Analyzing your self-storage metrics is key to understanding what factors are driving occupancy at your locations.
Operators spend countless hours reviewing management summaries, digging into financial reports, and generally pulling their hair out trying to piece together information from numerous sources.
Many operators are pushing off important decisions until they can have a monthly meeting to discuss what’s affecting their occupancy numbers. By then, much of the data is 30 days old or more.
With so much information available, many operators are exploring the use of dashboards to display metrics and indicators. Brands like Tableau, Qlik, and PowerBI have put more than a decade into building some of the best dashboard products possible. Their hope is that a dashboard will make sense of the vast quantity of information and help users turn it into actionable insights. But with so much information available, it’s easy to fall into traps with dashboards.
“By 2023, 60% of companies will use three or more analytics solutions to connect insights to actions.” – Gartner, Insights 2021
User Fatigue Trying to cram too much data onto one page results in the dashboard becoming cluttered and difficult to use for analysis, which really defeats the purpose. There are some bad examples of dashboards that display volumes of completely static data, in a format that can be overwhelming for the user and not supportive of the decision-making process. Ultimately, users will stop using the dashboard and revert to prior means of data analysis.
“70% of business software users will drop a process if it requires more than five steps.” – Deloitte Insights, 8/21
Difficult to Replicate One issue of having so much static data on display is the difficulty of replicating an analysis. Data discovery becomes completely accidental in many cases and nearly impossible to repeat. Replication is important because it adds reliability to the conclusions or estimates drawn from the data. Too often, the data presented is out of context and the user must then act on the metrics displayed on the dashboard. But does this facilitate decision making? Or does it lead to some serious shortcomings and very wrong conclusions?
Lead to Cognitive Bias Users of dashboards may not look at certain data simply based on human bias. They may assume they understand trends that are displayed on the dashboard and may never drill down any further. Dashboards are hampered by their mere simplicity and not providing visibility into what’s happening in the underlying business, which can diminish value for the user and lead to a managerial blind spot. When the user believes they fully understand a trend in the data, the use of the dashboard has been completely defeated.
“Organizations leave 97% of gathered data unused.” – Towards Data Science, 2022
When implementing dashboards, it’s easy to fixate on displaying as much content as possible. The design may completely fail to account for how it is ultimately useful. We ourselves have made that very same mistake of designing a beautiful representation of key metrics and indicators, which never proved worthwhile to the client. Had we been able to see the perspective of the user, we would have never delivered that product.
This failure led us to develop Adverank, a business intelligence tool that automates the challenge of discovering insights into occupancy data. User fatigue, lack of replication, and bias are problems that have been solved in Adverank. Our application focuses solely on your digital advertising and occupancy and is presented to the user in a way that kicks off the decision-making process.
Dashboards can still play an important role in monitoring and understanding your self-storage, but Adverank’s automation is much better at understanding the significance of what’s happening with your digital advertising and how it is, or is not, impacting occupancy. Contact us today to learn more.
