Advertising success lies in understanding the relationship between media channels and how the advertising engages consumers or prospects. Somewhere in your media ad serving, Google reports, Web site-tracking tools and customer transactional databases you have all the data points you need. But how do you unlock the knowledge in this data? The answer: find the right marketing campaign dashboarding and analytics partner.

Dashboards have recently seen an increased resurgence in the market, especially from a corporate marketers and agencies perspective. As advertising strategies span multiple channels and tactics, there is an abundance of data driving the need to integrate and visualize quickly and efficiently.

Selecting, implementing and managing a marketing dashboard partner for tracking, reporting and then analyzing all these data points can seem a daunting task for even the most experienced advertisers and marketers. However, when done well it can make all the difference to get the most out of your marketing dollars. If you plan on embarking on a vendor search, here are 10 tips to keep in mind when choosing your dashboarding partner:

1. Determine your dashboarding, reporting, & analytics needs

Dashboarding providers range from free services provided by publishers to enterprise solutions with five-figure monthly fees. A robust free service which provides decent functionality and detailed reporting is Google Analytics. There are numerous online communities of Google Analytics users that help one another set up and troubleshoot tracking codes. What is presumably the biggest advantage of Google Analytics compared to other free services is its seamless integration with Google AdWords. However, users need to remember that like many free Web services, it is subject to spotty reliability, delays in reporting, lower numbers reported compared to other site measurement tools due to its tracking methodology, and as reported in the online communities, losses of historical data. Even with these drawbacks, Google Analytics remains a popular and widely used digital media and Web analytics tool for small to medium size marketers and ad agencies. When the need arises for a more accountable, reliable and customizable enterprise solution, if you can handle the monetary and learning curve expense, there are a number of available options providing substantially more control over the presentation of your data and depth and breadth of tracking. The analytics marketplace is in a frenzied race to provide turn-key interfaces and solutions for corporate marketers of all sizes and functionalities.

2. Internal end-user business intelligence requirements 

As you select a dashboarding partner, it’s important to consider what type of business intelligence features are going to be needed by your team before making your selection. One step in the vendor selection process is defining–as a team–what types of reports, graphs, and analysis your business users will need to make them successful. You will also need to consider the number of users that will be accessing the dashboarding system, their skill sets, and their specific technological needs. For instance, will analysts on your team be able to use the dashboard to slice and dice the data in ways that make sense to them.

3. External end-user business intelligence requirements

In addition to considering your internal team, it’s important to consider the needs of your external agencies and partners. Be sure to gain your agencies and partners feedback in terms of their reporting needs. This will help the vendor scope the best solution for you and help you to understand the vendors ability to provide dashboards and insights across your organization and partners as well.

4. Security

As you invest time and energy into your selection process you can easily weed out many potential partners if they don’t meet your security requirements. This is a good point to lead with. Be sure to ask the vendor to provide detailed information related to the products security, password protection, audit trail, and quality assurance processes. Find out where the data physically resides and if there are redundancy systems in place if their system is breached or parts of it fail.

5. Dashboard user interface (UI)

The UI is probably one of the most important drivers of adoption for any dashboarding system. If the UI is hard to understand, it isn’t likely the system will be used. Things to look for are features that allow end users to easily manipulate data with filters, drag and drop capabilities, and whether the dashboard provides a clear visual representation of the data that allows for actionable insights.

6. Reporting 

In the same vein as the UI, the reports your dashboarding partner runs must be approachable and easily understood. Without meaningful and user-friendly reports the likelihood that the dashboard will be used and widely adopted are slim. The ability to provide both standard and adhoc reports is also very important as business users have different needs for the different marketing data types at different times. If reports are too strict some necessary reports may not be possible if a certain amount of flexibility isn’t possible. Some questions to consider: Can you do actual vs. buy vs. plan reports? Is trending analysis possible? Can you set-up email alerts for reporting anomalies? Another thing to consider is if the reports work with standards already adopted by your organization like Excel and PowerPoint.

7. Professional services support

Once you’ve determined the UI works, and the reports are going to meet the needs of your organization, the next big consideration is if you will be provided the support you will need to navigate your dashboard selection and grow it over time. Whether you go the free or paid route for your dashboarding partner you need to make sure technical support is figured into your equation of selection, especially if your dreams of widespread adoption are answered. There is nothing worse than having a piece of technology that is widely adopted that breaks with all your hard work and data trapped inside. If you handle support internally it will still cost time and money, and sometimes even more than outsourced options given the complexity of some situations. By seeking a vendor with a strong solution, and strong professional services in place, while it may cost more up-front you could save money in the long run. The major points to consider are if your prospective dashboarding partners has professional services group to help implement the dashboarding system, consult on best practices, and provide insight over time. If they don’t, take into consideration if immediate savings outweigh the potential long-term downside

8. Advanced analytics capabilities

Aside from dashboards and collaboration, be sure the vendor solution has advanced analytical capabilities and features such as the ability to accomplish cookie-based attribution analysis of multiple media channels (example – display and search marketing). Ensure you can store all historical media and customer data in the product. Lastly, ask about how sophisticated are the analytics capabilities that come out-of-the-box. These analysis solutions and advanced product features will be important down the road as you become more sophisticated with your marketing reporting and analytics. Many lower end dashboarding products do not have these core capabilities and the vendor will either charge a lot of money for these ‘extra’ capabilities or will not have this functionality in their product.

9. Data collection capabilities

The most compelling dashboard data is a sum of all the parts of marketing, including data from all campaigns, partners, and tracking solutions. Your dashboarding partner must work with all these moving parts to provide the best insights possible. First you must determine if the dashboard partner currently works with all of your most important third party services. If they don’t you should make sure they have an open API that you can plug-in to your mission critical systems. Of course the time and effort it will take for bridging these gaps should play an integral part in the decision making process. Once you have reviewed your mission critical third party services you must consider services you will be adding in the near future to make sure your dashboarding partner can grow as your arsenal of technology grows. From a high level you want to make sure it can collect data from outside services such as third-party ad servers (DoubleClick), search data (Google, Yahoo) and data from traditional media efforts (print, DRTV). It should also be able to interact with backend website analytics tools. Be sure to ask the vendor for a list of all the types of digital and offline data sources they have integrated. Example data sources to ask about include ability to accept emails, FTP site collection, manual log files, screen scrapes, or other more manually-oriented data collection mechanisms. Lastly, be sure to inquire about the QA and exception reporting process.

10. Product demo

Above all, when speaking with the vendor, ask for a demo of the product you can interact with. Never rely on the vendors word that it will be easy to use and be sure to ask detailed questions during the demo. Ask to see how things work as opposed to viewing a ppt presentation on the dashboarding solution.

This just scratches the surface of a more comprehensive list, but hopefully will set you on your way to critically thinking about your own marketing dashboarding needs assessment and vendor selection.

In 2008, as larger portions of advertising budgets shift to online, we’ll need to consistently improve measurement and performance. Indeed, digital marketers are already under pressure to bolster business intelligence capabilities in unprecedented ways.

This article provides a ‘top 10’ list of best practices for digital advertising reporting and measurement. Advertisers need to find ways to better track, analyze, and predict online consumer behavior, and use business and marketing intelligence tools effectively to help find the most attractive prospects and customers. This list offers a blueprint for ensuring a successful measurement strategy that will maximize return on media investment and improve overall campaign performance.

STEP 1—Select a data collection and warehousing approach

First, you’ll need a marketing data warehouse. Figure out where you want this reporting and measurement data warehouse to reside. This warehouse should store all historical media, website, and customer data to better understand consumer behavior and optimize future marketing campaigns. Three possible data warehousing choices include:

1. Agency. Ask your agency to warehouse marketing and customer data. Some firms have created proprietary reporting and marketing measurement systems. These platforms allow for more flexible marketing data management, but lock the advertiser into a specific approach. And, if you’re an advertiser with multiple agencies, it may not be ideal to have one company managing all of the data.

2. In-House. Warehouse the data inside your company. This requires advertisers to handle and manipulate large volumes of data through the use of appropriate software, hardware, and talent (people). Consideration should be based on initial start-up costs, time-to-market, cost-of-ownership, and long-term strategic corporate goals.

3. Third-Party Provider. Use a third-party partner to collect, manage, and report marketing data on your behalf. A select few partner providers automate or offshore components of clients’ analytics reporting needs. Too many agencies or in-house marketing departments have highly skilled (and highly paid) in-house or agency personnel spending valuable time creating reports that could either be automated or offshored by a third party.

STEP 2—Define Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

The first step of your marketing campaign is to define your business and campaign goals based on identifiable business benefit and need. When creating goals, you will want to take a top-down approach. A top-down approach starts with the business decisions that need to be made and then works its way down into the data needed to support these decisions. In order to take a top down approach you MUST involve the actual business users who will be reading these dashboards, as these are the only people who can determine the relevancy of specific business data to their decision making process.

STEP 3—Determine marketing or campaign success criteria and overall goals

Once your business and campaign goals are defined, the next step is to assign your transparent or universal KPIs, to each campaign. These key metrics will allow you to evaluate campaign performance. If available, integrate historical campaign data and metrics into the mix to better understand performance over time. Whenever possible, try to quantify or monetized these goals to understand the impact on the business.

STEP 4—Establish attribution management and tracking

During the definition phase, it’s important to build the proper campaign attributes framework. You will want to collect detailed information from the stakeholders related to target audience, creative, messaging, placement, media publisher and requirements related to reporting. With each stakeholder group, take the following steps:

Identify used data sources; validate availability and how to extract from each source
Define measurement and what business rules are applied to source data
Answer what are the key metrics & KPIs of each element
Identify how are they inter-related/rolled up from operational to strategic

Be sure to implement proper tracking codes on your site and various media channels. Proper tracking code management and pre-campaign testing will ensure issues are resolved prior to going live with the actual campaign

STEP 5—Employ visual marketing scorecards and dashboards

Again, the key to the dashboard development is buy-in from stakeholders and focusing on the key KPIs. All too often stakeholders get bogged down in the details. Dashboards and scorecards turn into unruly and overwhelming sets of un-actionable data. Figure out what data really matters and focus on these key KPIs. General examples of the key questions marketing dashboards should answer include:

-Quantifying the business impact of marketing investment
-Identifying which media channels perform best
-Determine which channels generate the most customer interest or engagement
-Evaluate which channels generate the most customer sales
-Identifying and reproducing complex multi-channel customer acquisition routes
-Contrasting multiple channel’s performance while campaigns are still underway

Dashboards are meant to evolve; your business goals and business aspects change the way in which measurement occurs – hence your dashboard, or marketing intelligence solution, needs to be flexible and allow for the process of evolution