BI Dashboards

Some questions need a number. A lot of them need a chart. Routy's BI dashboards turn your traffic, conversions, and revenue data into the kind of visuals you can share with people who never log into the tracking platform — the kind that go in a quarterly review, a Slack channel update, or an email to a partner. The dashboards are built on Metabase under the hood, which means the charting and visualisation layer is a serious, mature BI tool rather than a basic "render some bars" component.

The configurability sits in front: filters that scope the same dashboard to this month, this network, this geo without rebuilding anything, smart defaults that update automatically (first-of-month, last-seven-days, current-user-context), and the ability to save filter combinations as preset views so the question you ask weekly is a one-click open rather than a three-minute setup every time.

After opening the dashboards section, the following becomes available:

• Pre-built dashboards for the views most operations check often: daily revenue, traffic-source performance, conversion funnels, network breakdowns, geo distribution, top-performing links. The pre-builts are configured for the standard affiliate use cases and cover roughly 80% of routine reporting.
• Configurable filters that scope any dashboard to a specific window, network, traffic source, or geo without rebuilding the dashboard itself. The same revenue dashboard can show "EU traffic from native sources last 30 days" or "US traffic from search last week" with a couple of filter changes.
• Smart defaults that update automatically: first-of-month, last-seven-days, current-user-context. Dashboards open with the right window set, so you're not manually adjusting the date range every time you open the same view.
• Shareable visuals: dashboards can be shared with team members who don't routinely use the tracking interface. The visualisation surface is clean enough for board-meeting use, which is rarely true of raw tracking-platform interfaces.
• Drill-down from charts to the underlying data when something on a chart looks off. Clicking a bar or a slice opens the row-level data behind it without leaving the dashboard.
• Saved filter presets, so the most-used combinations of filters become one-click views rather than three-minute setups every time.

Metabase as the underlying engine is the part that makes this work at scale. Metabase is used by tens of thousands of companies as a primary BI tool, which means the visualisation library is mature, the query performance is well-tuned, and the dashboard interactions feel like a serious analytics product rather than a tracking-platform afterthought.

You open a dashboard from the BI section. The dashboard loads, queries Routy's data layer for the visuals it needs, and renders. Filters at the top of the dashboard let you scope the data without changing the dashboard structure — change the date range, the network, the geo, and the visuals re-render against the new scope.

Behind the scenes:

• The data layer for dashboards reads from Routy's pre-aggregated stats tables (see the stats aggregation feature). This is why dashboards stay fast even on high-volume accounts.
• Filter state is per-user — your filters don't change what other users see when they open the same dashboard.
• Saved filter presets are shareable, so a useful filter combination can be circulated to the team.
• Custom dashboards can be requested for accounts on plans that include them — typically a setup conversation rather than a self-serve flow, because custom dashboards usually involve some discussion of which visuals will actually answer the questions you're asking.

The Metabase layer underneath has its own capabilities — custom SQL questions, additional visualisation types, embedded analytics — that some accounts dip into for one-off needs. For standard reporting, the pre-built dashboards plus filters are what most operations use day-to-day.

The case for BI dashboards is less about analysis than it is about communication. The numbers in your tracking platform are useful to you. Communicating those numbers to people who don't live in the platform — your finance team, your investors, your network partners, your board — requires translating them into charts they can read at a glance. Without proper BI dashboards, that translation usually happens through someone screenshotting the tracking platform into slides, which is slow, error-prone, and produces visuals that look amateur compared to what those audiences expect.

The other case is that good dashboards surface trends you wouldn't notice in a tabular report. A seasonality pattern in your conversion data, a geo that's quietly outperforming, a traffic source that's been declining for three weeks — these are easy to miss in numbers and easy to see in a chart. The dashboard is a different cognitive surface, and using it regularly tends to surface patterns that would otherwise go unnoticed until they became problems.

For agencies specifically, the shareable dashboard is also a client-facing artefact. Sharing a dashboard with a client beats sending a CSV every time, both in perceived quality and in the time you save on report-building.