of reporting and analysis?
45. Do you support other visuals such as scorecards?
46. Do you offer easy benchmarking such as “vs. previous period”, “vs. last
year” and “vs. a target or goal”?
STAGE 6: DATA VISUALIZATION
Key objective: Determine how flexible the vendor’s
chart options are, along with their solutions for
sharing, drilling down and exporting.
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ABOUT BECKON
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can trust. You need Beckon, The Source of Truth for Marketing™. Beckon’s
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better, faster decisions that let you do more with every marketing dollar.
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