These days, it seems like there is a dashboard for just about anything in business, and experiential marketing is no exception.

After all, having dials and gauges and flashing lights must mean we are on top of our games, right?

While there’s no doubt that dashboards provide significant value and have brought efficiency to our workdays (in fact, eshots has built a fair share of our own), the reality is that dashboards only do one thing, and that’s report the status of something.

They are not magic problem solvers.

If you really want to get value out of a dashboard, you need to fully grasp experiential measurement and understand what is causing those warning lights to illuminate or, better yet, have access to resources who are well-versed in experiential data interrogation.

In other words, just like a car, the light on the dashboard is only going to extinguish once a mechanic fixes the problem!

Here are some questions to ask when sourcing dashboards:

1) Is your data capture consistent so when those dashboard lights come on, it’s truly an apples-apples warning worthy of your attention?
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2) Can a single dashboard securely accept data from all of your experiential technologies (AR, VR, and data capture), enabling you to efficiently monitor your entire activation?
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3) Have you considered your own business goals and how the reports/dashboards will help you best measure those goals?
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4) Will your dashboards and reporting tools scale easily enough as your business grows or changes?

What we’re really trying to say: don't choose a dashboard based on its catchy graphic design, choose one that can report on your specific experiential strategy.

Experiential marketers who get the most out of their dashboards ensure the heart and soul of their strategy is properly deployed. Once that’s in place, they find themselves in the advantageous position of knowing what they want to monitor and how they should be monitoring it. This makes it easy to determine which dashboards work best for them.

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