7 essential dashboards for SaaS businesses

Gain meaningful snapshots of all key business functions, align your teams with a bird’s eye view of business objectives and make better data-driven decisions. SaaS dashboards are essential to understanding the health of your business and your paths to growth.

We called upon leading SaaS professionals to gain first-hand insight into the dashboards they consider an essential part of their day-to-day. On top of that, we will be sharing the reports you should be including within each dashboard. 

1. Customer retention dashboard

Retaining customers is a major focus for any SaaS business, so keeping an eye on how your retention strategies are performing is a must. The cost of acquiring new customers can be pricey, so with the help of a robust dashboard you can pay close attention to your customers and identify any opportunities of growth or strategies needing improvement.

Ideally, your SaaS company wants to develop loyalty and advocacy with customers, this starts with having a solid retention strategy in place and tracking the customer’s experience throughout.

Top 5 reports to include:

• Customer churn 

• Net retention rate

• Revenue churn

• MRR growth rate

• Customer lifetime value (CLV)

2. Marketing dashboard

This will be your one stop shop into examining the performance of your marketing strategies. It can easily turn into a lengthy dashboard covering the breadth of marketing disciplines from paid media, content, SEO and product marketing. So, depending on the set up of your SaaS company, you may need to separate these marketing categories into mini dashboards. 

Robin Nichols, a Content Lead from SaaS company, 360Learning shares her team's weekly and monthly essential dashboards, “the first that we report on weekly is a dashboard, and it shows us 1. the number of organic MQLs generated to date, and 2. the number of organic SQLs generated to date. This is probably our most important dashboard.”

Nichols adds, “on the content team, our main missions are to feed the sales pipeline with SQLs (and MQLs), and tell our brand story (awareness). The MQLs and SQLs dashboards give us the hard numbers we need to know if we're on track to help sales hit their revenue targets, and where we can make improvements.”

Top 5 reports to include:

• MRR 

• Website traffic

• Cost per acquisition

• Lead-to-MQL Ratio

• MQL-to-SQL Ratio

“Traffic and SEO dashboards give us indications for where we can generate more leads ---> MQLs ---> SQLs, and also how far our reach is in terms of storytelling.”

- Robin Nichols, Content Lead at 360Learning.

3. Sales dashboard

When setting up your sales dashboard it's important to work out what metrics are important to you. This will depend greatly on your business, if you’re at the earlier stages of SaaS then you’ll want to see a quick snapshot on new revenue acquisition and MRR. In the scaling stage,including reports like annual contract value will provide you with a clearer future outlook. 

Every business will be different and have distinct sales goals, so as long as your dashboard is set up to align both your company objectives and the team then you will be on your path to success. 

Top 5 reports to include:

• Net MRR / ARR

• Sales forecast vs actual sales

• Sales representatives performance

• Average deal size

• Sales qualified leads (SQL)

4. Web analytics dashboard

It’s safe to say nowadays the majority of marketing happens online, with the organization's website being the hub where customers and leads are directed to. Creating a web analytics dashboard will show you the top-priority metrics indicating the usability and success of your website, in real-time. 

Founder of the AI-driven platform Idiomatic, Chris Martinez, believes the web analytics dashboard can sometimes get “lost in the shuffle.”

“We use a web analytics dashboard to determine where prospective customers are dropping off in the marketing funnel. It allows us to determine where we should focus our advertising efforts in different traffic channels (social media versus paid social, as an example) and why we are (or aren’t) succeeding in organic search. These metrics have spurred on-site CRO that has helped us grow our user base.” 

“Web analytics will confirm what customers are telling you, or reveal where things are really at — what parts of the website (and your product, if hosted online) are most used or underutilized, and how customers are making use of your resources,” continued Martinez.

“In your web analytics dashboard, I’d recommend adding an FAQ-traffic session to determine what the MOST frequently asked and/or unanswered questions your customers have. These questions can be reinforced in your content strategy to fill that need for current and future users.” 

- Chris Martinez, Founder of Idiomatic

Content lead, Robin Nichols also finds value using a web analytics dashboard, consulting it weekly. It “shows 1. Organic traffic to our website, 2. Organic traffic to our blog 3. Average time on page 4. SEO traffic to our website and blog. 5. Which articles are generating the most organic and SEO traffic. 6. What are our main sources of organic traffic?”

“Finally, we also fill in a Google sheet dashboard using data from Ahrefs that shows us the rankings of some important keywords (per market), number of backlinks and linking domains to our site/blog, and how many keywords on our blog that are in position 1-3, 4-10, and overall,” continues Nichols.

Top 5 reports to include:

• Website engagement metrics (page views, link clicks, user behavior, bounce rate,  session duration)

• Website traffic

• Unique sessions

• Sessions by device

• Sessions by campaign source

5. User experience / product dashboard

This dashboard will focus on how your users are interacting with the platform. By having the data from various user funnels all in one central location, it will help you understand the user completion rate of tasks for example purchasing or subscribing to product notifications. 

Allan Stolc, Founder and CEO of Bankly values the user experience above all else. “A user experience dashboard means a lot in assessing the growth of our business. As a fintech company, it is vital to keep track of our users' level of engagement and ensure our site visitors are correctly getting the message we want to convey,” he shares. 

“That said, we include reports that show the number of active users on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. We also look into the average number of times each user visits our website and the average duration of their stay. This is the best way to ensure that our bounce rate is minimized, which increases our chance of converting potential leads into customers.” 

Simon Bacher, Co-Founder of the startup Simya Solutions who created the gamified language learning app Ling App, uses a mobile-specific analytics tool to create dashboards around the user experience and product usage. 

“We use the app to track general KPIs, such as mobile downloads, user growth rate, subscriptions, and even upgrades and crashes. This tool also helps us track app engagement metrics, including retention rate, session length, daily active users, social shares, and churn rate,” shares Backer.

“We’re also able to gauge user experience KPIs, like load time, API latency, and permissions granted,” he continues.

Including a user experience or product dashboard will give you eyes on the health of your product and help you work with agility if issues occur within the platform.

Top 5 reports to include:

• Did the user achieve [business critical action]?

• Activation rate

• Purchase Funnel (Today)

• Hourly Dashboard Views (Past 5 Days)

• Active users (DAU, WAU or MAU) 

6. Customer support dashboard

Your customer service support team is critical to the success of your SaaS business. Building a comprehensive dashboard will help provide a 360-degree view of the customers, their queries or pain points and the performance of the service team.

By tracking calls and queries, you can gain first-hand feedback on recurring issues that can drive change within the product therefore creating a better experience for your customers. 

 Top 5 reports to include:

• Tickets by day / week / month

• Tickets by status 

• Chats per day vs tickets by day

• Average tickets per day

• Net promoter scores

7. Finances dashboard

Setting up a financial dashboard for your SaaS business will help you keep track of how sustainable and successful your business is. You will be able to forecast how successful the next quarter, or financial year are looking to be. Plus, if there are dips in key KPI’s then you are about to take action quickly. 

Top 5 reports to include:

• Monthly recurring revenue (MRR)

• Annual run rate (ARR)

• Conversion rate

• Churn rate

• Average selling price

Final word 

Now it’s your turn, use the example dashboards provided above as a base and start creating your own in Ortto. With templates on offer and a variety of report styles to choose from you can build a customized dashboard to fit all the business critical KPI’s you need to keep an eye on.

Start exploring dashboards in Ortto today.