A well-executed marketing dashboard can help you analyze your web data. Take a look at six reasons why you need to create yours today.

Marketers are facing incredible pressure to improve the accountability of their marketing spend, and yet, the 2007 ANA Accountability study found significant gaps in the ability of organizations to make effective decisions using metrics and measurements. 

Developing marketing dashboards is a significant way to aid in this decision-making process, but advertisers must also distinguish between a "need to have" dashboard and a "nice to have" dashboard.

The promise of marketing dashboards -- a visual, interactive collection of timely marketing campaign performance metrics -- has not fully come alive. Why is that? It is easy to be taken in by the pure intuitive, eye-grabbing appeal of the dashboard and not realize what makes a successful dashboard. Several of the dashboard implementations become a mere collection of metrics without consistent definitions or timely updates and are therefore unable to drive the promise of improved communications, timely decisions, and cost efficiency. Such dashboards can look pretty and are referred to as "nice to have" marketing dashboards.

On the other hand, a "need to have" marketing dashboard is what every marketer should seek, and it delivers the following:

Improved communication
Business decision makers are confronted with the overwhelming task of communicating performance metrics with employees across different levels and departments. Dashboards should simplify this communication challenge by providing all stakeholders with full visibility into a standard set of defined metrics. Furthermore, the dashboard should easily provide access to insights, for example, and quickly isolate and describe early stages of trends that otherwise may go unnoticed.

Timely decisions
A dashboard should dramatically expedite decision-making by reducing the time it takes to transform data into insights. The process of data aggregation, standardization and dissemination is automated, enabling almost real-time update of metrics. Additionally, dashboards should not merely describe what has happened, but should contain predictive metrics that provide forward-looking insights. Predictive models integrated into dashboards is essential.

Cost efficiency
Ready access to pertinent, synthesized information enables the marketing executive to focus on strategy development and decision making rather than spending time and resources sifting through disparate data sources in an attempt to formulate a clear picture of the changing marketplace.

Okay, so how do you build a "need to have" marketing dashboard?

Designing an effective business dashboard is more challenging than it might appear. Dashboards need to display large amounts of business information and at the same time be easy to use, intuitive and have attention-grabbing graphics. The following success factors can help the program manager build a successful marketing dashboard.

Right metrics
One most critical challenge is developing the right set of standardized metrics across geographies, campaigns and communication vehicles to enable effective comparisons. The optimal and most constructive way to collect metrics for a dashboard is to take a business-focused approach rather than a data-centric approach.  The top-down approach starts with the business decisions that need to be made first and then works its way down into the data needed to support those decisions. This approach requires that actual business users get involved to ensure the relevancy of specific business data.
 
As much as possible, the dashboard should not be loaded with a lot of metrics. The goal should be to keep it light with the most meaningful performance metrics.

Speed
Timeliness of information access has become a competitive imperative and drives the need for process automation in delivery of the dashboard solution. Frequency of data "refresh" is a key success factor along with rules that help the loading of data automatically.

Data visualization
Since one is compressing large amounts of business information into a small visual area, every dashboard component must effectively balance its share of screen real estate with the importance of the information it is imparting to the viewer. It is essential to have user interface (UI) design expertise in developing dashboards. There needs to be standard use of graphics and a developed methodology behind it.

A comprehensive yet intuitive dashboard with predictive components and solutions is a critical capability to deliver on marketing accountability. However, dashboard implementation is complex, requires expertise and when not properly designed becomes a mere "nice to have."

Vipin Mayar is EVP, Global Director of Data & Analytics at digital advertising agency MRM Worldwide, a McCann Worldgroup company.