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Building Effective Reports and Dashboards

Reports and dashboards turn raw data into actionable insights. This guide shows you how to create effective reports, organize them into boards, and share them with your team to drive data-informed decisions.

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Understanding Boards

Think of Boards as your homepage for keeping track of your most important metrics, or a collection of reports that you can share with your coworkers to highlight key trends or stories. You can add text, images and videos to these boards to help add color to the interpretations as well.

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When to Use Boards

Boards are ideal for:

• Executive dashboards: High-level metrics for leadership
• Product area monitoring: Track KPIs for specific features or flows
• Weekly business reviews: Shared metrics for recurring meetings
• Launch tracking: Monitor new feature or campaign performance
• Team alignment: Give everyone visibility into progress toward goals

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Discovering Useful Boards

If you’re new to your company or product analytics in general, one of the best ways to get started is to:

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1. See What Teammates Are Measuring

Use the Discover feature to search by your teammate or object type (Board, Insights, Flows, etc.) and explore what the top creators in your organization are measuring.

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2. Leverage Mixpanel Templates

Use official Mixpanel templates, which are out-of-the-box and fully customizable boards designed to help you better understand your user base and monitor metrics like adoption, retention, virality, and product impact.

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3. Copy Demo Project Boards

The Mixpanel Customer Success Team has created boards in demo projects that you can copy into your own projects, including:

• Boards to help with monitoring the quality of the data
• Boards for troubleshooting your data

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Creating Your First Board

Building an effective board requires planning and intentional design.

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Board Design Best Practices

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Start with the Most Important Metric

Place your North Star Metric or most critical KPI at the top. This sets the context for everything below.

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Tell a Story

Organize metrics to flow logically:

1. High-level outcomes (revenue, retention, growth)
2. Leading indicators (activation, engagement, feature adoption)
3. Supporting metrics (funnel conversion, traffic sources)

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Add Context

Use text cards to:

• Explain what “good” looks like for each metric
• Document recent changes or launches
• Provide definitions for complex metrics
• Link to related resources or documentation

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Use Visualizations Intentionally

• Line charts: For trends over time
• Bar charts: For comparing categories or time periods
• Tables: For detailed breakdowns
• Single-value cards: For current state or totals

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Keep It Focused

Don’t overwhelm with too many metrics. If a board has more than 15-20 cards, consider splitting it into multiple themed boards.

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Types of Boards to Build

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Executive Dashboard

Purpose: Give leadership visibility into business health Key metrics:

• North Star Metric
• Revenue or ARR
• User growth (new, active, retained)
• Key conversion rates
• Product engagement

Cadence: Weekly or monthly review

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Product Area Dashboard

Purpose: Track performance of a specific feature or flow Key metrics:

• Feature adoption rate
• Engagement with feature
• Conversion through related funnels
• Retention of feature users
• User feedback or satisfaction

Cadence: Weekly team review

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Launch Dashboard

Purpose: Monitor new feature or campaign performance Key metrics:

• Adoption/exposure rate
• Engagement with new feature
• Impact on related metrics
• Comparison to control (if A/B tested)
• User sentiment or feedback

Cadence: Daily during launch, then weekly

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Data Quality Dashboard

Purpose: Monitor data health and completeness Key metrics:

• Event volume trends
• Properties with missing values
• Identity management health
• Data freshness

Cadence: Weekly audit

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Sharing and Collaboration

Once you’ve created your board, share it with the right people in the right way.

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Internal Sharing

You can share boards with your coworkers within your organization for them to view or add creators to it and start collaborating. They need to have a Mixpanel login to access these boards. Permission levels:

• Viewer: Can view the board but not edit
• Editor: Can add, remove, and modify reports
• Owner: Full control including sharing settings

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External Sharing

If you want to share the board outside of your organization (anyone without a Mixpanel login to your project), you can do so via public boards. Note that your Project Owner has to first enable the feature in your Project Settings, but once done, all project users except those with the role “Consumers” will be able to create public board links.

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Board Subscriptions

In certain instances, e.g. communication with your executives, you might want to send an email of the top metrics instead of links to the live board itself. You can do that via Board Subscriptions. These emails, which can also be sent as Slack messages, allow you to schedule and share the most recent metrics with both project members and external audiences.

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Maintaining Your Boards

Boards aren’t set-and-forget. They require regular maintenance to stay useful.

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Regular Reviews

Schedule monthly board audits to:

• Remove outdated or irrelevant metrics
• Add new metrics as priorities shift
• Update text and context
• Verify all reports still load correctly

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Use Annotations

Add Annotations to mark important events:

• Feature launches
• Marketing campaigns
• Bug fixes
• Policy changes
• Seasonal events

Annotations help explain why metrics changed and provide historical context.

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Archive Old Boards

Don’t let outdated boards clutter your workspace. Archive boards that are no longer relevant or replace them with updated versions.

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Advanced Board Features

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Date Range Controls

Use board-level date controls to let viewers change the time period for all reports at once.

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Filters

Apply board-level filters to slice all data by a specific dimension (e.g., country, platform, plan type).

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Saved Views

Create multiple views of the same board with different filters or date ranges for different audiences.

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Embedding

Embed boards or individual reports in internal wikis, Notion pages, or other tools using embed links.

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Building Insights Reports for Boards

The Insights report is your most flexible tool for creating custom visualizations for boards.

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Measurements, Filters and Breakdowns

You can use Insights to:

• See what events users are doing on your site
• Visualize in bar charts, line charts, pie charts, and more
• Break down metrics by user or event properties
• Filter to specific user segments

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Formulas

Create ratios of different events, for example, the proportion of users who are searching for a product for the first time. If these are common formulas that members of your team will use repeatedly, save and share them so people can rely on the same standard definition.

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Custom Events and Properties

Combine certain events because you have a collection of key events that you want to track together as a single metric, or have an event that you want to filter based on a specific property using custom events. You might also want to modify existing properties on the fly using custom properties. One common use case is marketers grouping UTM sources into default marketing channels (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok = Social).

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Behavioral Breakdowns

Segment your users not just by who they are (user attributes), but what they do. For example, understand the number of times users typically view a product before purchasing, or look at the distribution of cart value per user.

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Setting Up Alerts

Once you’ve created a report for a key metric you want to track, create an alert to monitor how it performs, either by setting explicit thresholds or setting up automatic anomaly detection. Alerts can be sent to your email or Slack.

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When to Set Alerts

• Business-critical metrics: Revenue, sign-ups, conversions
• Data quality issues: Event volume drops, missing properties
• Product health: Error rates, load times, churn signals
• Experiment results: Significant changes during A/B tests

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Real-World Example

Scenario: A SaaS product team creates a “New User Activation” board to track onboarding performance. Board structure:

1. Header text card: “New User Activation Dashboard - Tracking users from signup to first value”
2. Key metric: Activation rate (% of new users who complete onboarding in 7 days)
   • Line chart showing trend over last 90 days
   • Single value card showing current week’s rate
3. Funnel breakdown: Onboarding funnel report
   • Shows drop-off at each step
   • Segmented by acquisition source
4. Time to activate: Distribution chart showing how long users take to activate
5. Feature adoption: Bar chart of which features activated users try first
6. Cohort comparison: Retention curves comparing activated vs. non-activated users
7. Text card: “Target: 40% activation rate by end of quarter. Current: 35%.”

Result: The team reviews this board weekly, identifies that mobile users activate 15% slower, and prioritizes mobile onboarding improvements.

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Key Takeaways

• Boards organize reports into coherent dashboards for decision-making
• Start by defining audience and purpose before building
• Place most important metrics at the top and tell a story
• Add text and context to explain what metrics mean
• Share boards with appropriate permissions for collaboration
• Use subscriptions to deliver metrics via email or Slack
• Maintain boards regularly and archive outdated ones
• Set alerts on critical metrics to catch issues early

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Next Steps

• Explore existing boards in your project using Discover
• Copy a template board and customize it for your use case
• Create a board for your product area or team
• Set up a board subscription for weekly stakeholder updates
• Add annotations for recent launches or changes
• Configure alerts on your most critical metrics
• Review the Team Collaboration guide for tips on sharing insights