Clients love marketing dashboards because they’re an effective, eye-catching way to illustrate campaign performance. Building dashboards, though, takes time that agencies don’t always have. And that’s why so many teams are investing in dashboarding tools like DashThis.
DashThis, which was designed for agencies, promises to put all your SEO, social, email and other digital marketing data in one automated report. With its templates and widget-based design tools, DashThis speeds up the process of building a marketing dashboard.
If you’re thinking about buying DashThis, check out our review of the software. We look at what it does well, where it’s not as strong and what else you should consider when purchasing marketing dashboard software.
What Does DashThis Do Well?
Speed and Design
You can create reports quickly and easily thanks to DashThis’ drag-and-drop widgets and its library of dashboard templates for PPC, Google Analytics, display, ecommerce and more.
You also have the ability to customize several aspects of your dashboards, such as changing out the headers and logos or adding comments. For more complex customizations, you may need to hire the DashThis team to create a white-label dashboard.
Affordability
Pricing for DashThis is based on the number of dashboards you use each month. Packages start at three dashboards for $33 per month and go up to $499 monthly for 100 dashboards.
What Are the Weaknesses of DashThis?
A Growing, but Relatively Small Library of Data Connections
DashThis offers more than 30 integrations with data sources like Ahrefs, Google Ads and Instagram. That includes many of the most popular sources, but not all of them — and that might include a source that you or a client really needs to track.
DashThis does offer a fallback option, its CSV File tool, for direct file uploads that you would be responsible for setting up and managing on your own.
No Data Warehouse
DashThis doesn’t really store marketing data. Instead, its dashboards pull directly from the originating data sources. If you only want to produce basic performance reports, this isn’t a huge problem.
But if you ever have ambitions of providing more advanced business insights and forecasts, you’ll need a larger storehouse of data that has been cleaned and blended where necessary — ideally, the kind that lives in a well-organized, carefully monitored data warehouse.
Setting up a data warehouse does take more upfront planning, but once it’s up and running, it’ll give you the horsepower to produce long-range predictions and forecasts. Need to clean up your data? You only have to do it once, and that perfected data will always be available in your warehouse.
DashThis doesn’t offer a way to fix errors in your data. Even if it did, there’s no long-term storage for that data, so any cleanup would be temporary.
DashThis and Level 1 Marketing Analytics Software
DashThis is a solid example of a Level 1 marketing analytics tool. It’s built to help marketers who are mostly concerned with reporting on standard KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) — what happened last month, how many clicks and impressions did we get, etc.
Level 1 tools are an important first step for marketing teams because they automate large chunks of the process of reporting and analysis.
But they’re usually a first step. To advance to more complex forms of marketing analytics, agencies typically need to invest in platforms that can handle more complex projects involving cross-channel marketing attribution, forecasting and media mix models.
To be clear: Not everybody needs to move beyond Level 1. We regularly encounter organizations that do very well by providing just-the-facts reporting.
The drawback is that, if you do eventually want to tackle more ambitious analytics work, your Level 1 tool won’t get you to the next level. You’ll have to start over with a completely new platform.
Who Is DashThis For?
DashThis is a solution for smaller agencies that need to produce reporting on popular marketing platforms. It might not perform as well for organizations that are monitoring several data sources or need to generate more complex, more valuable business insights.
What Else Should I Consider Before Buying DashThis?
Curious about DashThis alternatives? Download the No B.S. Buyers Guide for Marketing Analytics, a free report from Alight Analytics. The guide will:
- Give you an easy-to-implement strategy for finding the right solution for your unique marketing analytics needs.
- Highlight the most common types of solutions on the market — including their pros, cons and capabilities.
- Show you the most important questions to ask when considering a new platform, so you can get the greatest value for your money.