ROAS Overview: Measuring Your Ad Performance
The Ad Performance dashboard is your essential tool for understanding the true impact of your paid digital advertising. It goes beyond clicks and impressions to connect your ad spend directly to your marketing pipeline and revenue.
Through CaliberMind’s web tracker, paid clicks are linked to an ad source and campaign via UTMs. This integration enables a clear picture of your return on digital advertising.
It’s crucial for executives to visualize the ROI of their ad spend, which often represents a significant portion of their budget. This dashboard empowers them to make data-driven decisions and optimize their advertising strategies for maximum impact.
Key Questions the Ad Performance Dashboard Answers:
- Campaign Effectiveness: How many impressions/clicks on LinkedIn (or any other channel) does it typically take to generate a new lead or opportunity?
- Financial Return: For every dollar spent on advertising, how much pipeline or revenue did you generate last year, quarter, or month?
- Channel Optimization: Which advertising channel (e.g., Google Ads, LinkedIn, Bing, 6sense) delivers the best performance (CPM, CPC, CPL) and highest return?
- New Business Impact: What percentage of new business directly originates from your advertising and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns?
Here’s an example of a ROAS report (showing LinkedIn as a source):
UTM-Tracking Prerequisites:
In CaliberMind, there are 3 key mechanisms that enable ROAS:
- Setting up a website tracker to track “page visits” and “identify” users when they fill out a webform. We recommend using Analytics.JS.
- Connecting your Ad Platforms to bring in the performance data for each campaign.
- For any platforms that do not have a native integration we can bring in this data by replicating template. This needs to contain campaign ID, name, spend, URL with UTM parameters for matching and the impression plus click results.
- Remember to tagging your URLs with Ad IDs, Campaign IDs, and UTMs. See our best practices guide.
In the example below, you’ll see some query string parameters which are used tag the visit for reporting. This requires discipline and a strong process by your marketing team. Some Marketing Tools (like HubSpot) have the ability to help generate these URLs when building out landing pages. We, at CaliberMind, use HubSpot and our team has a pretty rigorous process when setting up each ad. You can see below as an example that the back-half of the URL has specific Ad and Campaign ID data in the URL’s Query String. These parameters are made specially to match up to spend and performance data from the Ad platform.
Marketing URL Example
Legend
Default settings*
We have a number of transformations that capture the source and campaign across various UTM naming conventions. You can view those within the platform under Settings->Website-> UTM Map. Some examples below.
- utm_source — which ad platform was used
- hsa_cam — which campaign id was used
- hsa_ad — which ad id was used
To change the defaults, we recommend non-advanced users to contact their CSM. Tracking ROAS can require some set up but the payoff to your organization’s decision-making will make it well worth your while!