Build CRM Analytics Dashboards

Build a CRM Analytics dashboard to continuously monitor key metrics of your business, analyzing the results by key dimensions, like region, products, and time period. Add interactive charts that synthesize information into an easy-to-read format. To complement the charts, add tables that show record-level details. Add filters to allow dashboard viewers to change the focus of the results. Create customized layouts to optimize the display of a dashboard on different types of devices, like mobile phones, tablets, and desktops.

Required Editions

Note Prior to the Winter '20 release, queries were called steps.

Available in Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience.

Available with CRM Analytics, which is available for an extra cost in Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited Editions. Also available in Developer Edition.

Watch a Demo: Build Interactive CRM Analytics Dashboards (English Only)

Get Hands-On Training with Trailhead: CRM Analytics Dashboard Building Basics

Note For you to create and edit dashboards with the dashboard designer, the admin must enable it in CRM Analytics setup—it’s enabled by default—and must grant you the Create and Edit CRM Analytics Dashboards user permission.

This section discusses how to build dashboards with the dashboard designer. The dashboard designer is the newer designer that offers additional features to help you build dashboards more quickly and easily. Use a template to create a dashboard with a predefined design. Use the wizards to quickly build widgets. Use drag-and-drop, snap-to-grid, and browser reflow to effortlessly add, position, and align widgets in a dashboard.

1. Create a CRM Analytics dashboard with a Template
   Dashboard templates speed your analytics development by automatically creating dashboards. Some provide blank layouts that you populate with data, while other “smart” templates create dashboards that require little to no additional configuration.
2. Create and Manage Dashboards with Reusable Components
   Dashboard components are a type of dashboard widget that can contain other widgets, pages, and Lightning Web Components. Use dashboard components to manage and reuse groups of charts, tables, filters, text, and more in multiple dashboards. Use Lightning Web Components to bring custom Lightning Experience functionality directly into dashboards.
3. Transform Tabular Data with Repeater Widgets
   Use repeater widgets to show select fields from a query in a scrollable list in your dashboard. Create a customized layout of text, numbers, charts, and images in a repeater widget, and your dashboard users can scroll through a stylized view of query data.
4. Make Real-Time Decisions with an Input Widget
   Perform speculative analysis to assess risk and develop recommendations for your business in real time. Use values from the input widget as a data source, and see its effect on your dashboard metrics without manual calculations.
5. Create Dashboard Pages
   Make the information on a dashboard easier to digest by chunking the content into multiple pages. And with fewer queries per page, dashboard performance increases. With pages, you can tell a story by creating a dynamic pathway through your dashboard. Depending on how you lay out your pages, you can also create some cool effects as you transition from one page to the next.
6. Add Widgets to the Dashboard
   Widgets are the basic building blocks of a dashboard. In the dashboard designer, you can add different widgets to perform functions. For example, widgets can calculate key performance indicators, filter dashboard results, visualize your data using interactive charts, and show record-level details in tables.
7. Copy and Paste Widgets Across Dashboards
   Copy widgets such as text and charts, then paste them in another dashboard and still keep the original widget orientation, styling, and queries.
8. Manage Queries for Widgets
   Queries return results that are displayed in widgets. For example, a number widget displays the result of a calculation that is defined in a query. Queries can be built on a data source, like a dataset or a Salesforce object. They can also be “custom queries” created with user-defined values.
9. Make the Dashboard Widgets Interactive
   You can make the widgets in CRM Analytics dashboards interactive. For example, you can filter a widget to show only results for the region that’s selected in a list widget. Or, the value of a number widget can change to red when it falls below a threshold. An interaction can also provide progressive navigation and exploration, revealing detailed information with a single click action.
10. Set Initial Selections and Global Filters in the Dashboard
    Set the initial selections and global filters that appear when the dashboard first opens. To analyze the results from a different angle, the dashboard viewer can change the initial selections and, if configured, global filters while viewing the dashboard.
11. Generate Unique CRM Analytics Dashboard Layouts for Different Devices
    After you add widgets to a dashboard, optimize it for viewing on smaller screens. For example, remove widgets from a layout for on-the-go mobile users, and rearrange widgets for users with tablet-sized screens.
12. Optimize Dashboard Performance
    Before you finalize the dashboard, run a performance check on the dashboard and its queries to ensure that everything is running optimally. The dashboard inspector identifies different types of bottlenecks, such as slow queries and networks, and provides recommendations to improve performance. Because dashboard layouts can contain different widgets (and queries), run the inspector on each layout. If a dashboard contains multiple pages, you can run the inspector for all pages. The inspector initially provides results only for the current page.
13. Keyboard Shortcuts for Building CRM Analytics Dashboards and Lenses
    You can do some basic actions from your keyboard.
14. Restore a Previous Version of a Dashboard
    CRM Analytics uses version history to back up dashboard versions when you edit them so you can restore a previous version.
15. Collaborate on a New Dashboard Version Behind the Scenes
    CRM Analytics users can add themselves to the list of dashboard publishers so they can edit and test new versions of the dashboard. Other CRM Analytics users continue to see a live version until a publisher makes the draft the live version.

See Also

• Best Practices for Building Your Own CRM Analytics Dashboard