What decision will your new dashboard help the client make? It is a useful quest
By Simon Ellicott · October 20, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
What decision will your new dashboard help the client make?
It is a useful question to ask before building it.
An agency connects advertising, sales, customer and inventory data.
The reporting becomes faster.
The analysis becomes richer.
Patterns become easier to investigate.
All useful.
But the client still needs to decide what to do.
Consider a product attracting repeat customers but delivering a weak margin on the first purchase.
Should the brand invest more?
Possibly.
But first, what is the contribution from those later purchases?
How long does it take to recover the acquisition cost?
Can the business fund that gap?
And how confident are we that the advertising created additional demand?
A repeat-purchase pattern is evidence to investigate, but it does not settle the investment decision.
The same applies when a campaign looks inefficient.
Perhaps it should be reduced.
Perhaps it supports a product launch whose economics need a longer assessment.
Perhaps the product itself needs attention before another pound is spent promoting it.
Connecting the data helps distinguish those possibilities.
Commercial context helps determine which response makes sense.
For agency owners, this has a practical implication.
If you invest in better analytics, also decide who will interpret the findings, challenge the assumptions and discuss the trade-offs with the client.
Otherwise, you risk building a more sophisticated reporting service around the same unresolved decisions.
A useful analysis should leave the client clearer about the choice, the evidence behind it and what would make you reconsider.
What did your latest reporting improvement enable the client to decide differently?