Why Dashboards Lie and Journeys Don’t

Most organisations today do not lack dashboards for their operations. What they lack is confidence. More often than not, executives see one number, marketers see another, and product teams see something entirely different.

What is being observed is that while everyone is looking at data, decisions are still relying heavily on instinct. This is not because teams are ignoring analytics, but because, by design and functionality, dashboards simplify complex actions for smoother operations that are, by nature, not simple.

Dashboards Were Built for a Different Era

We can say Dashboards were created out of necessity, as a result of digital journeys initially being short and predictable. A typical journey looked like:

A user arrived→They clicked→They converted.

Then, the measurement focused exclusively on elements like the sessions, page views, campaign performance, and conversion rates. Majorly because, at that time, the process of summarising activity into charts and KPIs worked.

Today, customers do not behave in straight lines. Customers now,

• Research anonymously
• Switch devices.
• Return days or weeks later.
• Interact offline.
• Abandon, reconsider, and come back through a different channel.

Dashboards still try to compress all of this into neat, compact summaries. However, that is where the issues emerge from.

What Dashboards tend to get wrong is that they answer one question well. I.e What happened?

Yet, they struggle with the questions that matter most.

• Why did it happen?
• What influenced it?
• What should change next?

We can conclude that averages hide friction, totals hide patterns, and last click hides contribution.

When multiple touchpoints influence outcomes, dashboards flatten the journey instead of explaining it.

The result is familiar.

Strong traffic leading to weak outcomes. High engagement leading to low retention. Optimised campaigns leading to declining trust in numbers.

Do not misinterpret dashboards to lie intentionally. They are simply telling an incomplete story.

Journeys Reflect How Customers Actually Behave

Customers do not experience brands through channels; they experience them through fulfilling journeys. Journeys that span time, devices, channels, and both online and offline interactions.

Such fulfilling journeys include moments of intent, hesitation, reassurance, and return. Journey-based measurement accepts this complexity instead of hiding it.

It focuses on

• Sequences, not isolated events.
• People, not sessions.
• Patterns over time, not snapshots.

This shift changes the way teams respond. Instead of asking, “Which channel converted?”, they can ask, “What combination of experiences moved this customer forward?”

Why Trust in Analytics Is Eroding

Many organisations often conclude that something is wrong with their analytics, even if it is not clearly articulated. This uncertainty often leads to different teams debating numbers. Attribution models are constantly questioned.

Reports are thoroughly reviewed but rarely acted upon, with decisions often justified only after the fact. The root cause is not a lack of data, but a lack of context. When analytics fails to explain user journeys clearly, teams begin to lose trust in what they see. And once that trust erodes, analytics shifts from being a decision-making engine to merely a reporting exercise.

From Reporting to Understanding

So far, we understand that it will be unfair to declare dashboards as useless. We know that:

• They are good at monitoring.
• They are good at summarising.
• They are good at alerting.

They are not good at explaining complex customer behaviour on their own. To support modern decision-making, analytics must move beyond static views and start reflecting how customers actually move. That requires measuring journeys, not just outcomes.

The Shift That Matters

The most important change organisations can make is not adding more reports, but rethinking the unit of measurement itself. Shifting the focus from channels to customers, from clicks to context, and from dashboards to journeys changes how analytics is understood and used. When analytics is built around the journey, clarity improves. Trust returns. Decisions become easier to defend. Dashboards show activity, but journeys reveal the truth.