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How is CaliberMind ROAS Reporting Different than Insights ROI?

There are many ways to do anything in marketing and marketing analytics, and we think it’s important for you to understand the pluses and minuses of these options. We’re going to briefly describe how the legacy ROAS reports work, how the new Insights reports work, and then dive into how they’re different. For more on what a “good” return is using CaliberMind or why CaliberMind reports numbers differently than your advertising platform, click here.

How Does CaliberMind Think of “Return”?

CaliberMind calculates return as the dollars “credited” to certain touchpoints divided by the cost of those touchpoints. The attribution model you select will determine how much or how little each touchpoint will receive. For more information on which attribution model to use when, click here.

Remember: If you report on different attribution models to calculate the return of different tactics, you will overstate the tactic’s impact. This is because each model allocates 100% of the opportunity value. Stacking one model on another will result in higher pipeline and bookings numbers than your sales team reported for the same period.

How Do Legacy ROAS Reports Work?

The Ad Performance by Platform dashboard in the original CaliberMind app gives marketers one way to view return on investment. It focuses specifically on opportunities that can be related to digital advertising events in CaliberMind (for more on Events, click here).

A few things to note about this report:

  1. The date selection applies to every metric and column individually. For example, when you read the Pipeline column, that pipeline was generated in the date range selected regardless of when the related digital ad was clicked. At the same time, the “clicks” column will show the number of clicks that happened in your digital advertising platform during the same selected period.
  2. ROAS is an estimate of return based on weighted pipeline associated with the platform. Weighted pipeline is the opportunity amount multiplied by the probability of the stage.

It’s important to know that the data is not cohorted and return on advertising spend is an estimate that still considers open pipeline. This report is useful when you’re looking for ratios to use when planning your budget, but will not be as accurate when assessing individual campaign performance.

How Do Insights Return on Investment Reports Work?

The Return on Investment reports in CaliberMind use the same event methodology and multi-touch models that the legacy reports use, but there are some fundamental differences that ensure the two reports will not line up.

Some things to know:
  1. Return is calculated for all campaigns and will take into account campaign costs in your CRM if your Actual Campaign Cost fields are populated.
  2. Return on investment is calculated based on finalized bookings, not weighted pipeline.
  3. The data filter applies to when the campaign events (recorded clicks) took place.
  4. All data is cohorted by the campaign event date. So if you look at this month’s ROI, the number is likely to be 0. It’s important to know the average time from first touch to closed-won to understand when your numbers can be considered final.
  5. If you have a long deal cycle and want to know which ads are working today, clicking on the platform in the main report will allow you to sort campaigns by early indicators like pipeline, leads, and opportunities.

It’s important to know that digital touches are tracked according to the UTM parameters associated with the first webpage visit recorded by CaliberMind that day. If no UTM parameters were captured, we assume that it was an organic visit.

CaliberMind has to follow the same rules the rest of your technology must follow. If people block cookies or use an ad blocker, we won’t be able to show the touch as related to a digital campaign.

It’s also important to know that CaliberMind thinks of the ad that was clicked and the form that was filled out on the landing page as two different events, and each of the events will get attribution. This ensures that we can view and calculate ROI on digital touchpoints, but it also means that we may also be crediting a campaign in your CRM with the same amount of attribution “credit” as the digital touch.

How Are “Insights” ROI Results Different?

Again, the biggest differences between the two reports are:

  1. Return is calculated against bookings in Insights and weighted pipeline in the legacy reports
  2. The Insights report shows how campaigns perform over time by cohorting the data by when the campaign activity took place, then tracking how that later turns into pipeline and then finally bookings. The legacy report looks at each metric as an independent snapshot in time.

To further illustrate the difference cohorting makes, let’s look at a video that breaks down the differences:

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