In the previous article, you've read how to create an account and connect your advertising platforms to deepdivr. In this article, you'll learn how to create a dashboard.

Before we move to create a dashboard, it is essential to say what it actually is.

A dashboard is a visual display of all your data that provides information at a glance. In deepdivr, a dashboard can be split into different tabs, making it easier to navigate and organize your data. When you click on a tab in your dashboard, it will show you all the widgets (visuals) of the data you want to monitor.

For example, your account can focus on your campaigns in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Once you click on that account, you can have separate or grouped dashboards for each country, and in each dashboard, you can have tabs focusing on different objectives - traffic, conversions, etc.

*In hindsight - your account (folder) is a collection of your dashboards. Dashboards are collections of your tabs, and tabs show you all the different widgets (graphs) of metrics that you want to monitor.

After creating an account, you'll be shown a screen that tells you there are no dashboards. Once you click on Create Dashboard, you'll see a list of campaigns, views, and posts available within the selected ad accounts, pages, and views you have connected to the account. You can see and edit the metrics shown for each item - it looks similar to an ads manager, but no worries. This is not the final visualization.

Your dashboard will automatically generate a name as "Unnamed Dashboard #(id number)." We'd recommend changing it into something that's more recognizable to you. Simply click on the Rename button next to the dashboard's name.

You'll notice two options for creating your dashboard on the top of your screen - either manual or automatic.

To manually create a dashboard, you need to select one-by-one all the items you want to visualize. There are several ways you can make this easier for yourself.

The first one is to organize your naming convention in your ads manager to make it easy to recognize your campaigns.

You can also filter the platform or platforms you want to include in your dashboard, depending on whether or not you wish to monitor cross-platform. Afterward, you can select the period of time when you were running your campaigns. Just by using these two filters, your job of searching for the specific campaigns will be much faster.

If the list is still too long or the filters above don't apply to your case, you can use the search field. Search for a specific name or keyword from your naming convention, or you can use other indicators such as objective. When you click on the Objective, all your campaigns will align based on their objectives. This means that all brand awareness campaigns will be grouped under each other, all conversions will be under each other, and so on.

Once you've made your selection, click on the View Dashboard in the top right corner of your screen.

Automatic dashboards are great to use in two scenarios. One is when you need to group a lot of data from the past — for example, all your campaigns from last year. Or in the second scenario when you want a dashboard to automatically be updated in the future. For instance, if your new campaigns will include a specific keyword that you set as automation, it will automatically go into that dashboard. The precision of this option depends on how specific your naming convention is.

Here is how you can set it up.

The first thing you can select is the platform that should be included, considering whether you want to monitor cross-platform or not.

Then comes a selection of a keyword and the field where the keyword can be found. For example, if your naming convention is specific (e.g., it contains the name of a product), you can select the Name field, and your keyword could be the product's name. Or, if it makes more sense for your case to select based on objective, you can use the Keyword field similarly.

Afterward, select a period of time and click Save. The platform will include all the campaigns that contain that specific keyword in the particular time period you chose in this setting. You can have more than one automation in a dashboard. So if your naming convention is different on Facebook than on LinkedIn, or if you simply want both campaigns with 'name A' and 'name B' in your dashboard, simply click + Create Automation (top right screen). Then go through the steps above again, and add more automations before creating the dashboard. Once you have added one or more automations, click on the View Dashboard to monitor your campaigns.

The switch on/off button called Fully Automatic may come in handy when you're dealing with a changing time - this month, this year, last month, last year, etc.

So, this means if you want to have automation that will consistently show you every time all your data from Last Month (month after month), this is the way to do it. Let's break it down in an example.

Let's say that every month, you want a fresh new report on how your campaigns performed the month before. Imagine that the current month is April. This means the Last Month rule will include your campaigns from March. When the month passes to May, the rule of the Last Month will automatically jump to April. That's a no-brainer. But here comes the trick.

If the Fully Automatic button is disabled, your dashboard doesn't know it should remove the campaigns from March. So what happens is that you'll end up with a dashboard that includes both March and April. And each month, it will only add more campaigns from the passing months.

When you enable the Fully Automatic, you'll basically tell the dashboard to show you the campaigns only from the Last Month. It means that the dashboard will automatically remove the campaigns from March, and you'll see only the campaigns from April. And every month, the dashboard will remove and add campaigns that match the rule Last Month.

So instead of every month creating a new dashboard all over again, you can have a dynamic dashboard that will automatically update itself.