How to Use Northbeam to Scale Marketing Campaigns Effectively

A guide on how to scale campaigns intentionally, effectively, and profitably

Once you’ve learned how to build and monitor your promotional campaigns and managing budgets and bid, the next step is to scale winning campaigns to fuel growth. Every brand does it a little bit differently depending on their unique goals, products, and strategies. In this article, we’ll review what to observe and identify in your Northbeam dashboard to justify scaling a winning digital media campaign. 

Determine which ads are performing the best

  1. Log in to your Northbeam dashboard
  2. Navigate to and click on the Sales Tab on the left panel

Set Up Your Northbeam KPI Benchmarks

In the Sales Page, we recommend you go platform by platform to set benchmark KPIs for important metrics such as ROAS or CAC. (If eligible, accounts must have consistent spend on the platform and at least 90 days worth of data to set Benchmarks.)  

Once you have those set, use the Breakdown By toggle at the top of the Sales Page to filter one Platform at a time by clicking Select “Clear” and choose only the platform you want to look at.

Evaluating your Campaigns, Ad Sets (Targeting), and Ads (Creatives) against your Core and Soft KPIs

  • At this point you should have created multiple Saved Views with many of the metrics that you will need for evaluating your Campaigns, Ad Sets and Ads.
  • Take a look at the key metrics starting at the campaign level, then the Ad Set/Group level and then down to the Ads level.
    • Utilize your Saved Views to get an idea what you should be expecting from each campaign, (a 1.2x ROAS, or $55 1st Time CAC for example) plus soft metrics (% of New Visits over 65%.)
    • For Ad Sets maybe you are evaluating these on ROAS or CAC, but mix in some soft metrics like CTR and ECR (Conversion Rate) on New & Returning Visitors to see if the Ad Set is converting better on New or Returning customers.
    • Ads, perhaps you are looking at a combination of CAC/ROAS and, ECR(Conversion Rate) & AOV on New and Returning customers.  Is there a particular ad that has a higher conversion rate and AOV that new customers buy more often and buy more from.
  • For the top performers: are these worth spending more on? For your worst performers: is it time to give up on these? These are all questions you should be keeping in mind as you review your data regularly until hunches solidify into trends. You can also add a further filter of First-time vs Returning metrics by clicking the Customize menu under to the top right of the Sales Table Data and choosing First-time vs Returning metrics like ECR (Conversion Rate) 1st Time Customers and ECR (Conversion Rate) Returning Customers . If your business relies heavily on keeping new customers to a certain performance level, this will be a very useful tool. 

Core & Soft KPIs Explained

Before you start scaling, what KPIs and targets would entail success? Internally, which metrics does your management team tend to favor when evaluating campaign performance? Although we understand the need for nuance, we find that generally our customers tend to look at two categories of KPIs: Core and “Soft” KPIs.

Core KPI are metrics that define the overall performance and health of your business like Revenue, Media Efficiency Ratio (MER) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) 

If these numbers aren’t healthy and trending in the right direction, it’s probably not a good idea to start scaling spend without trying to troubleshoot a few things first. If these numbers do look good because topline growth is healthy, then we recommend looking at “Soft” KPIs next before allocating additional spend. 

How to view your Core KPIs

  1. Login to your Northbeam dashboard
  2. Navigate to the Overview Page if you’re not already there
  3. Under Cash Snapshot, review Revenue, MER, and Cost per New Customer
  4. Click the dropdown menu under MER to find Cost per New Customer. 

“Soft” KPI are metrics that help paint a fuller picture and provide more clarity on what’s actually going on with your campaigns like New Site Visits, % of New Visits, Email Signups, Conversion Rate, Click-Through Rate, Cost Per Click, etc.

We recommend using these metrics whenever you need to further investigate a campaign, regardless of performance. If a campaign is going poorly, looking at these “Soft” KPIs can help you troubleshoot what part of the funnel is causing the most drop-off. If a campaign is going well, you can validate the performance using “Soft” KPIs to make sure the underlying foundation is solid before scaling. 

How to view your “Soft” KPIs

  1. Login to your Northbeam dashboard
  2. Navigate to and click on the Sales Tab
  3. You can find blended (overall) KPIs at the top of the page
  4. Scroll down to the data tables if you want granular insights at the platform, campaign, ad set or ad level. 
  5. At the far right of the table, click the “Customize” button. 
  6. Select all the “Soft” KPIs offered by Northbeam. 
  7. Click save to apply changes to the data table. 

✏️ NOTE: If you have not saved a view when you were Customizing Your Dashboard, click the Save+ button at the top left of the page, so that you can easily return to this view so that you can easily get to this view again.

Set your targets using KPIs

Let’s go over an example from one of our customers on how they set targets using a Core KPI: ROAS. Note that your business may prefer to set targets using another metric, but in this case this brand likes to use ROAS as a convenient catch-all metric for overall performance. 

After monitoring and benchmarking their blended ROAS numbers, this brand came up with a scale-based rule system for their internal team: if an ad or campaign fell below 0.45x ROAS then the team would turn those ads off. If a campaign hit at least 0.75x ROAS then the team would scale spend after looking at Core and “Soft” KPIs to ensure performance was replicated with other metrics. In the gray zone in between, the team mainly looks at “Soft” KPIs to try and improve performance or gives the campaign more time to definitely skew one way or the other. 

Other best practices for scaling marketing campaigns

Here are a few other best practices to keep in mind when scaling your campaigns: 

  • Keep track of new visits! New, incremental purchases are key to healthy, sustainable growth over time. Even if a campaign is performing well with other KPIs like ROAS, if the traffic isn’t ultimately going towards new customers you may want to hold back on scaling until you can figure out why (for prospecting campaigns). 
  • First-Time vs Returning Purchase Ratio: for any given prospecting campaign, ideally at least 60-70% should be going towards new purchases). There are a couple of preset Saved Views that show New vs. Returning Customer data based on CAC and Revenue (ROAS), so that you can confirm the bulk of your spend is going towards recruiting new customers.

💡TIP: Click on Customize and pull in the fields of Visits, New Visits and New Visit % in an effort to get a better understanding of how many new visitors you are driving in addition to new sales revenue.

  • Align on targets and goals using your Northbeam dashboard 3x a week: During high seasonality times such as Black Friday/ Cyber Monday, your team may find more frequent reviews valuable. Leverage Custom Labels so you can view certain segments/ categories of campaigns with ease.