June 25, 2015
How to Measure the ROI of Digital Advertising
It’s Friday at 6pm… John is about to walk out the door for a weekend of fishing and golf, when suddenly his boss rushes in and says, “John! I need to get all of the revenue numbers from our paid marketing campaigns for the board meeting on Monday morning!” John’s heart sinks. He sees his weekend slip away into the abyss of endless spreadsheets and VLOOKUPS trying to track down ROI. Have you ever spent thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on paid marketing campaigns and had no idea how much revenue they brought in? Then you need a way to measure your paid campaign ROI that’ll help you:
- Grow knowledge about which lead sources drive revenue
- Know where to invest your future marketing spend
- Provide tangible, concrete results for your boss
- Develop higher quality leads for your sales team
- Speed up your buying cycle
And no more lost weekends glazing over spreadsheets and running VLOOKUPS! All these benefits sound remarkable, but how do you make it happen? In this post, you’ll learn a quick and easy way to see your paid campaign revenue using Autopilot + Salesforce.
A step-by-step guide to measuring paid campaign ROI
This proven process creates a report showing the effectiveness of your marketing efforts on bottom line revenue. All it takes is four easy steps.
Step 1. Create a custom URL to track your paid campaign
Adding “UTM parameters” to a normal URL is how you tell it apart from others URLs. Normal URL: http://walterwhiteenterprises.com/todd-is-crazy Custom URL made with “UTMs”: http://walterwhiteenterprises.com/todd-is-crazy?utm_source=google&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=freeshirt UTMs are the format and code Google uses to track your campaigns. To create a UTM, use Google’s URL builder form: 
The four must-have components for a UTM are:
- Website URL: The URL of the landing page or web page your campaign links to.
- Campaign Source: The higher level source like “adwords,” ”facebook,” “adroll,” or “techcrunch”
- Campaign Medium: The medium through which the campaign is sent like “display,” “ppc,” “cpm,” “email,” “social,” or “referral”
- Campaign Name: The specific promotion or campaign like “newsletter-feb2015,” “free-shirt”, “lead-nurturing-whitepaper”
- Website URL: The URL of the landing page or web page your campaign links to.
- Campaign Source: The higher level source like “adwords,” ”facebook,” “adroll,” or “techcrunch”
- Campaign Medium: The medium through which the campaign is sent like “display,” “ppc,” “cpm,” “email,” “social,” or “referral”
- Campaign Name: The specific promotion or campaign like “newsletter-feb2015,” “free-shirt”, “lead-nurturing-whitepaper” As an example, let’s build the UTM for a display ad campaign our friend Jesse clicked. Original landing page URL = http://walterwhiteenterprises.com/free-shirt Source = “google” Medium = “display” Campaign name = “freeshirt” The result after plugging this into Google’s URL builder is… http://walterwhiteenterprises.com/vamonos-pest?utm_source=google&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=freeshirt
Step 2. Link to your custom URL when setting up your campaign
When you are setting up display ads, search engine marketing, social media sponsored posts, retargeting efforts, and other marketing campaigns, use a custom tracking URL for each. The more campaigns you run, the more custom tracking URLs you’ll have. That’s why it’s a good idea to set standard naming conventions to use within your company. To see what this looks like in the setup for a Google Display ad, let’s go back to our display ad campaign example: 
In this case, the spot to add the custom tracking URL from step 2 is the form field “Destination URL”. Where exactly to place your target URL will vary depending on the paid marketing channel.
Step 3. Segment existing customers based on marketing channel
In this step, you will use the custom tracking URL from step 2 to create a “smart segment” that shows which customers came from which paid campaign source. In Autopilot, take your list of paying customers and refine by source, medium, or campaign. This enables you to see how your marketing efforts are driving results at a higher-level all the way down to the effectiveness of individual campaigns. To find the segment of people who came from your Adwords campaigns, first refine by “paying customers” and then add “adwords ” as the “utm_source”. 
This creates a list of paying customers who started their journey by clicking on an Adwords campaign. 
Next, create a journey with your newly created smart segment that updates the “Lead Source” field to “Adwords,” like so… 
Assuming you’ve set up your Salesforce sync, this updates the lead source in Autopilot + Salesforce. The final step is next - running a report that shows the true ROI of your lead source.
Step 4. Run a report in Salesforce that shows the revenue per channel
The report to make in Salesforce to measure your paid campaign ROI is an opportunity report based on lead source. This report shows the amount of revenue brought in through each individual channel. Here’s an example of what a “closed opportunity” report in Salesforce looks like: 
From here you can create a dashboard to visualize the report for future reference. Check out this sample: 
The same process of create a custom URL → add tracking URL to campaign → segment paying customers by UTM → run an opportunity report based on lead source can be implemented for your display ads, retargeting efforts, search engine marketing, social media ads, and every other paid marketing channel to measure your ROI. To get started with measuring how much revenue your marketing dollars are bringing in, sign up for a free trial of Autopilot. Do you have another method for measuring your paid campaign ROI? Any pro tips that we missed? Let us know in the comments.
