• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, August 27, 2009

Web analytics firm Omniture Thursday launched CMO.com, a news and information hub for chief marketing officers that offers articles, white papers, analyst reports as well as community features.

The site is divided into three basic categories: news, insight and CMO community. The news section includes content updated daily from 40 outside sources including Advertising Age, The New York Times, Forbes, MediaWeek, MediaPost and SearchEngineLand.com, focusing on digital marketing and major brands.

Stories are organized by categories such as social media, targeting, branding and trends.

The Insights section offers reports, surveys, statistics, and commentary from industry experts from consulting and research firms and academia. A featured study on the site Thursday from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, for instance, found that CMOs are increasingly optimistic about the economy and their customers' purchasing activities. They're also embracing social media.

In that vein, CMO.com has its own Twitter feed. It also aggregates interviews with CMOs, CMO survey results and industry events among other community features. The site is sponsored by marketing agencies, technology providers and consulting firms that help fund operating costs. Advertisers on the site so far include Cap Gemini, Aprimo and Outrider, a division of GroupM Search.

"Brought to you by Omniture" appears in the upper right corner of pages on the site, but otherwise branding by the company isn't obtrusive.

Gail Ennis, senior vice president for marketing at Omniture, said the company decided to create the site in response to client demand for a central source of knowledge on digital marketing. "It's a one-stop-shop for CMOs to increase their level of knowledge around the transition to digital marketing," said Ennis.

The move follows Omniture's release last week of a new dashboard geared to CMOs that allows them to track metrics in emerging categories such a mobile, video and social media, and to show marketing results in terms of revenue, brand health and business impact.

The CMO dashboard is an extension of the Online Marketing Suite Omniture unveiled earlier this year to help marketers optimize ad spending and boost conversions. Both steps reflect Omniture's efforts to cater more directly to CMOs as they expand digital marketing efforts.