An article that’s a must read for all marketers: Rob O’Regan in MarketingNPV Journal on “Marketing Dashboards in Practice “.

There’s no longer much of an argument over the need to measure marketing performance. Face it, the left-brainers have won at least the battle, if not the war. But just how are CMOs faring with their new measurement-driven agendas?

The short answer is: So far, so good…

He notes that the drive now is to providing pinpoint metrics to the right people in the organization to make proper decisions.  Management of the dashboard views (most metrics programs provide the ability to boildown the data to key indicators) and understanding the real numbers that need to be watched are the key.

This is a drive that’s moving down the chain, it’s not simply “dashboard views for large corporations” anymore.  At Vario, we’re sending emailed pdf dashboard views on either a monthly or weekly basis to our customers so they can see the key numbers on their sites.  For the most part, we haven’t gotten into customizing those dashboard views yet.  Those customers that need drill down capability, or are savvy enough to need customized data, tend to be savvy enough that it’s better to just give them full access to the Google Analytics package.  Then they can mine their own data.

There’s the thing: the tools that small marketers have at hand now are better than they’ve ever been, and in the case of Google Analytics, they’re rapidly approaching the feature set of the enterprise metrics solutions.  Are they there yet, no.  Right now the big missing piece for Google is they are missing the ability to handle page comparisons for ad placement, page design, etc., as well as missing an enhanced ability to pass variables into the metrics system.

But fear not, we are seeing a test of page comparison in Google Adsense right now, which most likely indicates a feature to be seen in the next evolution of the analytics package.  And one can definitely expect to see enhanced variable capabilities in the next release as well.

The boundary that separates small and large business has never been blurrier.