The Klipfolio for Digital Signage Guide

We’re inundated with data. The individual bits of information are overwhelming on their own, the takeaways are what count. For example, we rely on Google Maps’ traffic estimates; we wouldn’t want to know the exact speed of every vehicle Google tracked to calculate the traffic. It’s those big-picture goals, assembled from data, that matter.

And the same goes for your business. You’ve got software tracking your sales, subscribers, support tickets, spending, and more. The data’s there. You now need to turn that data into quick takeaways that, at a glance, tell you how things are going.

Klipfolio is made to turn your data into actionable takeaways; ScreenCloud is made to put those takeaways on your organization’s screens. Here’s how to get them to work together so your most important data is a glance away when needed.

A quick Klipfolio guide

Klipfolio starts with your data, which already lives somewhere: In your content management system (CMS), your accounting software, your internal database, and more. Klipfolio gives you two ways to visualize that data from your software: Klips and Metrics. Then, you can pull those Klips (dashboard widgets) and Metrics together into dashboards, rearranging facts and figures into your team’s command center.

Klips

Do you wonder how much of your website’s traffic came from social channels, or how many tasks are marked as overdue in your project management app?

There are pre-built Klips that answer those and other questions with data from hundreds of apps. They’re Klipfolio’s original way to turn your data into insights. Add a Klip to your dashboard, pick your favorite app from Klipfolio’s integrations, then choose the widget you want to use. Klipfolio will add it with sample data to your dashboard.

Click the 3-dot menu on a Klip widget and select Reconfigure to connect the widget to your software. A moment later, you’ll see your followers, traffic, or any other data the Klip was built to share.

Or, you can dig deeper. Click Edit, then click the values or graphs to edit the Klipfolio functions that power the widgets. Or, click the A tab on the top right, and drag in new graphs and charts to add detail to your widgets.

To share your Klipfolio on digital signage, the most important thing might be to make your widgets easy to read at a distance. To make the text larger, select any part of a widget, choose the Properties tab on the bottom half of the screen, then set the font size and style of your choice.

Once you’re done, save and exit the editor. Then add as many widgets as you want to fill out your Klipfolio dashboard. Or, switch to Metrics for another way to summarize data.

Metrics

Metrics go to the next level and track any single objective from your data. It integrates with 19 apps today—including Google Analytics, Stripe, Shopify, and Zendesk—and makes more of those apps’ data easily accessible. Here, you pick an app (Google Analytics, say), then pick up to three metrics to track (perhaps bounce rate, page views, and average time on site), and Klipfolio will add them to your Metrics list.

That gives you a quick overview of each data point and its change over time. Click the Metric to expand it into a full-page dashboard dedicated to that one metric. Or, click Add to Dashboard to see details about more metrics at once.

Metric widgets in a dashboard will typically show a graph by default—which can be hard to read at a distance on digital signage.

Want a single number instead, to track perhaps an OKR tied to this quarter's sales or SEO goals? Open the widget’s menu, click Edit, and you can pick the graph type and data range to display. For a single value, select the `123` button, then click the Filter tab to choose what data range to display. There are no font size options here, but the defaults should be easily readable at a distance.

Klips let you dig in and build deeply customized widgets with data from a variety of sources—with pre-built templates to get you started. Metrics let you pick the stats that matter, and Klipfolio does most of the rest of the work in turning those into insights. One widget at a time, you can build the Klipfolio marketing dashboard or sales tracker your team needs.

Once you’ve picked the best Klips and Metrics to get the data your team needs, it’s time to get it on the big screen.

Putting your Klipfolio widgets and dashboards on digital signage

The easiest way to share Klipfolio with your whole team is the Fullscreen button built into every Klipfolio widget. Clip that, maximize your browser window, then perhaps connect your laptop to your conference room TV with an HDMI cable for quick digital signage.

Or, you can share your dashboard with your whole team. Click the 3-dot menu beside your dashboard’s name in the sidebar, then choose to either share a dashboard privately with your team via email, or copy a link to publish your dashboard where anyone can see it.

Add a full Klipfolio Dashboard to ScreenCloud

A far better option is to connect Klipfolio to ScreenCloud and put your Klips and Metrics on your digital signage—a TV in your office, a spare monitor in a boardroom, or even a tablet in your entryway. That way, whenever anyone wants to know how many users came in this month or if your traffic is trending up or down, they can just glance up at the screen to see how things are going.

Add ScreenCloud to your signage, then you can connect your favorite software and show it on your screens automatically—including Klipfolio.

There are a few ways to add Klipfolio to ScreenCloud. The easiest is with a link—as long as you’re ok with making a link that publicly shares your data.

Make sure your Klipfolio dashboard fills up exactly one screen—four to six widgets is best. Then copy your Klipfolio dashboard link: Click the dashboard’s menu in the sidebar, select Share > Publish Link to Dashboard, add a name and logo if you want, then copy the link.

Then, go back to ScreenCloud, click the Links tab in the left sidebar, add a new Link, and paste in your Klipfolio dashboard link. You can then add Klipfolio to any of your ScreenCloud screens or playlists you want.

Have a larger dashboard with more widgets than can’t be shown on a single screen at once? Use ScreenCloud’s Page Scroll app instead.

Copy your Klipfolio dashboard link, as before, then in ScreenCloud this time choose Apps in the sidebar, select Page Scroll, and add a new instance. Paste in your Klipfolio dashboard link, then set how fast you want the dashboard to scroll.

Add a single Klipfolio Klip or Metric widget to ScreenCloud

Want to share only one widget with your team? Or, want a way to share your dashboard, without needing to share a public link? ScreenCloud supports that as well.

There are two ways to do that. The quickest is with ScreenCloud Dashboards, which lets you select any part of an app or website to share on your signage. It can use your Klipfolio account to grab the dashboards and widgets you want to share, too, so you don’t have to create a public link to share them. And, it works with both Klips and Metrics—including full Metrics dashboards.

Here’s how it works. First, in ScreenCloud, click the Dashboards tab in the left sidebar, add a new one, and enter `klipfolio.com` in the address bar to get started. There, login to your Klipfolio account, select the dashboard you want, then click the Take Snapshot button. You can then click on anything in Klipfolio to add it to ScreenCloud. You can select everything inside a widget—just not its title. Or, you can click the Fullscreen button inside Klipfolio first, and click ScreenCloud’s Select Entire Screen button to embed your full dashboard.

The other option is by embedding an individual Klip into ScreenCloud. This takes a bit more tweaking, but is the most customizable way to get a Klip on your signage (though it doesn’t work with Metrics widgets, as they don’t support embeds).

Start in Klipfolio. Click the 3-dot menu on any Klip widget you want to embed, select Share > Embed Klip. There, you can customize the Klip’s title and width, and copy the embed code.

Klipfolio Embeds are a DIV, not an iFrame, so to add them to ScreenCloud you’ll need to use ScreenCloud Playgrounds, a tool to build a one-page website to share anything you want on your screens.

Create a new ScreenCloud Playground, choose the Blank Template option, then paste your Klipfolio code in lieu of the `Add your code here` text at line 19 in the HTML editor.

Click Preview, and your Klip will show up in the top left corner of the screen, by default. If you’d like to show that Klip alongside other Klips and app data in a multi-widget ScreenCloud Channel layout, save your Playground and you can go ahead and add it to your ScreenCloud dashboards.

Or, if you want to show this single Klip on its own, you can tweak your Playgrounds code a bit more to turn your Klip into the standalone screen you want. Back in Playgrounds, add the following code to the CSS column to center the div:

Then, you can experiment more with the ScreenCloud Playgrounds code to build what you want. Adding a custom background color, boosting the font size, or including a headline with info about the widget—the sky’s the limit.

And that’s just the start. Now that you’ve got Klipfolio on your signage, it’s time to see what else you should add. You can put any number you want on a ScreenCloud sign — using ScreenCloud’s integrations and built-in tools to unlock your team’s info from Airtable, Notion, spreadsheets, and much more and put it on your signage.