If you’re like me, then you’ll agree that time is the most valuable (and limited) resource anyone has. Time spent doing menial tasks should be avoided at all costs. As a team of engineers, we often fall into the trap of wasting time because it’s simply too easy to do so.
A google sheet can help you avoid this by making relevant data easily available and accessible (i.e., without having to dig for it). I find google sheets particularly useful in managing projects because they provide an excellent overview of the status of your work.
But the trick to really analyzing data is to create templates that allow you to slice and dice your data!
I’ll explain step-by-step how to use google sheets as a project dashboard. The best part is this template can be easily used by any team of engineers!
First, let’s describe the data we want to track. Most of our clients are tracking advertising expenses and merging that data with total lead volume, or sales.
There are several other factors that should be included as well:
– Number of leads coming from each source (i.e., google, facebook, etc.)
– Conversion rates by campaign and media type (i.e., google, facebook, etc.).
– Amount of sales revenue by region or country.
Let’s also include the total lead price range to ensure that we’re profitable enough given our costs. This metric can be found by dividing total sales revenue minus advertising cost by the number of leads generated. It is critical for this metric to stay above 0 – it means you are making a profit with your ads! Otherwise, your ads are costing your business money which will eventually cause them to close down shop!
So why not just use the ads managers? Why pull all this data into a spreadsheet?
Because you need to view your business at a macro level.
For example, you want to know which sources are your most profitable. If you’re google, then this is easy! You simply track revenue and conversion rates by campaign (using google analytics). But if you’ve got multiple media types (direct mail, google adwords, facebook), then it gets much harder to keep track of how each source affects the viability of your business.
We have tried almost every custom dashboard company on the market, and nothing seems to compare to Google Sheets!
They’re free and work perfectly!
But more importantly that are flexible.
Consolidata easily connects with Google Sheets allowing you to have your data uploading to the spreadsheets as frequent as you would like.
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