In any business at any rate one needs to determine Why things seems to be moving on a positive upright direction or the other way around. There are many factors to consider among the most common are it's nature, size, orientation, environment, origin and other underlining factors (directly or indirectly) does affect the growth of any business (in general).

For many Marketing Professionals it is crucial that they perform proper analysis to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of any marketing plan, campaign or scheme being implemented for specific goal(s).

The general term use to describe the processes, activities involved is "MPM" - Marketing Performance measurement and Management. It was said; that this can be accomplished by aligning the marketing strategies, activities and metrics with the business goals (set).

Hence; optimizing the Return Of Investment (ROI) due to effective marketing.

Is a technique to create a clearly defined objective to meeting business results. It provides a systematic description of the actions taken by marketing personnel as they use a specific set of activities to produce a defined set of outcomes.

It can also help identify skills the organization may need to implement the plan. In addition, an organization can use the process map to identify technology and training requirements.

By navigating this metrics continuum, from activity-based to predictive, marketers can move towards more effective marketing measurement and align measurement and metrics with business outcomes.

The use of systems and tools make it possible to determine the performing investments and the contribution of marketing efforts to the overall success of the organization.   Without the implementation and use of these system and tools, creating a performance-driven marketing organization is difficult to achieve.

Requires two(2) Elements:

• standards and processes for identifying and accessing relevant data
• the ability to generate performance metrics from the data

Professionals involved in MPM implementation use a dashboard to report the marketing performance. The dashboard is where all data and metrics are collated and presented as useful information for the organization. Marketing professionals create these dashboards from metrics and KPI.

A standard dashboard should at least have three(3) layers and as follows:

Level	Function	Description
Executive level	Strategic level	Monitors and measures performance against business outcomes and marketing objectives
Operational level	Marketing management	Tracks performance of core marketing strategies and processes
Tactical level	Functions & individuals	Analyzes performance at project or activity level as they relate to the first two

Below are some of the most important component in order for You to Manage Marketing Performance and as follows:

• Data
  • gathering of right types of data, and its accuracy, is crucial in measuring the marketing performance
    • there should be a mechanics to verify the collected data
  • collecting up-to-date data is also very essential
    • the processes involved in the analysis is not off a critical time-base nature
    • a few hours (6-24 hour) delay is acceptable
• Analytics
  • by thoroughly analyzing the data, organizations can gather actionable business insights to improve the marketing effectiveness and marketing efficiency with regards to what have been executed or what have been put into action
  • allows us to make faster and better business decision
    • by measuring the impact of marketing activities, competitive effectiveness and market environment focusing on;
      • sales of product
      • services offered
      • visibility or survey feed-back
      • promotion runs
      • and more...
  • allows us to determine the health or state of different marketing medium
    • which may include but not limited to
      • internet
      • social networking sites
      • mobile and fixed advertising
      • text messaging
      • television and/or radio commercials endorsement
      • events
      • and more ...
• Metrics
  • visual quantitative mechanics that prove value and demonstrate the contribution of marketing to the organization
  • MPM focuses on measuring the aggregated effectiveness and efficiency of the marketing organization
    • common Metrics categories may include the following but not limited to
      • impact on share of preference
      • rate of customer acquisition
      • average order value
      • rate of new product and service adoptions
      • growth in customer buying frequency
      • volume and share of business
      • net advocacy and loyalty
      • rate of growth compared to competition and the market
      • customer engagement and buying power
      • margin
      • and more ...
  • Operational Efficiency and Performance
    • determines how efficiently resources of the organization such as people, facilities, and capital are used
    • provides the organization with a way to rationalize marketing investments, but do not correlate marketing to business strategy and business performance
      • Program-to-people ratios
      • awareness-to-demand ratios
      • cost vs lead
      • cost vs sale
      • conversation rates

To start managing Marketing Metrics you need to establish and determine specific performance targets known as key performance indicators (KPI) with a given agreed scope.

The following simple steps might help and give you a head start and as follows:

• determine the business outcome that they are trying to impact
• determine the importance of the said targeted business outcome
• determine the data required to satisfy the targeted outcome
• search for this data, and determine the decisions and actions that must to be enforced as a result of this data mining

Note
There are a number of Tools out in the market today which greatly allows you to manage and measure Marketing Performance much faster.

In case You have started doing marketing online, Pay-Per-Click or related services. Google, Yahoo and MSN does provide a reliable interface of their own for you to manage your campaign(s).

On the other hand you can check out Market Mix Models which measure the impact of marketing activities, competitive effects, and market environment on sales of a product.   The consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry extensively uses this method.