You have already mastered the core of your revenue engine. Your ABM Funnel Guide showed you how accounts move through the journey, and your Attribution Guide showed you what marketing efforts get credit for pipeline and revenue.
Now, we move to the next level of analysis with two critical questions:
- “Is my paid advertising budget working?” We need to go beyond attribution to see if our ads are cost-effective.
- “Which accounts are actually interested in us right now?” We need to move from static, stage-based lists to dynamic, engagement-based priority.
This guide will show you how to use your Ad Performance and Engagement dashboards to answer these questions and build a truly data-driven marketing and sales strategy.
Part 1: The Ad Performance Dashboard (Optimizing Your Budget)
Your attribution models tell you if an ad influenced a deal. Your Ad Performance dashboard tells you at what cost. It unifies all your ad platforms (Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) into a single view to measure efficiency.
Use Case 1: The “Budget Optimizer” (Digital Marketing Manager)
Scenario: You are planning your budget for the next quarter. You need to know which platforms and campaigns are actually cost-effective so you can spend your money wisely.
Core Metrics: Ad Spend, CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions), CPC (Cost Per Click), CPL (Cost Per Lead), Total Attribution
Best Practices:
Start with the 10,000-Foot View:
- Look at the main KPIs: Ad Spend, Total Impressions, Total Clicks, and Total Leads. This gives you a high-level average.
Check the Advertising Funnel (Impressions -> Clicks -> Leads). A low click-to-lead conversion rate might not be an ad problem, but a landing page problem.
Find Your Most Efficient Platform:
- Go to the Platform Performance table. This is where you compare your channels head-to-head.
- Example Analysis:
- Google Ads: Has a low CPC ($0.67) and a CPL ($1,050). It’s very efficient at generating a high volume of leads.
- LinkedIn: Has a high CPC ($12.79) and a very high CPL ($346,550). It is much more expensive.
Insight: Your Google Ads are your “volume” engine, while LinkedIn is your “premium” channel. You are paying 246x more for a LinkedIn lead. (The next step, which links to your other guides, is to ask: “Is that $346k LinkedIn lead worth 346x more? Does it create a bigger deal?”).
Find Your Best and Worst Campaigns:
- Drill down into the Campaign Performance table. This is where you find what to cut and what to scale.
- Example Analysis:
- High Performer: “Paid Search – ABM” (Google Ads) has a low CPC ($0.14) and a great CPL ($311.00). This campaign is a workhorse.
- Low Performer: “Detailed Search” (Google Ads) has a massive CPC ($36.24) and a high CPL ($5,828). This campaign is burning money.
Action: You have a clear, data-driven recommendation: Shift budget away from the “Detailed Search” campaign and scale up the “Paid Search – ABM” campaign to maximize your lead volume while lowering your average CPL.
Tie Ad Spend Directly to Pipeline Value (Ad Attribution Tab):
- While the Summary tab shows cost per lead, the Attribution tab (or combined view) shows cost per pipeline dollar. This is how you prove revenue value.
- Action: Use the Attribution Model filter (e.g., W-Shaped model for a holistic view). Use the Campaign Performance table which now includes attribution metrics (not shown in the standard view).
- Key Metrics: Compare the Ad Spend column with the Total Attribution column.
Insight: A campaign with $8M in Ad Spend and $65M in Total Attribution has a 8.69x Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). This proves the campaign is a massive revenue contributor, regardless of how cheap or expensive its CPL might be. Focus your budget expansion on these high-ROAS campaigns.
Use Case 2: Identifying Trends for the Marketing Analyst
Scenario: Your boss asks, “Our average CPL spiked by 30% last month. What happened?”
Core Metrics: CPL, CPM, Total Cost (over time)
Best Practices:
- Visualize the Problem:
- Use the Total Cost and CPL Over Time chart. You can visually pinpoint the exact week or month that your CPL (Cost per Lead) spiked.
- Diagnose the Cause:
- Cross-reference this with the Total Impressions and CPM Over Time chart.
- If CPM also spiked: The ad market was just more expensive (e.g., holiday season, increased competition). This was an external factor.
- If CPM was flat but CPL spiked: This is an internal problem. It means your ads were shown, but they failed to convert clicks into leads at the same rate. Your conversion rate dropped.
- Find the Culprit:
- Action: Filter your Campaign Performance table to the specific month the spike occurred. Sort by CPL. You will likely find one or two “Detailed Search” or “Competitor” campaigns that overspent and under-delivered, dragging your entire average down. You can now pause those specific campaigns.
Part 2: The Engagement Overview Dashboard (Prioritizing Your Time)
You now know how accounts move (Funnel) and what ads brought them in (Attribution & Ad Performance). The final piece is knowing who to talk to right now.
Engagement scoring moves you beyond static funnel stages. It is a powerful feature that establishes Relative Buyer Intent based on a weighted, dynamic score. It answers, “Which accounts are hot, and which are cold?”
Use Case 1: Sales Prospect Prioritization
Scenario: Your sales team is overwhelmed. They have hundreds of accounts in their name and don’t know who to call first. They are wasting time on cold accounts.
Core Metrics: Engagement Score, Eng. Score Change Last 30, Engaged People
Best Practices:
1. Stop Using Static Lists. Start Using Dynamic Lists.
- Go to the **Engagement Overview: Companies** tab. The **Company Detail** table is your sales team’s new “call list.”
2. Leverage Dynamic Prioritization:
- Engagement Score (Benefit): This score is a benefit because it represents the cumulative value of the account’s history with your brand, ensuring long-term highly-interested accounts are always recognized and visible for nurture.
- Eng. Score Change Last 30 (Feature): This metric is a benefit because it identifies accounts that are surging in interest right now, providing the dynamic trigger for immediate sales outreach. It acts as a real-time intent signal.
- Insight: An account with a 300-point score is good. But an account with a 100-point score that gained 80 of those points this week is a 5-alarm fire. That’s the account to call today.
3. Check for “Air Cover”:
- Before calling, look at the `Engaged People` column. If an account has a high score but only 1 `Engaged People`, it’s just one person browsing. If it has 17 `Engaged People`, it means a whole buying committee is active. This account is ready for a sales conversation.
- Action: Tell your sales team to build their daily call lists from the **Company Detail** table, prioritizing accounts with both a high `Engagement Score` and a high `Eng. Score Change Last 30`.
Use Case 2: Persona Identification and Demand Gen Strategy
Scenario: You need to plan your content and campaigns for the next quarter. You need to know what content is actually resonating and with which personas.
Core Metrics: Contribution to Score, Scored Events, Job Level, Campaign Type
Best Practices:
1. Find Your Power-Users:
- Go to the Engagement Overview: People tab.
- Look at the Contribution to Score Over Period (Top 10 by Job Level) chart. This shows you who is engaging. You might see that “Director” and “Manager” levels are driving 60% of your engagement, while “VP” level is flat.
- Insight: Your content is resonating perfectly with practitioners, but not with executives. You may need a new content track for that VP-level persona.
2. Find Your Power-Channels:
- Go to the Engagement Overview: Campaigns tab.
- Look at the Campaign by Channel Detail table and sort by Contribution (descending).
- Insight: You might find that “Branding” and “Combining for Unified Strategy” are your top two engagement drivers, while some of your expensive “Paid Social” campaigns are near the bottom. This means your owned and earned channels are driving deeper engagement than your organic channels and some of your other paid social channels.
- Action: You now have a complete strategy: You know your “Director” and “Manager” personas are your most active. You also know they are engaging most via “Paid Search” and “Paid Social.” Your next-quarter plan is clear: Double down on LinkedIn content and optimize your chatbot playbooks to serve this audience.
Use Case 3: Specialized Reporting Requests Made Easier
Scenario: A sales leader asks you a very specific question: “Which of our webinar campaigns are engaging ‘Aerospace’ companies?”
Core Metrics: Rows (Campaign), Columns (Industry), Metric (Contributed to Score)
Best Practices:
1. Use Your Pivot Table:
- Go to the Engagement Overview: Explore tab. This is a powerful, flexible tool for answering custom questions.
- Set Rows: “Campaign”
- Set Columns: “Industry”
- Set Metric: “Contributed to Score”
2. Get the Answer in Seconds:Action: You can see a grid of all your campaigns and how much engagement they are driving in every single industry. You can filter for the “Aerospace” column and give your sales leader a precise list of the top-performing webinars for their target accounts.