The Essential Guide to Marketing Measurement

Hi everyone, 

It’s time for another bite to chew on. 

Do you know what’s even more important than strategy and tactics?

Measurement. 

If you don’t know what impact your efforts are having - then you can’t adjust, improve, or change course. You’re just stumbling around in the dark. 

Even worse, if you’re measuring the wrong thing, it means you could be running confidently in the wrong direction.

You need a compass to guide the ship. And you need to be sure it points true north.  

That’s why we’re going to take you through what we do for our marketing measurement and attribution today. 

Because you can have great ideas and great-looking assets, but it doesn’t matter if you can’t tie them back to business impact. 

On the Menu

• First - Choosing a North star

• Second - The day-to-day decisions

• Third - Attribution windows

Choosing a North star 🌟

There are a lot of proxy measures when it comes to measuring performance marketing. 

• CTR

• Hook rate

• Hold rate

• Playthroughs

Blah blah blah.

Most metrics can be useful in certain circumstances, but to get started you really need to nail down what actually matters to your business. 

And to do that, you need to go beyond the in-platform click-and-view stuff and get into your financials. 

• What does it cost to cost to acquire your customers?

• What does it cost to ship them the product?

• How much do you have left over? 

Yup, it’s contribution margin. Revenue - variables costs = CM. 

Our number one metric is CM per new user (because existing customers are not as expensive to “re-acquire” and they can skew your results).

We know if we’re NC CM positive on the day, then marketing is adding money to the business. 

Of course, you can’t get this measure from Shopify’s dashboard or Meta account manager. In In-platform ROAS won’t tell you your NC CM. 

You’re going to need a tool for that. 

At Obvi, we use Triple Whale. It’s our daily go-to platform in judging our marketing efficiency. 

All of our variable expenses go into TW (COGS, fees, shipping, etc.) and it helps us back out an accurate net profit number**.

We are also able to connect our various marketing channels so we have a single source of truth, rather than having to manually collect results from each platform. 

Our marketing mix includes Facebook, Instagram, Google, TikTok, Influencers, and some other minor paid channels, so aggregating them under one “roof” saves a lot of time and hassle. 

**Of course, this depends on you knowing all of your variable fees, so as we always say around here, make sure your financial house is in order so you can be confident in your CM. 

Also - don’t stop at CM tracking. We have a P&L report that our finance team updates and sends to leadership DAILY: 

In partnership with Triple Whale 🐳

As mentioned, we use Triple Whale for business intelligence and attribution. We look at it every day to help guide our paid media decisions.

So we’re pretty intrigued by their new server-side tracking feature - Sonar.

We’ve got a sneak peek at the new release and talked to some brands who have used it so far, and it looks like this could be a game changer for high-growth DTC brands. 

What is it exactly? 

Sonar sends enriched data back to Facebook via the Meta Conversions API and helps you identify more users on your site.

That means →

• Better event match quality (EMQ)

• Capture every conversion

• Close user journey gaps

• Identify returning customers

• Improve targeting

Sonar + Triple Whale first-party pixel + business intelligence tools = powerful single source of truth. 

Your targeting on Meta will improve, your email flows will convert more customers, and your understanding of what’s working will be clearer.

One of the first Sonar users we talked to was able to substantially increase their Meta spend (+58%) thanks to a major boost in conversions (+150%) and ROAS (+60%). We can’t wait to test it ourselves.  

If you’re looking for a first-party data or BI solution, you can’t go wrong with Triple Whale. 

And now that they have cutting-edge data enrichment as part of their suite of tools, it’s a great time to consider signing up. Just in time for the Q4 rush.  

You can learn more about Sonar here. 

The day-to-day stuff 📋

So you’ve set aside all of the proxy measures and decided to focus on net daily contribution margin from new customers. 

How does that impact your decision-making on the ground you ask? 

It’s simple when you’re in the black - see what’s ripping and put more $ behind it. 

It can get more complicated when things are down. 

Here’s a scenario:

Let’s say the day isn’t looking very good - we’re below our CM target. We’ll go with a break-even ratio of 1.5, but the account is at 1 for the day. 

Here’s how it might play out:

1. Go and look at the performance of each channel: FB, Instagram, Google, TikTok

2. Find a sub-1 return on TikTok, but everything else looks fine

3. We look at TikTok ad set attribution in TW → One ad set is getting spend but not performing

4. We turn it down to avoid veering below our CM target for the day.

Sometimes you will find underperforming ads or ad sets that a platform is pouring money into. Usually, it’s a new asset that hasn’t been in-market for very long and maybe Facebook has decided “Hey let’s give this all the money today.”

Because you don’t have a lot of purchases or history behind it, that can be pretty unnerving -  especially if the platform reports bad numbers for the ad despite all the money going into it.  

In these situations, we consider our aggregated CM target first. Are we positive? Is revenue going up? 

If so, that gives us some flexibility around decision-making. Because a high spend suggests the system thinks the ad might be a winner, so you don’t want to turn it off prematurely. 

Next, we check out the Triple Whale attribution. 

With the TW pixel, our first-party data refreshes in real time, providing a more immediate view of performance. This allows us to make faster decisions.

So when the TW pixel shows strong results, we can confidently scale up. If both Meta and TW data suggest poor performance, we tend to adjust our spend downwards to protect our CM.

We find having two ways to check performance like this is very helpful in these circumstances. 

Attribution windows and TOFU considerations 🪟

We optimize around a one-day click attribution window. It’s pretty stringent, but we do it for a couple of reasons:

1. We have a high daily budget, so same-day “click then buy” signals are a quick and clean feedback loop.

2. We spend across a lot of channels, so if we open the window up to 7-day click then there’s a higher possibility of overlap between them.

If your spend is lower and/or you are mostly using a single marketing channel, you should be okay with a 7-day window. This is just what works for Obvi at this phase of our business.  

Something to consider -

Understand your brand’s consideration cycle and LTV. 

If you’re selling a high AOV item, it’s going to be tough to optimize ads around a 1-day click break even. 

You can still leverage a 1DC attribution window, but you need to figure out how it backs out to profit over time. 

For instance, if you sell cookware in $500 bundles, maybe you determine that a 0.40 1DC CM actually ladders up to a profitable ad or ad set 7 or 28 days down the road. 

Similarly, if you have a high rate of subscriptions or re-purchases, you should be able to develop, a 3-month profit model that will allow you set a lower 1DC target. 

All of this to say - your business is different than ours. So you’ll need the tools and the information to help determine what is actually optimal for your bottom line.   

Other factors - prospecting and TOFU

“Hey what about top of funnel stuff?” 

You are probably wondering this right now aren’t you?

For sure not all of your marketing activity happens at the “sale” level. You have to work to get people there. 

And sometimes not all of your creative is going to have the best CPA or sales numbers because it’s working in that “problem unaware” or “solution unaware” stage of the funnel. 

Those ads are not going to be as efficient as your “problem-aware” and “brand-aware” creative. And nowhere near as efficient as BOFU stuff like sales, discounts, and offers.  

That’s when it can help to go into your ads manager and understand how Facebook is deploying your ads. On top of your messaging, this can give you a clue as to where in the funnel they’re landing. 

Back in the day, you could build this out manually with prospecting vs retargeting campaigns. 

But if you go pure broad targeting (like we do), then you’re letting the Meta algo make those decisions. 

The two things to look at here are CPM and frequency. 

• Higher CPM + frequency = lower funnel ad.

• Lower CPM + frequency (and a high unique reach) = a prospecting ad. 

It’s important to keep this in mind because, while efficiency matters, so does reach. 

You can’t scale your ad account by simply retargeting interested buyers. You’ll run out of those if you aren’t constantly filling your funnel with new prospects.

Which is why you want to make sure you have a diversity of ads with some of them speaking to users at the awareness and pre-awareness levels. 

We’re not saying accept bloated CPAs from your top-of-funnel ads. You need them to have a certain efficiency as well (cost caps help here). 

Just be sure that → 

• You have creative that is prospecting for you with higher reach, lower CPMS, and lower frequency numbers than your middle or bottom-funnel creative.

• The blended average in your accounts is hitting your contribution margin goals. 

One of the best ways to fill your funnel? Influencer marketing. 

This is actually where a lot of top-of-funnel awareness for Obvi comes from these days. 

The easy way to evaluate these campaigns is CPM → Take what the content costs to make and divide it by the number of impressions it generates. 

If you have a lot of influencer and UGC campaigns getting a lot of reach (alone or in aggregate) at a reasonable CPM, it’s a great way to prospect for your brand. 

We also track sales from influencers (via utm tags and affiliate codes), but our primary metric with them is CPM. 

Then we take the best stuff and feed it back into the paid ads flywheel via UGC mashups, white labeling, and messaging research ♻️  

Put it together

Here’s the marketing measurement checklist:

✅ Choose a north star metric tied to your bottom line 

✅ Use measurement tools that bring clarity to the day-to-day decisions

✅ Optimize your attribution settings around your brand and product

✅ Make sure to fill your funnel so you don’t run out of prospects

If you get these pieces in place, it’s one more small step to layer on your fixed expenses so you can have a holistic net cash perspective on your business. 

Every day. 

This setup is what has helped us scale confidently (and profitably) and is one of the reasons we are currently in the best cash positions in Obvi’s history.

If we can do it, so can you. 

All the best, 

Ron and Ash