Dashboards are helpful tools for monitoring the performance of your online marketing campaigns. This fact is especially true in online marketing, where it’s easy to lose track of the vast amount of digital data. Below, we’ll introduce you to one of our most popular dashboarding tools – Klipfolio.
What Is Klipfolio?
Klipfolio is a cloud-based dashboarding tool launched in 2011 and received $10 million in funding in January 2017 for further development. You can integrate hundreds of different products into Klipfolio. Meaning, you can add data from a wide variety of tools directly into your dashboards without any additional development work.
Here are just a few of the available connectors:
This amount of data interfaces is one of the main reasons why we love Klipfolio so much. It makes it incredibly easy to add new data sources. The Klipfolio data sources can be used to create so-called “Klips”. A “Klip” in Klipfolio is the name given to individual graphs or data visualizations. With these “Klips”, you can build individual dashboards customized to your needs.
For example, you can use the following standard clips:
This ability to set up dashboards in a very customized way – from the data sources to the graphics and their arrangement – makes Klipfolio so powerful. However, there are some challenges associated with this.
Advantages And Disadvantages Of Klipfolio
Advantages
- Data Sources: As mentioned earlier, Klipfolio is compatible with hundreds of different tools, and the number of connectors is constantly expanding. Additionally, you can use data from spreadsheets (including Google Sheets), FTP uploads, or an online database.
- Data Editing: once you create a data source in Klipfolio, you can edit and manipulate the data directly in Klipfolio. What you manipulate can be as simple as calculating a sum or something more complex like a query that groups dimensions and outputs an average per dimension.
- Customizability: in Klipfolio, you can customize not only the data but also the clips and dashboards. You can change graphics and colors and apply conditional formatting.
- Cloud-based: Since Klipfolio is cloud-based, you can access the dashboards from anywhere. Another benefit is that you can pull your data from data sources in real-time. Meaning: You do not store any data on your server, and your data is always up to date.
Disadvantages:
- Learning curve: Klipfolio is a potent and comprehensive tool. One consequence of this is that you will have to learn quite a bit to master all the features. Do not be intimidated by this. Just accept that it might take a bit longer to create dashboards in the beginning. Fortunately, though, there are several pre-built dashboards, Klips, and data sources, as well as excellent online help, that you can access.
- Development Time: Because Klipfolio allows you to create dashboards specifically tailored to your needs, it also naturally requires a lot of specificity and customization. For this reason, your dashboard may take longer to complete. Other tools may be faster and easier, but they don’t offer the level of customization that Klipfolio does.
- Costs: While we list the cost under the disadvantages, the price is not that high. With a starting package of only US$24.- per month, Klipfolio is an affordable dashboarding tool.
Use The Klipfolio Dashboard Templates
To give you an idea, we have included two pre-made Klipfolio dashboard templates here. The first template is a social media dashboard that aggregates data from various sources:
The second template shows an SEO dashboard that you can use to measure your SEO success:
An organic search dashboard to better understand your SEO performance:
The New PowerMetrics Tool
For those who find developing a Klipfolio dashboard too time-consuming, Klipfolio has launched an alternative, the PowerMetrics tool. PowerMetrics works similarly to more straightforward dashboard tools in that it is less customizable – but you can set up PowerMetrics more quickly. It also offers the kind of interactivity and reusability you may be familiar with from business intelligence (BI) tools.
If you have any questions about Klipfolio, feel free to contact us!
