Creating and managing Dashboards are two of the most common activities you’ll do when using TapClicks. If you are a Super Admin, you are also often responsible for helping troubleshoot issues raised by your team. This article outlines the steps for troubleshooting Dashboards when issues are raised by your team. You’ll also see instructions for how and when to escalate to the TapClicks support team.
Though Dashboards are a visualization and storytelling tool, the most common issues that are raised relate to perceived data discrepancies. This is 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 where they likely are working.
1. Data Discrepancy issues
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 fairly easy 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 read more about those steps here.
Check the date range of dashboard
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 are different, then the data will correspondingly appear to be different.
- Have your team member send a full-screen image of both the TapClicks dashboard and the Data Source report
- Compare them and verify the date range is exactly the same
Check if the dashboard includes today’s date
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 range, then click “update dashboard”. This will launch a new fetch for data associated with that dashboard
2. Missing Data Issues
Missing data issues are when one or more expected values aren’t appearing 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, check the Connection Status page and ensure your data is flowing into the system as expected. For Smart Connectors, check the Smart Connector data source in question and ensure there is data available for the date range you've selected.
Check for special icons on widgets
You are able to configure widgets independent of the dashboards where the widgets sits. For example, you can set the date range for a widget that is different than the dashboard. You can also filter widgets to display only specific data from the source they are displaying.
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 to see if the suspect widget has filters or other configurations applied. They will display as icons.
- 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 form 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 changed you’ve 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. 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 more rows to be displayed. 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 on Edit Widget from dropdown
- Click on Styles tab
- Select number of records to display from options
- This allows you to increase the number of rows displayed
Try changing default SORT of widget
Sometimes the data isn’t displaying as expected because it is sorting by a different metric than you desire. To fix this, you can change the default sort for that widget by following these steps:
- Hover over top right corner of widget
- Click on Edit Widget from dropdown
- Click on Data tab
- Scroll to Metrics selection box
- Click on 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
The most common reason for this issue relates to uniqueness of the data. If you create a grid widget and want to show ads, it’s possible TapClicks is interpreting the ad name or ad ID as being the same. In that case, it won’t show duplicates.
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 on Edit Widget from dropdown
- Click on Data tab
- Scroll to Group By selection box
- Add another metric to the Group By function
- Evaluate if this resolves the issue
- If not, add another. This will add more uniqueness to what is being displayed.
Still have issues? Reach out to Support
If you are still encountering issues with your Dashboard, then we recommend reaching out to the support team to get 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 screenshot the whole screen as well.
- Submit a ticket at support.tapclicks.com
- Tell the Support team you followed these troubleshooting steps. Potentially include the link to this article as reference.