The dashboard of a car, a plane, even a video game gives you a lot of crucial information. How fast are you going? How far have you traveled? How much fuel do you have left? How hot is the engine?

A marketing dashboard provides you with the same up-to-the-minute information necessary to run your operation -- sales vs. forecast, distribution channel effectiveness, brand equity evolution, human capital development -- whatever is relevant to the role of marketing in your organization. An effective dashboard might focus on only three critical metrics or show the top 20. It could appear in your inbox monthly in the form of a nice color printout or be beamed over the company intranet first thing each morning.

The most useful marketing dashboard allows you to measure and manage your marketing effectiveness in ways you probably haven't tried. It will verify all the things that are working well. It will also shine a bright light on systems, projects, staff, and processes with the opportunity to improve. It will change the way you gather information while helping you to simplify the complex world of moving measurement targets. Most of all, an effective dashboard will focus your thinking and significantly improve the way you communicate it to others.

And yes, it just might reveal for all to see where the marketing investments are paying off and where they aren't. That's the tough part.

From what we see in many organizations, marketing — unlike IT, sales, or manufacturing -- isn't always given the same credit by top management for having a direct impact on the organization's bottom line. Certainly, marketing creates ideas and initiatives that drive growth. Though most CEOs would agree that marketing plays a role in the company's success, they just don't know how to quantify that role. This is what makes it so difficult to get incremental funding for marketing programs or even to defend existing funding when dollars get tight.

This is something a marketing dashboard can help change.

Many of today's marketing organizations have made significant strides in the development of sophisticated analytical approaches to improve marketing measurement. Ph.D. statisticians are now common in most large marketing departments, as are research departments, media-mix models, and models for assessing the return from a proposed initiative.

But what are they really measuring?

Figure 1.1 shows the three most common measurement “pathways” marketers are pursuing today.

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