How To Create a Dashboard Using Your Raven Tool’s Data

Raven is a great marketing tool, no doubt about that. We have many clients using this app. In complement, they rely on DashThis to create and manage their marketing reports, the documents they will ultimately hand to their own clients.

Hence, one frequent question we have: Is it possible to integrate our Raven marketing data into our DashThis dashboards?

And the answer is Yes!

However, this requires a bit of work. Indeed, Raven has an API that any third party could use to grab data. Unfortunately, most of, if not all, their valuable marketing information isn’t available from their API. From what they told us, they don’t plan to add this anytime soon either.

That brings us to Plan B which is to use DashThis’s CSV file uploader feature. Since you can export any Raven reports in CSV format, that means you can import any Raven report into DashThis!

But not so fast: We wish this was plug and play, but it requires some tweaks.

First off, to download a report in CSV format from Raven, simply click the setting button at the right of any report. As far as we know, you can export to CSV those reports:

• Keyword Manager
• Competitor Manager
• Event Manager
• Tag Manager
• Site Auditor
• Google Webmaster Tools (Although this one is already a standard plug and play data source in DashThis)
• Research Central
• Content Manager
• Blog Manager
• Textbroker
• Link Manager
• SiteFinder
• Backlink Explorer
• Insights Keywords
• Insights Content

To export, simply click the « Settings » button and click « Save all data to CSV ».

That’s it, you now have your valuable marketing data that will be pushed into DashThis.

And here’s the tricky part: As said in our blog post « How to Push Custom Data into your Dashboards Using CSV Files », you need two pieces of information that are not available in the CSV export from Raven: The Customer ID and a Date.

The Customer ID tells us where to put the data, i.e. in which dashboard. You could have a single CSV file that push distinct information to several dashboards.

The Date tells us in what time period to put the data. This month? Last year?

So, back to your Raven CSV file. You need to edit it with any text editor and add those two pieces of information. To make this simple, just add this into the file header like this:

Original CSV file:

Keyword,%,Visits,Page Views,Pages/Visit,Avg Time on Site,New Visits,Bounce Rate
(not provided),95.23%,699,3,486,4.99,04:14,401,0.57%

After the Customer ID and Date is added:

MyClientName
08/31/2014
Keyword,%,Visits,Page Views,Pages/Visit,Avg Time on Site,New Visits,Bounce Rate
(not provided),95.23%,699,3,486,4.99,04:14,401,0.57%

And then?

The hard work is almost done. Simply define the file template like you would do for any other CSV file. The recipe is here.

Upload your files and voilà!

If you are comfortable with Excel, you could even group several files into one, add a new column for the Customer ID and upload only one file for all your clients. Like this:

On a related note, you might find useful the Text To Columns function in Excel when working with CSV files.

» Do you want to create a dashboard using your Raven’s marketing data? Then you should try DashThis!