For more than a decade, I’ve been building ad analytics dashboards for big brands like American Express or Uber. No matter what was the vertical, they’ve provided consistent product feedback about them:

  1. Daily and Weekly reports: most of the users, especially those in large companies, wanted a daily report. It would depend if they were running an performance campaign or a branding campaign.
  2. Month-to-today as default view: seeing only today’s data is too narrow. And a year-long data doesn’t mean much in terms of next actions. The sweet spot was always the MTD resolution.
  3. Performance breakdown: which creative is driving the more performance or engagement was a key question that users kept bringing it up.
  4. Export the data: the ability to export what the user was seeing and play with it in an excel sheet.
  5. More functionality/customization: this feedback is a trap. Users will always want to slice and dice the data in different ways to unlock the ultimate “insight.”

As you provide more features, you will get dangerously close to re-invent a BI or Advanced Analytics tools like Tableau.

Once your product gets too complex, the user will suffer and ask for more simple solutions. They will want recommendations, insights, or even automated actions, so they don’t have to go through the time-consuming process of unlocking information (exactly what there were asking for before.)

Leo Celis