We can define an effective marketing dashboard as one that enables marketers to visually display relevant and current campaign, customer, advertising and/or branding information needed to achieve marketing objectives (such as improve ROI, generate qualified leads, and deliver revenue). It is optimized to speed the evaluation of and reaction to current trends and statistics and to make that information and results accessible to colleagues.

Marketing dashboards are powerful because they help marketers use relevant, current information to understand clearly how marketing is performing with respect to the overall organization's goals as well as help to explain marketing's contribution to interested colleagues. Essential to the success of a dashboarding project are:

• Choose metrics based on why they matter
• Keep it visual
• Make it interactive
• Keep it current or don't bother
• Make it simple to access and use

If you're already engaged in a dashboarding effort, take note of these five best practices and evaluate how your efforts measure up. If you're not, it's not only time to ask yourself why not, but can taking one on help give better visibility to your marketing objectives.