What’s all the fuss about Databox?
Databox has ranked as #1 by G2Crowd for being most efficient data visualization tool. Despite the popularity, many fail to really take advantage of it- and that’s understandable, because it’s got more than 65 integrations with great tools, as well as more than two hundred one-click report templates. You could customize these templates, add multiple metrics into one dashboard and choose any preferred layout. When it comes to pre-built metric visualisation, the options fall into thousands! You wouldn’t need any sort of technical expertise to have all your data metrics at your fingertips.
What are some of the most common misconceptions about it?
Databox is not an analytics tool! It won’t help you perform comprehensive analytical tasks. However, it allows you to visualize all your data in the most organized, user-friendly way. Some of the beautiful features are getting daily reports on appealing dashboards. There’s an array of features to choose from, like Smart Alerts, Favourites and Daily Scorecards.
So what does it really do?
Say, you do have tools like Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics as your primary data analyzing tools. Using Databox will funnel all your data across these and several other platforms that you might be using, into one, single dashboard. There’s a reason it’s got more than 65 integrations- and you’re not expected to make all those integrations, but you are expected to have several tools you might use to analyse, and logging into each and every one of them can be a hassle. More than 18 visualization charts and analysis are tools available, including comparison with historical data, allowing us to easily access and analyse different sorts of data. It gives us a clear picture about where our campaign is going well, and where we could put more effort for better results.
Does it strictly help with visualizing analytics and nothing else?
This is one of the most frequently asked questions. And the answer is: technically, no. You always have a business goal, right? Every business has a different goal, and a slightly different route to take. Obviously, you use analytics as a major part of your business strategy, as it has to be aligned with your goals and needs. So, with Databox, you can have your analytics streamlined.
What’s the best combination of integrations?
Let’s say that your business goal is outreach and link-building. Perhaps you made this guidebook that took up a ton of resources to create, and now it’s up on your website. The next step would be to promote and make it accessible, right? It’s a very time-consuming process, if you know anything about link-building and outreach. With Databox, you’d be able to see the difference between your ranking easily, and it wouldn’t take weeks, like it would without it. A good solution is connecting an SEO tool with an Email Outreach tool (Like Ahrefs and Mailshake) and have a custom dashboard. This way, you’d be able to track the activities and compare and analyse easily. You could have your emails per day connected with the dynamic, daily goals or weekly goals (in the form of a bar that could fill up, if you choose to see it that way). Even if you’re not getting feedback, you could at least track actions in the beginning. You could have a good visual on your organic traffic data graph.
Other popular integrations:
• Another combination could be Facebook Ads, Stripe and Google Analytics if your goals are SEO and lead-gen related.
• One of the most powerful combinations (as recommended by one of our developers) is integrating CRMs like HubSpot CRM and Salesforce.
• Integration with SQL to pull out data from your proprietary database and see it along with other sources you have, like Mixpanel and Salesforce. Microsoft Azure SQL is also one of the popular ones. With Microsoft Integration Services, you could stop worrying about extraction, conversion and transport of complex data retrieved from multiple sources, all without knowing a single line of code!
• Microsoft Azure Databox Disk. This is a cloud solution that enables you use to transport terabytes of data to Azure in a reliably, quickly and cost effectively. Here are the really helpful FAQs for those who need quick answers:
• For a rich, comparative analysis, you can integrate a combination of your Ad Sales, Marketing data and SQL tools.
• Integrating it with Google Sheets will not hurt, to say the least!
• You may have a dozen of tools you might be currently using for data analysis, and you can use Databox to sync all of them.
The list goes on and on. If you’re already using a few data analyzing tools, you should already be able to visualize having all of that in one place, easily accessible and manageable.
What they don’t tell you
First off, this isn’t a blame game. Databox is amazing, but they can’t possibly cover everything and there are some things people tend to learn only after they start using it. So instead of learning from your own mistakes, you can learn from other people’s mistakes. There are mainly two things that you might come to know about it after you begin using it-
1. The DIY Dashboard Designer
You cannot use Databox efficiently without it! The core benefit of Databox literally is Dashboard Designer. So put this in your Databox Checklist as soon as you get it. I mean, you can pull data from Databox and view it, but Designer allows you to have predefined templates and some remarkable visualization, charts and tools right on your desktop. You can then easily pull out the metrics, visualize your KPIs in various forms and create custom dashboards, available for everyone on your team to see.
2. Chronological data
Every good product has at least one weak point. One issue faced by Databox users is with some data viewing over a period of time. They can’t view overall data over a specified period of time. For example, if you want to view and sort data over different integrations for a period of 7 Days, 30 Days, 90 Days, 6 Months or 1 year, you might face difficulty viewing it, as it might appear in different columns So, some tools may still be missing. You’ll have to view chronological data for each integration separately.
That’s about it! There’s not one specified and recommended way to use it, and that’s the best thing about Databox. Once you know what to do, you can use it in any way that facilitates your objectives. Working hard may be good, but working hard and smart is what may really lead you to success.
