In the digital media era, marketing has shifted from fuzzy brand building to highly targeted and measurable efforts including Web and e-mail campaigns, paid search and, increasingly, social media initiatives.

To deliver on the promise of measurability, software-as-a-service-based business intelligence vendor myDials on Tuesday launched a Performance Module for Marketing designed to help marketing executives spend their budgets more wisely.

The myDials BI service provides a foundation of dashboard interfaces that can be linked with myriad data sources and set to user-customizable views and drill-through analyses. Customers can also set up goals, thresholds and exception alerts whereby users can spot exception conditions such as revenue shortfalls.

The myDials Performance Module for Marketing is prebuilt with a battery of key metrics and comparative visualizations of interest to marketing professionals. For example, lead analyses include cost and conversion ratios by campaign, product and location. Web site activity visualizations include visitor activity, location, source and time spent onsite.

Social media measures include Facebook fans, likes and mentions, and Twitter followers, mentions and retweets. Paid-keyword-search campaigns can be measured in terms of clicks, click-through rates, costs, quality and comparative keyword performance.

By pulling all these measures and comparisons together in one place, the Performance Module for Marketing lets users correlate campaign metrics with revenue and gross profit to show returns on marketing investments, according to the vendor.

The data needed to drive all these analyses must be integrated from various source systems. MyDials has developed standard connectors to CRM metrics from Salesforce and NetSuite, Web analytics from Google analytics, paid-search results from Google AdWords, social media stats from Facebook and Twitter, and ERP data from NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics and SAP. Data can also be extracted from myriad databases, spreadsheets and flat files.

myDials costs range from $25 per user, per month for Lite (read only) users up to $90 per user, per month for Advanced users with configuration, customization and what-if analysis capabilities.

The Performance Marketing Module is a free add-on to the MyDials service, but costs escalate as the number of data sources increases. Data-connector costs start at $750 per year for spreadsheets, Web forms, and flat files and max out at $5,000 per year for enterprise applications. Google connectors are $1,800 per year and Twitter connectors are $1,200 per year.

Sales, IT, HR, Finance and Professional Services are among the other domain-specific modules available in the myDials service portfolio.

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