What Is a Dashboard?

Key takeaways 

A dashboard allows for continuous oversight by showcasing live data updates.

• Dashboards provide a means to observe website traffic, marketing outcomes, public health trends, and more.

• Tableau, Power BI, and Looker are popular data visualization tools for creating custom dashboards.

• Becoming familiar with different types of dashboards can strengthen your capabilities as a data analyst.

Learn more about dashboards and the different formats they come in. If you’re ready to start preparing for a role in data analytics right away, consider pursuing Google’s Data Analytics Professional Certificate. Beginner-friendly, this flexible program offers guidance on how to clean and organize data for analysis. You’ll also have the opportunity to learn how to visualize and present data findings in dashboards, presentations, and commonly used visualization platforms.

What is a dashboard?

A dashboard is a tool for monitoring and displaying real-time data. Typically, it's connected to a database and features visualizations that automatically update to reflect the most current data in the database.

Dashboards are highly customizable and used across many business functions. They're generally designed to translate data into easily understood visuals, such as charts and graphs, enabling stakeholders to stay informed about current metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) at a glance without necessitating individual analysis or complete analytics reports.

People who work in data visualization commonly use programs such as Tableau, Power BI, and Looker to create dashboards. These dashboards may be used to monitor website traffic, marketing performance, financial metrics, or public health data.

Learn some dashboard basics in the following lecture from Google's Share Data Through the Art of Visualization course, part of the Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate.

Types of dashboards

There are many different types of dashboards you may encounter in the workplace, from business dashboards that show key business metrics to analytical dashboards that analyze data trends and equip users with actionable insights. Some of the most common dashboards include:

• Strategic dashboards: These dashboards are responsible for tracking key performance indicators that help users make more strategic decisions.

• Operational dashboards: This kind of dashboard offers a view of current performance.

• Executive dashboards: This dashboard equips business leaders with an overview of overall organizational performance.

• Analytical dashboards: This common dashboard tracks, processes, and analyzes data to identify trends and actionable insights.

• Marketing dashboards: These effective dashboards provide a snapshot of key metrics for digital marketing campaigns, such as engagement and conversion rate.

Related terms

• Business intelligence

• Business intelligence analyst

• Dashboard

• Data analyst

• Data visualization

• Power BI

Learn more: Data Analysis Terms and Definitions

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