7 Business Dashboards That Offer Striking Data Visualizations

When data gets complex, there’s no better way to understand it than a business dashboard. You can cull data from your website analytics engine, an Oracle database, social media campaigns and more, all to see how they interrelate.

Unfortunately, some dashboards are overly cluttered and actually make data more complicated to understand. The seven tools featured here use more color, graphs, clear delineations and white space to make data more understandable. The cost for using these dashboards varies depending on the number of sources you use, the amount of data you’re analyzing and how many admin users you have involved.

John Brandon is a former IT manager at a Fortune 100 company who now writes about technology. Follow him on Twitter @jmbrandonbb.

Many large companies use a “touch ’em all” marketing approach: Buying banner ads, promoting products through Twitter and Facebook, running ads on television and almost everything in between. Making sense of this multifaceted marketing approach often requires visualizing the data. Beckon provides a dashboard that essentially creates a lush infographic. Senior-level marketers can glance to see how much each impression costs for an ad campaign, check the cost effectiveness of each campaign in a simple bar chart and even compare the effectiveness of an email campaign against social media or television ads.

[ Related: Marketers See Value in Big Data Analytics, But Face Hurdles ]

Domo dubs itself a business intelligence dashboard, one that pulls data from various enterprise systems and lets users arrange them in blocks within their personalized dashboards. Operations staff, for example, can receive notifications of threats as well as opportunities, while sales staff can gain insight into customer purchasing patterns. As for business intelligence, Domo automates the data aggregation and calculation process, which lets BI teams provide stakeholders with timely key performance indicators.

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