Revolutionizing Marketing ROI: CaliberMind's Innovative New Approach

Measuring the Return on Investment (ROI) of marketing costs often means wrangling data from multiple advertising platforms, incomplete details about campaign costs and uncertainty about the impact of recent strategies on overall pipeline contribution. 

CaliberMind’s Brand New ROI report has been completely reimagined from the ground up to provide insights, and answer questions that were previously difficult to resolve. The newest ROI report simplifies historical ROI analysis and surfaces real-time, actionable insights for optimizing budgets across marketing channels and campaigns. 

The key innovations that make these new reports work include: a brand new interface that allows customers to manually input budgets for any channel; and a unique take on the concept of a lookback window that will allow users to shorten the feedback loop between dollars invested and dollars attributed. Shortening the feedback loop makes it possible to compare performance over time for campaigns regardless of how recently the dollars were invested.

CaliberMind Customers can now easily answer questions such as:

  • What was my ROI for certain channels the past 2 quarters? 
  • How is that changing over time? 
  • What’s working? What’s not? 
  • What channels are improving? 
  • and most importantly… Where should I invest my next dollar?
Screnshot of the New ROI Reporting Dashboard from CaliberMind

The New ROI User Interface

Previously ROI calculations were limited to the cost data that ad platforms could pull in. Pulling this data from ad platforms is unwieldy and tracking hidden costs for other channels is often a challenge for marketers. 

For example, A company spending $60,000 a year on their marketing automation platform previously would not be able to measure the ROI of the email channel. CaliberMind allows you to input the cost of a company's MAP, and can even allocate dollars for the cost to manage it. 

Users now have access to a consolidated platform to measure the ROI of marketing efforts. This eliminates the tedious process of extracting data from attribution tools, transferring it to spreadsheets, adding cost data separately, and repeating the entire process for minor filter adjustments.

A Shorter Feedback Loop

In a standard B2B attribution deployment there is often a look-back window of 365 days or longer. This means that ROI numbers can change for up to a year after the initial investment is made. Making this muddier, until a year after the investment has been made, marketers could not compare numbers reliably as numbers from different dates were likely to change, and do so at different rates. 

CaliberMind has reimagined the lookback window as a lookahead window that marketers can adjust during analysis, making it easier to evaluate channel performance over different windows of time instead of waiting until the end of a calendar period to analyze. This can all be done without having to update the lookback window that used in existing attribution reports.

New Concepts in ROI

Touch Date Aggregation

Calibermind’s approach to dates has evolved considerably over the past 2 years. Most legacy reports were based on opportunity creation or close dates. Insights reports allow users to toggle between opportunity creation date, opportunity close date and event (touch) dates. 

New ROI reporting offers a streamlined approach to date selection in order to provide clear, actionable insights into channel and campaign performance. The reports in the new ROI dashboard are based on Touch date (or event date) and the date of marketing investment. 

For example: A company invests $10,000 into a campaign in January, and then an additional $1,000 in both February and March. That campaign yields 100 touches in January and 0 touches in both February and March. In February those 10 touches from January are assigned attribution totaling $25,000, and then in March another 10 touches from January are assigned attribution totaling $25,000. 

Using the opportunity create date, the math looks like:

Month

ROI

Attribution

Cost

January

0X

$0

$10,000

February

25X

$25,000

$1,000

March

25X

$25,000

$1000

Using touch dates the math looks like:

Month

ROI

Attribution

Cost

January

5x

$50,000

$10,000

February

0x

$0,000

$1,000

March

0X

$0,000

$1,000

If these numbers are aggregated quarterly the math becomes identical, but viewing legacy reports on a monthly basis might lead a user to conclude the campaign over performed in February and March while under performing in January, when in reality the opposite was true.  That delay can be very problematic, and as such the new ROI reports (and the reports in insights) are only aggregated based on touch date.

ROI Lock/Look Ahead

The expected long delay between budget spend and user interaction makes it impossible to compare how ROI changes over time. By default, CaliberMind uses a 365 day look-back window, meaning that from the date attribution is assigned, touches are eligible attribution if they happened in the 365 days prior. That means ROI numbers based on touch date can continue to increase for up to one year after the touch happened which is often too late for marketers to evaluate ad strategy.  

To shorten this feedback loop, we can configure ROI reports with a “look ahead” period that you input as number of days. Think of the look ahead period as the inverse of the look-back window. For example, if you select a look ahead period of 90 days, that means that solely for the purpose of calculating ROI, attribution is assigned during the first 90 days after the touch happened. Attribution will continue to be assigned in CaliberMind’s system for other reports, but it won’t be factored into the ROI calculation. 

When more time than the look ahead window has passed for a given date, we call that date locked. Locked means that, with few exceptions, ROI will NOT increase in a meaningful way over time as new attribution is assigned since no new attribution can be factored into the calculation. For date periods where enough time has NOT yet passed, we call those periods unlocked.

A shorter feedback loop allows you to compare more recent ROI data over time. By setting a look-ahead window to 90 days, you can look at data from 91 to 180 days ago and compare it. Since all dates in 91 to 180 days ago period are locked, we can compare channels or campaigns in an “apples-to-apples way.”

Top Down ROI

Top Down ROI is a new concept in CaliberMind. Along with these new ROI dashboards, CaliberMind has created a Channel Budget input feature. This allows customers to input cost data for various channels. This is a free form entry that allows users to input whatever cost they want for each channel, giving users flexibility and control of budgeting scenarios.

In the past Cost data in CaliberMind was limited to what could be pulled in from existing datasets. This meant cost data was limited to campaigns pulled from CRMs and from ad platforms such as Google and Linkedin. By allowing users to input costs as they choose, they account for channels where cost data doesn’t exist (ex the cost of an annual subscription to Marketo) and if desired include management costs (ex employee salaries).

Bottom Up ROI

Bottom Up ROI is ROI where cost data is based exclusively on cost data pulled from data connectors, and is the traditional way costs were calculated.

Get Started with New ROI Reporting

The new CaliberMind ROI dashboard empowers users to analyze marketing performance by channel or by campaign. Here's how each differs:

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