How to Use Northbeam for Creative Strategy and Reporting

Learn how to prep your creative team, evaluate your creatives performance, and optimize them for success

Our platform offers rich and powerful insights into campaign performance for creative optimization. We highly recommend onboarding and training your creative team and stakeholders on how to use Northbeam so they can evaluate campaign performance whenever they want on the platform without needing to ask someone who knows how to use it. 

In this article, we’ll cover common workflows and how to track and evaluate your campaigns and creatives using the Sales Page. 

Navigate to the platforms you want to evaluate the creatives of

1. Login to your Northbeam dashboard 
2. Navigate to and click on the Sales Tab, 
3. Navigate to the Saved View you have created in order to evaluate your Core KPIs and Soft Metrics.
4. If you have not created a Saved View
1. Using the Breakdown toggle, select “Platform (Northbeam)” - This will automatically display all relevant Platforms that you’re running campaigns in.
2. If you want to filter to only your top channels click into the Breakdown menu until you see a blue bar. Select “click to edit” and then press “Clear” to remove all selections.
3. Choose only the platforms you want to see, and then click “Save” and “Apply.” 
4. When you scroll down to the data table below the graphs in the Sales Tab, you’ll see these changes are now reflected. 
5. Click Customize to add in the metrics that you would like to use in order to evaluate your creatives.
6. If this is a view that you plan on using to evaluate your ads with in the future Click the Save button in the top left corner and save it. Learn more about our Saved Views by clicking here.

Suggested metrics for evaluating creatives

The following are metrics that we suggest you add in order to understand the impact of your campaigns creatives.

• Spend
• Visits - how many total visits driven by this ad.
• % of New Visits - the % of new visits driven by this ad to the site.
• CAC - Customer Aquisition Cost for this ad creative.
• ROAS - Return on Ad Spend for this ad creative.
• Transactions - Total transactions driven by this ad creative. 
• Revenue - Total revenue driven by this ad creative. 
• CTR - The click through rate for this ad.
• ECR (Conversion Rate) - The blended conversion rate for this ad.
• ECR 1st Time - The conversion rate for this ad on 1st Time Customers to your business.
• ECR Returning - The conversion rate for this ad on Returning Customers to your business.
• AOV - The blended Average Order Value for this ad.
• AOV 1st Time - The Average Order Value for this ad on 1st Time Customers to your business.
• AOV Returning - The Average Order Value for this ad on Returning Customers to your business.

Dig deeper into each channel

1. Click into the Campaign tab. For example, if you click into Facebook Ads, you can review all FB campaigns and bring up a menu of all active and paused campaigns.
2. Blended Metrics - Once you click in to the Platform you will see all of the Campaigns within the platform and the Blended Metrics at the top will now show your Blended Metrics for all of the campaigns.  If you click into a campaign it will then show you all the blended metrics for the Ad Sets within the campaign.  If you choose a particular Ad Set it will then show you all the blended metrics for those creatives.
3. Review the Campaigns to see which ones are over performing and under performing against your Core KPI’s. After taking note of these, click on the campaign to dig in to the Ad Sets.
4. Review and take notes of the Ad Sets that are over performing and under performing against your Core KPI’s.
   1. If you need a refresher on what the Ad Set is targeting click the details button and it will open up details about the Ad Set.
5. Click on each individual Ad Set to review the Ad Creatives. From here you will be able to compare the Core KPI metrics of each Ad Creative.
   1. Evaluate the CAC and ROAS metrics of the Ad Creatives.
6. Next look to evaluate the Soft KPI’s of each of the Ad Creatives:
   1. Evaluate the % of New Visits that each ad is driving. As we explain in the Northbeam Campaign Starter Kit, this constant recruitment mindset ensures your brand will always have a healthy pipeline of new customers to build a foundation on for future growth
   2. Evaluate the CTR for each of the ad creatives for their effectiveness to entice people to your site.
   3. Next evaluate the ECR (Conversion Rate) of the ads to understand how each ad is doing at driving conversions.  Look a the conversion rate on 1st Time Customers to understand the effectiveness of the ad to drive new customers.
7. Clicking the Details button will allow you to review your creative if you have any questions on which creative you are viewing if you don’t remember from memory.