Creating and managing Dashboards are two of the most common activities users will perform when using TapClicks. As a Super Admin, you may often troubleshoot issues raised by your team. This article outlines common Dashboard troubleshooting steps and when to escalate to the TapClicks support team.
Although Dashboards are visualization and storytelling tools, the most common issues raised relate to perceived data discrepancies. These occur when data is believed to be either missing, inaccurate, or otherwise questionable. Though the dashboard is only displaying data from your Data Sources, data discrepancy issues are often uncovered by a team member on the dashboard since this is likely where they are working.
1. Resolving Data Discrepancies
A data discrepancy issue is one where it appears the data in TapClicks and the data in your source application do not match. This is likely one of the most common issues raised by your team and has some relatively simple fixes. If these recommendations do not resolve the issue, then you may want to also look at troubleshooting data discrepancy issues for the data source itself. You can learn more about those steps here.
Verify the Dashboard's Date Range
This is a simple fix. Simply make sure the date range in TapClicks and the date range in the data source report match exactly. If these dates differ, the data will appear inconsistent.
- Ask your team member to provide a full-screen screenshot of both the TapClicks dashboard and the Data Source report.
- Compare the two and ensure the date ranges match exactly.
Determine if “Today’s Date” Is Included
If you include today’s date in the report, you may discover slight differences as the day progresses. This is because TapClicks fetches data daily rather than continuously. The daily fetch occurs in the morning of the Eastern time zone. The source application likely will continue collecting data continuously. When you compare the TapClicks snapshot of data with the continuous data from the source application, sometimes you can find differences for “today’s date range”. To learn more about data fetching, see this article.
To troubleshoot or resolve this:
- Check the data range of the TapClicks dashboard
- Ensure today’s date is not included
- If you want to include today’s date, click Update Dashboard. This will launch a new fetch for data associated with that dashboard
2. Troubleshooting Missing Data Issues
Missing data issues occur when expected values do not appear on the TapClicks Dashboard.
If the date range for your dashboard and the source application appear to be the same and you’ve considered whether today’s date might be causing a difference, the next step is to check if there is missing data.
Check Connection Status and Recency of Data
Often Data Discrepancies on the dashboards or reports are caused by issues with the data source itself. For Instant-on Connectors, visit the Connection Status page to verify that data is flowing properly. For Smart Connectors, check the Smart Connector data source in question and ensure there is data available for the date range you've selected.
You may check the Data Load Status article for a better understanding.
Check for Special Icons on Widgets
You are able to configure widgets independent of the dashboards where the widget sits. For example, widgets can have date ranges or filters applied independently from the dashboard. These settings allow widgets to display specific data from the data source.
When you configure a widget using these features, you will note icons in the top right of the widget indicating the adjustments being applied. In the image shown, you can see that a custom date range has been applied as well as a filter. The custom date range icon is a calendar. The filter icon is a stack of lines in the shape of a triangle.
If data appears to be missing on a widget:
- Check if the affected widget has filters or other configurations applied. Icons in the top right corner will indicate these settings.
- If these exist, remove them to see if the widget displays the correct data.
Exports Not Showing All Data
When exporting a Dashboard to PDF, you may find that Grid Widgets don’t display all the expected results. You may just see a subset of results from what was shown on the Dashboard itself.
To resolve this export issue, follow these instructions:
- Hover over top right corner of widget
- Select Edit widget
- Go to Styles
- Turn on Paginate records. This will tell us how many total records there are
- In Number of records to display in reports select how many you want to show in exports. In this case, “Reports” means exports
- Save the widget changes you have made
- Next, navigate to the top of the dashboard
- Click on More Options (three dots icon near top of page)
- Select Edit Reporting Options
-
Then select “Show all pages in Report”
- Dashboard: Shows records at end of dashboard
- Section: Show records at end of section
- Do this for every grid widget
3. Troubleshooting Grid Widget issues
A grid widget on Dashboards looks like a table or list. When using Grid Widgets, your team may find that some data isn’t showing or you want to display more rows. There are three common reasons why data may not display as expected on a Grid Widget:
- Not enough rows are displaying
- Data is grouped differently in TapClicks than in the data source’s reporting
- Not all ads are displaying in the grid widget
Not enough rows are displaying
To fix this simply follow these steps:
- Hover over top right corner of widget.
- Click Edit Widget from dropdown.
- Click the Styles tab.
- Select number of records to display from options.
- Adjust the 'Number of Records to Display' option.
Try changing the widget's default sort
Unexpected data display issues may occur if the widget is sorting by an undesired metric. To fix this, you can change the default sort for that widget by following these steps:
- Hover over top right corner of widget.
- Click Edit Widget from dropdown.
- Click the Data tab.
- Scroll to Metrics selection box.
- Click the gear icon.
- View list of metrics being used in Grid Widget.
- Select the metric you want to sort by using the up-arrow / down-arrow icon.
Not all ads are displaying
Ad display issues often stem from a lack of data uniqueness. For example, TapClicks may interpret ad names or IDs as duplicates, in which case it won’t show them.
The way to resolve this is to increase the uniqueness of what is being shown. To accomplish this follow these steps:
- Hover over top right corner of widget.
- Click Edit Widget from dropdown.
- Click the Data tab.
- Scroll to Group By selection box.
- Add another metric to the Group By function.
- Evaluate whether this resolves the issue.
- If not, add another to increase uniqueness to what is being displayed.
Still have issues? Reach out to Support
If dashboard issues persist, contact the support team for assistance. The following steps will help the support team with resolution.
- Open Dashboard experiencing the issue & screenshot the whole page
- For data discrepancy issues, open the Data Source application (Facebook, Google Ads, etc), navigate to the comparable report as what you are viewing in TapClicks, and then take a full-screen screenshot as well.
- Submit a support ticket at customercare@tapclicks.com
- Inform the Support team that you have already followed these troubleshooting steps. Potentially include the link to this article as reference.