How do I use Signals?

“How do I use Signals” is the question of the day! We offer you a lot of information and that can always be overwhelming at first. However, we designed the tool to be as intuitive and user-friendly as possible, so acclimating won’t take any time at all. This article will give you general information about how you can start to implement Signals into your daily work habits and allow it to inform your decision making. So, let’s take a closer look.

You can either use Signals on the web or through the mobile app. After logging in, you’ll find yourself at the Dashboard. The Overview page will always offer a broad level snapshot of how your brand is doing across your retailers and how trends are developing. There is a toolbar that will always offer the most important KPIs, like Dollar Sales, Units Sold, Point of Distribution (POD), Stores Selling, Units/Store Selling, and Opportunity Gap. You can adjust the time period you’ve viewing in the upper right hand corner and look at anything from two weeks up to a year. This will always allow you to get an understandable and thorough view of how your brand is doing.

There are two ways to delve deeper: contextual navigation or the toolbar at the top of the page. Contextual Navigation is the knowledge process we’ve built into the tool, where you can click or hover over a data set to get additional information. If you’re looking at a chart of retailers and want to examine one more closely, click on it. You’ll go to a new page where that retailer is broken down by store. Curious still? Click again and see that store broken down by item. The Account, Store, and Item pages are also available in the toolbar at the top of the page and either will take you to the same and more detailed view. 

Two incredibly useful tabs are Campaigns and Voids. Campaigns does what it sounds like- it allows you to track a particular campaign through the system by creating a customized group of items and stores. Need to document what you see? Download it as a PDF! Attach them to emails and use them in presentations, the data is yours. The Voids tab is also a well of opportunity by design. Here, you can track which retailers or stores aren’t carrying your best selling items, which have stopped carrying items, and which are continuing to carry those products for repeat periods. We show you where sales aren’t meeting expectations and provide you with the KPIs and visuals you’ll need to strategize a solution. You’ll find graphs, charts, and maps to use and the item, store, period, and retailer criteria can be combined differently for new perspectives. 

Our goal is to provide you your store level data in readable formats, so anyone can make use of it as is without additional manipulation. Any page can be downloaded as a PDF for presentations or meetings. That option is in the upper right hand corner. Pages can be saved as “Favorites”, to be easily pulled later without resetting your search criteria. Those Favorites can be shared with other users, so you can easily communicate over insights. As you continue to explore the to tool and manipulate search criteria, remember that contextual navigation will always enable a closer look.