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      How to incorporate Northbeam into your workflow

      Daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly workflows your team should set up in order to get the most out of Northbeam

      Two of the most common questions we get are how often should I be checking Northbeam and what exactly should I be looking at to make decisions? Northbeam easily integrates into your company workflow within and across departments to help you plan, execute, and review. 

      In this module, we’ll cover daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly tasks that will help you better predict the profitability of future marketing campaigns and confidently scale your business.

      Daily Checklist

      We recommend media buyers and other power users check Northbeam daily to ensure everything is running smoothly while monitoring progress on all active campaigns. Although we don’t necessarily advise making buying decisions daily, the better grasp you have on the day-to-day pulse of your business, the more Northbeam can help you to uncover anomalies and new insights that will drive marketing strategy. 

      • Check your 🔔 Maintenance Alerts by clicking the notification bell in the top right to see if there are any Maintenance items to check. Maintenance Alerts are sent when our system notices a gap in our tracking parameters. These can be missing UTMs, problems with platform connections, and so on. It is imperative that you address alerts as soon as possible. 
      • Monitor active campaigns using the Sales Page - There are many ways you can break down your data to look at active campaigns. We recommend creating a Saved View with the breakdowns you want to see. Applying platform labels while at the campaign level tab will make it a lot easier to get to the metrics and campaigns you want. Use these steps to create a Saved View.

      Weekly Checklist

      Once a week, you should revise your benchmarks and focus on strategies to help you achieve your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Active campaigns will have enough data after a week to start making budget allocation decisions. We recommend turning off certain ads or tactics entirely, or launch new tactics, based on insights. 

      • Review campaign performance on the Overview Page by assessing key metrics (eg. spend, revenue, MER, CAC, etc). 
        • Start by looking at daily insights over the last 7 days, which gives you a convenient summary view. 
        • Then choose to group by Week and Last 28 Days in the Date Filter box to look at KPIs week-by-week to look at how your campaigns performed week over week. 
        • Make sure your MER or CAC is in line with your business goal to maintain efficiency, ensuring your campaigns stay profitable. Choose either MER or CAC as your primary KPI.
        • Assess your Cost per New Customer to understand acquisition cost and determine if it’s too high.
      • Dig deeper with the Sales & Marketing Page to get more information on ad sets and ads within campaigns
        • If your highest spending campaigns don’t have the strongest metrics, then look into your “soft” KPIs to uncover what is happening. For example, you notice ROAS is down on your top-spending campaign even though spend is down. You should look at CTR, eCPC, and CPMs for that campaign to see if that reveals the reason why. 
        • Review New vs Returning customers to ensure the new customers you’re attracting are the right fit for their business.

      💡TIP: To access New vs. Returning Customers insights, click on the Sales Tab on the left panel > Click on the first dropdown at the top of the page > select one of the Customer Type saved views > Scroll down to the Breakdown Table 

      • Identify the most impactful customer touchpoints by looking at unassisted conversions. 
        • View all the touchpoints for a specific campaign using Common Click Touchpoints. 
          • Touchpoint Groups represent the other touchpoints, and you can see stats for each of these to the right of each group
          • Common Paths tells the number of customer paths that resulted from each of those touchpoint groups
          • Common Converting Paths shows which of those paths actually resulted in a conversion
          • Converting Revenue and Common Conversion Rate reveals how successful each of those touchpoint groups are at driving sales
          • Monitor the (none) touchpoint group which is the unassisted conversions that resulted in a campaign. To look at it, sort Common Paths by highest using the arrows on the table. Ideally, we want a high Common Paths number (about 80%) with a strong conversion rate. You can compare this Common Conversion Rate to the overall campaign conversion rate as a benchmark to see if this campaign is worth scaling. 

      💡TIP: To access Common Click Touchpoints, click on the Sales Tab on the left panel > scroll down to the Breakdown Table > Select Campaign at the top of the Breakdown Table > click the blue note icon to the right of the campaign name > click Common Click Touchpoints on the slide out panel 

      • Review the Customer Paths for all your campaigns by using the Path Filter dropdown to add a Platform Breakdown and look at any channel you’re investing in to determine which channel is best to scale

      💡TIP: To access Customer Paths, click on the tab at the right of the notification bell at the top right of the platform > select Customer Paths

      Monthly Checklist

      Once you have enough data to monitor monthly trends, that’s when your sample size is large enough to find actionable insights and start drawing real conclusions on your media mix. 

        • Review soft KPIs (eg. email sign-ups) to see if they’re correlated with higher revenue. If there is some correlation, then that soft KPI could be a leading indicator of eventual conversions down the line. 
      • Evaluate customer quality with the LTV Page 
        • Selecting Month First Acquired filter on the left dropdown and look for anomalies with the number of customers acquired by month. Is this due to seasonality, tactics, or some other reason? 
        • Look at Customer Value to see if there are any patterns. Were customers acquired during a certain period considerably more valuable than benchmarks? If so, why? 
        • Look at Marginal instead of Cumulative Values to see how CLV changes over time after the initial purchase for each of these customer segments.
        • Repeat this exercise by filtering to First Order (Product) and First Order DIscount Code

      💡TIP: that if you have enough data, use past year data to do your comparisons so you can strip out seasonality.

      Quarterly Checklist

      Every quarter, we recommend taking a step back and doing a full audit of all your campaigns from the last 3 months. At this point you’ll have enough data and sample size to find concrete takeaways of what really works for your business. This is great opportunity to determine what was effective: 

      • What are your most effective platforms? What did you do in the last 3 months with platform strategy or placements that drove better or worse results vs the previous quarter? 
      • Access your audience and hone your ideal customer profile. Media Buyers know how hard it can be to find the right audience and scale appropriately. Throughout your audience testing, did you notice any common characteristics that tended to perform well regardless of campaign objective, creative, or any other variables? 
      • Note which creatives and copy worked and didn’t work. Our in-house media buyers stress that your creative is the biggest lever that you can pull to improve performance across all channels. Take a look through your campaigns, ad sets, and ads to see if you can find any common themes that seem to perform well. Is there a specific content pillar, copy concept, ad format that performs better than your benchmark metrics? If so, a quarter’s worth of data will reveal what these best practices are. 

      💡TIP: Here’s how to set up Custom Labels so you can create labels for each creative type to easily navigate between them by Breakdowns.