The Ultimate Guide to KPI Dashboards for Digital Signage Software
How KPI Dashboards Pair with Digital Signage Software to Power Business Success
A KPI dashboard is critical to keeping your business focused on its strategic goals. Stay ahead of the competition with software that integrates key data in real-time and gives you the flexibility to display targeted content to different teams and individuals.
Integrating KPI dashboards with digital signage software allows you to automatically refresh dashboards with up-to-the-minute business data on screens across offices, factories, and distribution centers. Digital signage has the flexibility to deliver targeted information to different functional units in your business and even to individual decision-makers.

What is a KPI Dashboard?
A KPI dashboard is a visual tool that gives your teams real-time snapshots of the key performance indicators relevant to them. They can be customized for different departments, functions, and even individuals and are often interactive, allowing decision-makers to drill down on specific metrics of concern to them.
What Is the Difference Between a KPI Dashboard and a KPI Report?
A KPI report is a periodic static-format publication that summarizes performance for a fixed period. KPI reports are used to assess performance, make strategic plans going forward, and deliver insights that inform long-term decision-making.
In contrast, a KPI dashboard displays live data in a dynamic, interactive format. KPI dashboards provide up-to-the-minute information for real-time monitoring, inter-team coordination, and quick decision-making.
Optimally, KPI reports and KPI dashboards work together to optimize short-term course corrections and longer-term strategic mapping.
How KPI Dashboards Fuel Business Success
KPI dashboards drive success by aligning all your teams with your business goals. Here is how a well-designed KPI dashboard gets your business firing on all cylinders:
Improving Accountability
Getting real-time insights into how their work contributes to team and business goals keeps everyone accountable.
Motivating Employees
KPI dashboards improve communication and motivation across your business units, right down to individual employees. Staff stay engaged and productive when they get clear insights into their performance and how it moves your business forward.

Optimizing Operational Efficiency
A targeted KPI dashboard can identify bottlenecks and delays and ensure that they are visible across your teams, which facilitates coordination. They can also reduce downtime, predict maintenance needs, and reduce inefficiencies by tracking machine performance.
Improving Decision Making
Lags between data collection and decision-making can mean missed opportunities. KPI dashboards with real-time data enable managers to course-correct with greater precision.
Enhancing Customer/Client/Patient Experience
If staff know how long customers or patients are waiting for service or care, they can make the needed adjustments. KPI dashboards can also track customer feedback and data about complaint resolution.
Monitoring Regulatory Compliance
Using a KPI dashboard to track compliance with legal, financial, and safety regulations can identify risks and prepare your business for compliance audits.
Integrating Multiple Data Sources
KPI dashboards can pull data from multiple sources, integrate it, and present it in a visual format that is easy to grasp. By providing cross-departmental visibility and company-wide access, teams can zoom in on their own benchmarks and zoom out to see if the business is moving in the right direction.

Improving Financial Management
With a KPI dashboard, you can stay on top of profit margins and cash flow, identify variances from your budget, and find opportunities for cost reductions and improved revenue. You can also refine your financial forecasting with readily available historical data.
Optimizing Digital Signage Content
Integrating KPI dashboards with the advanced capabilities of digital signage, you can target messaging to location, audience, or business needs and goals. Digital signage gives you the flexibility to fully optimize your KPI dashboards, providing precise, real-time information for your teams to work with.
What Makes Good KPI Dashboards and Dashboard Templates?
A good KPI dashboard has these elements:
- Clear, easily readable data that conveys information at a glance.
- Charts and graphs that provide unique insights that do not overlap with other data on the screen.
- A lack of clutter and distracting content.
- Live data feeds and automatic updates.
- Customizability for teams that need their own metrics.
- Smooth integration with other business tools such as PowerBI, CRM systems, and marketing platforms.
- Optimization for digital signage displays.
A KPI dashboard template provides the foundation for a customized dashboard, making set-up accessible for users with little technical training. Look for these features:
- Pre-defined layouts for different business functions.
- Built-in data visualization tools that are easy to customize.
- Support for different types of screens (mobile, desktop, digital signage).
- Automated data integration with live data sources.

Leveraging Digital Signage for KPI Dashboard Displays
A KPI dashboard provides valuable insights, but digital signage allows you to determine how and when those insights are displayed. Rather than static KPI insights, digital signage gives your teams dynamic, real-time performance tracking.
Real-Time Data Display
Traditional KPI dashboards require users to log into different platforms (e.g., Power BI and CRM systems) to check updates. Digital signage screens immediately and continuously update KPI dashboards with up-to-the-minute data. This allows for quicker decision-making based on the most current information.
Coordinated Visibility
Digital signage can be displayed in all areas of the company, including lobbies, break rooms, and meeting rooms. This allows businesses to keep all employees informed, coordinate the dissemination of information, reinforce transparency, and create opportunities for discussion and joint problem-solving. Company-wide dashboards also give employees a sense of how their work fits into the bigger picture and eliminate the information silos that can be harmful to coordination.
Targeted Messaging
Digital signage displays the proper information to the proper teams, reducing distraction and confusion for teams that may not need all the information on a traditional KPI dashboard.
Content Scheduling
Using digital signage, a business can choose times and days to display specific KPIs. For dayparting, morning updates might include daily goals and results from the previous day; midday tracking could show progress toward a variety of goals; end-of-day reporting might summarize the day’s achievements, highlight missed targets, and suggest areas for improvement.
Integration with Business Intelligence Tools
Digital signage software allows you to pull data from multiple sources and integrate them into one dashboard. Your teams will no longer have to access and integrate this information, saving time and reducing analysis errors.

Enhanced Engagement
Digital signage, with its dynamic interactive features, keeps users interested and engaged. A gamification component can also be added to introduce an element of fun and friendly competition.
AI-Driven Content Optimization
AI-powered digital signage makes KPI dashboards even more targeted by responding to how users are accessing information. For example, AI can track which KPI metrics are viewed most often and which are being ignored. The system can then adjust the dashboards depending on which information needs to be highlighted or displayed differently.
KPI Dashboards for Different Businesses and Business Areas
There is no limit to the applications for KPI dashboards, particularly when paired with digital signage software and powered by AI.
Corporate Offices
Executive leadership dashboards track revenue, profit margins, and strategic goals; sales performance dashboards display real-time revenue, deals closed, and the status of sales in the sales funnel; IT dashboards monitor cybersecurity threats, system downtime, and other key statistics; HR dashboards provide updates on attendance, staff shortages, and recruitment.
Marketing
KPI dashboards can be used to track conversion rates and ROI on marketing campaigns, display website traffic, social media engagement, and other engagement metrics, monitor leads, and highlight opportunities. These metrics allow marketing teams to tweak campaign messaging and make other adjustments quickly.
Retail Stores and Shopping Malls
In retail environments, KPI dashboards can monitor sales volumes, average transactions, loyalty program usage, returns, and customer feedback. They can also display stock levels and reorder reminders. Shopping mall management can monitor foot traffic patterns, individual store performance, peak shopping hours, and food court usage to help with planning and decision-making.
Healthcare and Hospitals
Healthcare facilities can use KPI dashboards to monitor wait times, appointment durations, operational efficiency, and compliance adherence. This information can be used to improve patient experience, determine resource allocation, and identify areas of potential cost savings.
Manufacturing
Factories benefit from KPI dashboards that display machine downtime, output rates, health and safety compliance and reminders, inventory levels, outstanding orders, completed orders, and employee and machine efficiency. These critical metrics can improve productivity, enhance safety, and point out areas for improvement.

Government Offices and Public Buildings
In government buildings, KPI dashboards can be used to display wait times at service counters and monitor those wait times for staffing and resource allocation improvements. Government departments that are responsible for emergency preparedness can use KPI dashboards to monitor security camera feeds and emergency alerts and track first responder response times. Public-facing departments can track the status of citizen complaints and concerns and identify obstacles or bottlenecks in the delivery of government services.
Public Transit and Airports
In public transportation management, KPI dashboards can display delays, vehicle status and location, vehicle bunching, passenger numbers, passenger movement, peak travel times, vehicle performance, fuel consumption, baggage handling efficiency, and weather and road conditions.
Gyms and Fitness Centers
KPI Dashboards can be used in fitness facilities to track peak usage hours, popular classes, user satisfaction, and equipment usage and maintenance schedules. They can also be used to monitor sales metrics for memberships and personal trainer hours.
Stadiums and Large Venues
In large sporting and entertainment venues, KPI dashboards can be used to display arrivals in real time and monitor how quickly attendees are clearing security to improve traffic flow and identify bottlenecks. They can also track food, beverage, and merchandise sales at individual vendor counters and display restocking needs.
Casinos
Casinos can use KPI dashboards to track slot machine usage by type of machine and time of day, gaming table revenue, and High Roller activity. For security and compliance purposes, they can monitor surveillance footage to ensure adherence to responsible gaming practices and analyze patterns to detect fraud.
Financial Institutions
Banks and other financial institutions can use KPI dashboards to display customer metrics such as ATM usage, new account signups, and credit card sales. They can also track performance at the branch level, including wait times, average service time, and revenues and expenses per branch.
How to Choose the Best KPI Dashboard Software
The right KPI dashboard software can be a game changer, especially when paired with the flexibility and added functionality of digital signage software. Here is what to look for when choosing the best KPI dashboard software:
Ease of Use and Customization
Choose user-friendly KPI dashboard software that offers drag-and-drop functionality, easy customization of visual elements, and other ease-of-use features.
Ability to Pull Data from Multiple Sources
The best KPI dashboard software can aggregate data from multiple sources and platforms. Look for software that connects with CRM and sales platforms, financial and ERP systems, marketing analytics, and operational data.
Scalability
Whether your business is a small startup or a multinational enterprise, the best KPI dashboard software will scale to handle growing data needs, support multiple locations and departments, and offer security and compliance features suitable for your business as it expands.
Integration with Digital Signage Software
Your KPI dashboard software should integrate seamlessly with digital signage software to display live KPI dashboards that update automatically and display crisply on screens of all sizes and types.

How to implement KPI Dashboards in Your Business
Thanks to today’s user-friendly options for building and maintaining KPI dashboards, you can set them up easily, no matter the size of the business. Here are the basic steps:
1. Identify Key Metrics
Choose the metrics that are most important for your business and your teams. Here are some commonly used metrics:
Department | Key Metrics |
Executive Leadership | Revenue growth, profit margins, market share |
Sales | Sales volume, lead conversion rates, customer acquisition cost |
Marketing | Website traffic, campaign ROI, social media engagement, customer retention |
Finance | Cash flow, budget variance, expense ratios, net profit margin |
Human Resources | Employee turnover, hiring efficiency, engagement scores, training completion |
Customer Service | Customer satisfaction, resolution time, support ticket volume |
Operations | Production efficiency, supply chain performance, downtime reduction, cost per unit |
IT and Security | System downtime, security threats detected, compliance metrics, IT incident response time |
Retail | Daily sales, average transaction value, inventory turnover, foot traffic trends |
Manufacturing | Production output, quality control metrics, equipment downtime, supply chain bottlenecks |
Be strategic with your choice of KPIs. Do not include metrics that do not align with your goals, and use KPIs that match what each department focuses on, even if the overall goals are the same.
2. Select KPI Dashboard Software
PowerBI is an excellent choice for most businesses, but evaluate all your options to find the one that is right for your needs. Smaller and more niche vendors are entering the market; one of these could be ideal for your business.
3. Integrate Data Sources
Add key data sources of information to keep your teams up to date right through the day. Some key sources to include are:
- CRM systems
- Financial and accounting software
- Marketing analytics platforms
- HR and employee performance tools
- Customer support and ticketing systems
- Operations and IoT data
- Security and IT monitoring
- E-commerce and retail platforms
4. Customize Your Dashboard
Tailor your dashboard to highlight the things that align with your business goals and your team’s objectives.
5. Deploy Digital Signage
Leverage digital signage software to get your key metrics in front of the right people at the right times. Explore the many additional functions digital signage can provide to maximize the impact of this cutting-edge technology.
6. Monitor and Adjust
Review your KPI dashboard regularly to make sure your teams are benefiting from it and that it is helping your business meet its goals. Explore the new technology releases to optimize your dashboard’s capabilities.

The Future of KPI Dashboards
KPI dashboards are set to undergo significant improvements over the next few years. Enhanced capabilities will include:
AI Integration
AI is making KPI dashboards more automated and intelligent. AI-powered dashboards will allow businesses to analyze patterns in large datasets to identify opportunities and risks, highlight anomalies in data to facilitate quick corrective action, and automatically suggest the best KPIs for your business goals.
Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics, powered by AI, will allow businesses to make decisions for the future instead of correcting for issues in the past. For example, KPI dashboards will be able to forecast demand and maintain optimal levels of inventory, detect fraud and security risks based on early data, predict equipment maintenance needs, and produce hyper-segmented marketing insights.
Customization and Personalization of KPI Dashboards
KPI dashboards are becoming more interactive and customizable, allowing users to access data that is most relevant to them and making it easier for them to drill down on specific data for better decision-making.
Optimized UX
Features such as natural language searches, AI-powered dashboard assistants, and intuitive interfaces will make dashboards easier to use and increase engagement across your business.
Why Choose Navori for KPI Dashboards on Digital Signage?
Navori Labs is a pioneer and leader in the digital signage software space. We are at the forefront of innovation, keeping our clients several years ahead of other software on the market. Offering seamless integration with PowerBI, built-in AI analytics, Enterprise-Grade Security, multi-screen synchronization, native support for almost all content types, and full customization, our user-friendly interface will keep your teams on track without needing a tech expert for setup or updates.
Navori has long-standing relationships with major hardware manufacturers, ensuring our software is optimized for any physical screen you want to use.
Optimize your business intelligence today and every day with Navori KPI dashboard solutions!