It’s the end of the month, and you’re preparing to update your team and your manager on the status of your project. You know it’s going well, but you have to show them. How do you share the project’s successes, and any concerns you have, in a quantifiable way? The answer is key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs measure specific aspects of performance, enabling you to monitor and share progress in a clear, objective way.

It’s the end of the quarter and time to do a health check on your ecommerce business to see how things are going. But you collect data from so many sources—how do you know which ecommerce KPIs (key performance indicators) are the most important? As Laura Moss, co-founder of Adventure Cats, advises, “The sheer number of KPIs you can track can be overwhelming, especially if you're new to ecom or a small business owner like I am.

When setting out to build a dashboard to display key metrics, there are several different approaches you can take - each with their own pros and cons to consider. Here we’ll walk you through some of the most popular approaches to help you decide which type of dashboard will best serve your needs. First though a quick caveat.