Understanding Your Marketing Channel Mix & Health with Northbeam

Learn how to spread your budget across channels based on their impact to the overall buyer journey and most effectively spend your marketing dollars

A healthy channel mix is making sure your strategy is focused on driving new, incremental purchases. As we explained in Northbeam's 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. We built our platform to make it as easy for you to track these new, incremental purchases at all levels of granularity. 

In this article, we’ll cover 3 best practices for tracking the health of your channel mix in your Northbeam dashboard. 

1. Use the Overview Page for a high-level view of the overall health of your marketing initiatives

Brands come in all shapes and sizes, but understanding your channel health involves not only tracking channel-specific metrics (such as Facebook CAC vs Google CAC), but also overall and blended metrics (overall ROAS and CAC benchmarks). The Overview Tab in Northbeam is the best way to take a quick look at both sets of data to get a feel for your channel mix health. 

• Remember that channel mix health is driven by effectively converting new and incremental purchases, so the Cost per New Customer chart is a great way to get a quick gauge of how your channel health is performing. To access it, find the Media Efficiency Ratio chart in the top right of the Cash Snapshot. Click the Dropdown menu and select Cost per New Customer. We recommend monitoring this over a period of weeks/months. At a high level, if this is climbing up, your channel health is starting to deteriorate which should prompt investigation and strategy pivots until the Cost per New Customer is back within expected levels. 
• In the Breakdown table below the charts, you can see True CAC per channel, which is a great summary stat to see how channels are performing, and vs blended benchmarks. Note that platforms are the default rows, but you can use the Breakdown toggle at the top of the Overview tab to group your data any way you want. For example, one of our best customers uses groupings of 8 categories of similar channels instead of 30-40 total channels when evaluating True CAC. 
• Don’t forget to balance True CAC against Transactions: are lower acquisition costs also resulting in fewer transactions and revenue? Simply optimizing for the lowest CAC channels might cause you to miss out on better performing channels that simply cost a bit more. We recommend keeping an eye on ROAS, transactions, and revenue to make sure these metrics are all moving in a positive direction.

You can also use the Sales Page for further granularity at the campaign, adset and ad levels. If you find yourself constantly going to “Customize” and adding in the same metrics like CAC and LTV CAC or Conversion Rate (ECR) 1st Time and Conversion Rate (ECR) Returning to evaluate the conversion rate of your ads on 1st Time vs. Returning customers use the Saved Views feature to save that customized view and save time.

2. Assess against Benchmarks

We’ve emphasized the importance of setting clear targets, but understanding your channel health involves both blended and channel-specific goals. Make sure to align internally on what your brand expects in your Core KPI Metrics - ROAS, CAC, or other relevant metric before repeating the exercise for your topic channels such as Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, etc. Below are some examples of benchmark strategies from our clients: 

• A ROAS scale: For example, if ROAS is below 0.15x then turn off all campaigns. If ROAS is closer to 0.25x, then keep spending but keep a close eye on performance. If ROAS is 1.5x, then scale spend by 10% to capitalize. 
• Platform benchmarks: Your target Core KPIs for ROAS, CAC, and other Soft Metrics should differ by platform because your strategies and content likely differ by channel as well. Internally, your team should have a good sense of what to expect from Facebook vs. Google, or Snapchat vs. TikTok ads for example. 
• Benchmarks and Conversion Lag: After 60 days worth of data Northbeam Benchmarks will become available.  You can use this feature to set Benchmarks that will automatically calculate the 30, 60 and 90 day conversion lag.  We will use your historical data to calculate the 1D ROAS or CAC necessary to hit your 30, 60 and 90 day CAC and ROAS goals, so that you can scale your campaigns with more confidence.

3. Use the Model Comparison tool for clarity and comparison

If you come from another attribution solution, you might be used to seeing data from another kind of attribution model, such as Google Analytics Last Non-Direct Touch and want to compare that to Northbeam’s Clicks Only multi-touch attribution model. Northbeam offers a Model Comparison tool so you can compare how revenue and conversion credit is assigned among the 6 attribution models we offer.

Where to find the Model Comparison tool in Northbeam

1. Login to your Northbeam dashboard
2. Find and click the hamburger icon at the top right of the screen to the right of the notification bell.
3. Select Model Comparison to access the tool. 
4. At the top of the page, you can choose which two models you want to compare by selecting from the options on the dropdown menu. 
5. To see data by Platforms instead of by campaign:
   • Click Breakdown
   • Click Platform
   • Select or Deselect the Platforms you want to see.
   • Click Apply