Marketing Overview

Knowing which marketing channels and campaigns bring the best-quality customers is key to maximizing your ROAS. While advertising platforms often tell you how much it costs to acquire a customer, they don’t provide insights into the quality of those customers.

Let’s consider two campaigns as example:

• Campaign A: $50 per customer acquisition, but customers have an LTV of $100.

• Campaign B: $60 per customer acquisition, but customers have an LTV of $200.

Which one would you spend more on?

If you only look at the cost per customer, campaign A seems cheaper. But when you factor in LTV, campaign B delivers higher-quality customers, making it a more profitable investment.

RetentionX’s Marketing Overview gives you the full picture—helping you identify not just the cheapest but the most valuable channels and campaigns.

How it Works

The Marketing Overview is powered by your first-party data, including both UTM information and referrers. To ensure accurate tracking, make sure that the UTM tracking is properly set up for all your campaigns, so RetentionX can determine the source of your conversions.

A UTM parameter is a small piece of code added to the end of a URL to track clicks and measure the performance of marketing campaigns: https://fashionstore.com?utm_source=meta&utm_campaign= spring_sale&utm_content=video&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=runningshoes

All UTM parameters are automatically imported from your connected eCommerce platform. If this data is not (fully) captured, you can enrich your customer's marketing journey with additional session data from Google Analytics.

In addition, connect your advertising platforms with RetentionX to enrich the analysis with further key metrics, such as Ad Spend, Impressions, and Clicks. All metrics or calculations that use this data are marked with the icon of the respective advertising platform.

To evaluate the performance of your marketing efforts, toggle between a channel-level and campaign-level analysis as well select either first or last click as attribution model:

Channels versus Campaigns

Evaluate the performance of your marketing efforts at both a channel level and a campaign level. You can toggle between the two, depending on the level of granularity you need for your analysis.

• Marketing Channel: Your channels specified in the UTM Source parameter, e.g. Meta, Google, Klaviyo.

• Marketing Campaign: Breakdowns of specific campaigns under each marketing channel - specified in the UTM Campaign parameter.
  To easily identify campaigns in RetentionX’s marketing reports and automatically map imported campaign data from your ad accounts, we recommend using dynamic placeholders that assign the campaign name as the UTM campaign parameter, e.g., utm_campaign={{campaign.name}}.

To ensure accuracy in your analysis, we recommend creating a naming convention for your UTM parameters. For example, if you use “klaviyo” as a source in one campaign, make sure to consistently use “klaviyo” and avoid variations like “Klaviyo,” “email,” or others across different campaigns. However, putting this into practice is easier said than done. Over time, different UTM source tags may be added for the same marketing channel, resulting in different line items in your report for identical parameters. But don't worry, RetentionX allows you to consolidate your marketing sources under a single channel. Learn more about how to group your marketing sources under one channel here.

First Click versus Last Click

Most customers interact with multiple marketing touchpoints before converting. For example, a customer might click on an Instagram ad, but only convert after receiving an email reminder. Which marketing channel gets the credit? That’s where marketing attribution models come in. RetentionX offers two primary attribution models to credit the conversion to either a customer's first click or last click before the conversion.

• First Click: Credits the first touchpoint the customer interacted with.

• Last Click: Credits the last touchpoint the customer interacted with before converting.

The conversions within a selected time period are impacted by the attribution model. Specifically, either the date of the first click or last click (depending on your selection) must fall within the selected time period to be counted. Learn more about attribution models here.

Performance Metrics

It’s important to analyze more than just the number of customers acquired. As mentioned, you need to assess customer quality too. With RetentionX, you can measure the LTV of customers acquired through each channel and campaign, and compare it to the Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC). This balance ensures you're acquiring high-value customers at the lowest possible cost.

Here are all key  metrics to help you gain insights into your marketing performance:

• Purchases: The number of orders resulting from the marketing source or campaign; based on UTM parameter tracking.

• Conversions: The number of conversions tracked by the advertising platform. This number is imported and based on the attribution setup in the platform. While your first-party data ("Purchases") is always click-based, you may have chosen view-through attribution (VTA) in your Meta Ads settings, for example. VTA credits conversions from campaigns that are impression-based, so Meta would attribute conversions to users who were exposed to the ad without actually clicking on it. This can lead to a significantly higher number of "Conversions" compared to "Purchases".

• Attribution Rate: The attribution rate indicates the percentage of "Conversions" reported by your marketing platform that were also captured by your first-party tracking. It is calculated as Purchases / Conversions x 100. After integrating with Google Analytics 4 and thus enhancing the marketing journeys, an attribution rate over 70% is expected.

• New Customer Share: The percentage of new customers out of all "Purchases", representing the share of first-time orders associated with the UTM source or campaign tag.

• LTV: Average Lifetime Value of your new customers acquired via the channel or campaign, calculated by Sum of Net Revenue - COGS. In addition, we calculate the average LTV of your new customers after their first 30 days, 90 days, 1 year, 2 years, and 5 years. LTV calculations are based on actuals. For incomplete data sets, you can include our powerful predictions by adding the add-on Forecast Plus to your plan.

• CAC: Customer Acquisition Cost calculates the average cost you incur to gain a new customer in order to understand how effective your marketing campaigns are. It's calculated by (Ad Spend / Conversions) x New Customer Share. "Ad Spend" and "Conversions" are imported directly from the advertising platform once you have integrated with Meta, Google, and TikTok Ads accounts while "New Customer Share" is calculated based on your first-party data.

• Payback Period: The payback period represents the number of months it takes for LTV to be equal to CAC.

• Ad Spend: The amount you spend on advertising. This amount is imported directly from the advertising platform once you have integrated with Meta, Google, and TikTok Ads accounts.

• Impressions: Impressions represent the number of users who have seen a specific ad or collection. This metric is imported directly from the advertising platform once you have integrated with Meta, Google, and TikTok Ads accounts.

• Clicks: The number of times the ad is clicked. This metric is imported directly from the advertising platform once you have integrated with Meta, Google, and TikTok Ads accounts.

• Click-Through Rate: The percentage of ad impressions that resulted in a click. This metric is imported directly from the advertising platform once you have integrated with Meta, Google, and TikTok Ads accounts.

• Conversion Rate: The percentage of clicks that result in a conversion. It is imported directly from the advertising platform once you have integrated with Meta, Google, and TikTok Ads accounts.

• AOV: The Average Order Value of customers acquired, calculated by Sum of Gross Revenue / Number of Orders. Learn more here.

• Product Return Rate: The average percentage of products returned from orders placed through the specific channel or campaign in question.

• Gross Revenue: Gross revenue generated from each channel or campaign calculated as Purchases * AOV.

• Net Revenue: Net revenue generated from each channel or campaign calculated as Purchases * Net AOV.

• ROAS: ROAS represents the amount of revenue earned for every dollar spent on a marketing campaign. It is calculated by (LTV / CAC) x 100. RetentionX provides breakdowns of ROAS at 30 days, 90 days, 1 year, 2 years, and 5 years. For DTC brands, a 300% ROAS after 1 year is considered good, meaning that for every $100 spent on marketing, you generate $300 in LTV from your customers' first year. Learn more here.

Monitor Performance Over Time

Click on a channel or campaign to monitor its performance over time:

For Purchases, Conversions, CAC, Ad Spend, Impressions, Clicks, Gross Revenue and for ongoing observation periods that haven’t yet been completed (e.g., the current month or year), RX extrapolates the run rate based on historical data. Learn more about the run rate here.

Advanced Segmentation

If you want to analyze your marketing performance at a more granular level, you can group customers based on the UTM parameters Term, Medium, or Content using customer segments. This allows you to drill down into how each segment is performing, as you can easily apply these segments to your reports for deeper insights:

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