Segment your data to monitor marketing channel performance.

For example, segmenting Net Cash Flow by marketing channel can reveal where you should be putting more budget, and help you optimize spend and resource allocation.

This is a sophisticated use case for ChartMogul, and you’ll have to do a bit of pre-work before you can start analyzing this data.

Tracking marketing channels and campaigns

Website visits can offer a ton of insight. When someone visits your site for the first time, you can typically access information such as referrer (the website that pushed them to yours), initial landing page, UTM codes (like medium, source, content, etc.), and other important details.

Let’s look at an example. Imagine you run an online streaming service like Netflix and you’ve released a new series called House of Cards. One of the goals of this series is to acquire new subscribers. Naturally, you’ll want to understand how successful your advertising efforts are in attracting new viewers and converting them into paid subscribers.

One way to do this is with UTM codes. If you share a post on Facebook announcing the new series, you might add parameters to the link in order to broadly identify the users who click through. These could look like utm_source=facebook, utm_medium=post, utm_campaign=house_of_cards and so on. Put all together, the link to the website would look like this:

www.example.com/signup?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=house_of_cards

Using a web analytics service like Google Analytics, you can see how many visitors clicked through that Facebook post to learn more about House of Cards. And with ChartMogul, you can now overlay that campaign information over important revenue metrics like monthly recurring revenue, subscriptions, customer lifetime value, and net cash flow. This helps you understand the business impact of a specific marketing campaign or channel.

If you’re not already sending this data into ChartMogul, please check out our article on custom attributes.

Any custom attributes pushed into ChartMogul will be available as filters. (We’ll touch on that more in a second.) If you want to see the custom attributes — such as marketing channel — for any individual customer, simply navigate to their customer record.

Segmenting your revenue data by marketing channel 

Now that you’ve added your marketing data, you can start analyzing your ChartMogul metrics to understand how marketing supports business growth.

Any custom attribute added to ChartMogul will be available in your list of filters.

Example 1: Measure the cash flow of paid versus owned marketing channels  

Let’s take a look at marketing’s impact on net cash flow. Navigate to the Net Cash Flow chart and select Add Filter. Click Marketing Channel > is and choose a channel or group of channels.

If you want to easily look at a category of marketing channels, you can use the contains operator. So instead of selecting each advertising channel individually, you could just enter Marketing Channel > contains > ad. (To make this work, you’ll want to use consistent naming conventions across channels.)

To compare channels, click New Segment and then repeat the process of selecting and adding a marketing channel.

In our example, we’re comparing the impact of advertisements against non-paid marketing channels on net cash flow. We want to see which channel is driving the most revenue.

Outside of ChartMogul, you can reconcile this data against your advertising spend and performance reports to understand the exact return on investment and adjust your campaigns appropriately.

Example 2: Identify your top-performing channels  

We can also compare each individual channel to see which is driving the most value. In the example below, you can see that net cash flow attributed to advertisements placed on Google and Twitter has increased at a faster rate than any other marketing channel.

Example 3: Measuring marketing's impact on customer lifetime value  

Looking at revenue coming in through marketing campaigns is great, but what we really want to see is that these new customers stay customers in the long term. Looking at customer lifetime value (LTV) helps us understand the quality of customers acquired through marketing channels.

In this example, we can see that both the customers acquired through ads on Twitter and Facebook had an LTV of over £4,000 in August and October 2019 as well as January 2022. If we’re spending less than £1,333 to acquire a new customer, we’ll have an LTV:CAC ratio of 3 or above, the ratio David Skok recommends.  Seeing the success in those specific months, we might want to repeat the same advertisement strategy in consecutive months. 

What we learned

• Understanding the performance of each marketing channel helps to make informed decisions where to allocate your budget 
• In order to maintain a good LTV:CAC ratio, we should aim for a ratio of 3 or better 

These are just some of the marketing insights you can glean through ChartMogul. For more granular insights, you can isolate the UTM codes tied to different Google Ads ad groups and keywords, or even different display creatives, in order to optimize your marketing strategy and campaign budget management.