dash-b · Use cases · Ads

Every campaign, every platform, one board and one number.

Spend is in four dashboards and the thing you actually want to know — what it returned — is in none of them. Put the spend beside your own orders and the question answers itself.

Ready to open

Eight boards that earn their pixels

Campaigns, funnels, audiences — each card opens a real design. Point it at your numbers and retire the weekly screenshot ritual.

Type it, and see the board appear

Say what the campaign board should show

Pick one of these, or type the number the spend has to answer to — and watch the board build itself. The shapes are the real widgets; the numbers are missing because they are not yours yet.

Spend on the left, revenue on the right, on the same screen

The comparison nobody's ad platform will ever show you, because it is the one that decides whether to keep paying them.

You know what you spent. Now see what it returned.Spend from every platform, revenue from your own database, one ratio.

The adding-up problem

Every platform reports well on itself

Each of them counts conversions its own way, over its own window, and each of them concludes that it deserves the credit. Adding four self-reports together does not give you a total; it gives you a number larger than your actual revenue.

A board pulls the spend from each and puts your own order data next to it. One definition of a sale — the one in your database — and the arithmetic stops flattering anybody.

The number that decides things

What you spent, against what you actually sold

Spend is easy to get and revenue is already in your database. The ratio between them is the only figure that decides whether next month's budget goes up, and it is the one figure no advertising dashboard is built to show you.

Put break-even on the tile beside it. A ratio without a threshold is a number; with one it is a decision.

Where the money should move

Ranked by what came back, not by what went out

A table sorted by spend tells you where the money went. A table sorted by return tells you where it should go next. One of those is a report and the other is a decision, and they are the same data arranged differently.

The tile that says 0.7× is the one that pays for the whole exercise.

Catching it early

A campaign that goes wrong goes wrong quickly

Budget burning three days faster than planned, a spend spike on a Tuesday nobody ordered — the cost of finding out on the first of next month is the whole of the difference. Put the board on a screen somebody walks past and it gets caught the same day.

The pacing tile is the useful one: not what you have spent, but whether you will run out before the campaign ends.

If you run ads for somebody else

The client's board is a copy with different tiles on it

Give each client a board with their own name and colours on it, showing the numbers they should see and not the ones they should not. It is a copy of your working board with tiles removed — which takes minutes, not a reporting project.

Send the link and it is current every time they open it. Nobody has to assemble anything on the first of the month.