Measure the return on each marketing program

A fair comparison starts with definitions everyone accepts, because each tool you use defines success a little differently. Kite proposes a short set of definitions, based on how your business sells, and saves them in your team's knowledge base so every monthly review uses the same ones.

Those definitions answer a few questions:

• What counts as a program? Usually a program is a channel or a recurring effort you can switch on or off, such as Google search ads, LinkedIn ads, trade shows, the webinar series, the newsletter, or organic content.
• What counts as cost? Kite includes ad spend, sponsorships, travel, freelancers, and the tools each program depends on. It also asks whether you want to include a share of your team's time, since some programs, like content, cost mostly people's hours.
• What counts as a return? For a business that sells through a sales team, the return might be pipeline created and deals won. For a self-serve product, it's new paying customers and their revenue in Stripe.
• Which program gets credit? When a customer touched several programs, you need one rule for who gets the credit, such as the first program that brought them in or the one that came right before they became a lead. Kite applies the same rule to every program so the comparison stays fair.

When two of your tools disagree, such as Google Analytics and HubSpot reporting different numbers of leads from the same campaign, Kite shows you both numbers and the likely reason. You choose which one is the official count, and Kite records that choice so the question doesn't come up again next month.

Kite gathers each program's cost from wherever that cost lives. For paid programs, it reads spend directly from your ad accounts:

• Google Ads. Spend, clicks, and conversions for each campaign, ad group, and ad over the month.
• Meta Ads. Spend, reach, and results for each Facebook and Instagram campaign and ad set.
• LinkedIn Ads. Spend and performance for each campaign from LinkedIn's own reporting.

Events, content, sponsorships, and tools don't have an ad account, so their costs usually sit in a spreadsheet or an invoice. Kite reads them from a Google Sheet you keep, from the costs recorded on a Salesforce campaign, or from the totals you give it in a message. If you run a trade show, for example, you can tell Kite the booth cost $12,000, travel came to $4,500, and the swag order was $1,800. Kite records the $18,300 total against that event. When your team tracks events as Salesforce campaigns, Kite can write the actual cost onto the campaign, so the number sits next to the leads and opportunities it's measured against.

Kite also flags costs that are missing. If a program produced leads this month but has no cost on record, Kite asks for it rather than letting the program look free.

Kite measures every program's return against the same record of customers and revenue, so the numbers can be compared and none of them are counted twice. That record is usually your CRM. For a self-serve business, it's your billing system.

Kite follows the trail in the order your buyers move through it:

• From the visit to the lead. In Google Analytics, Kite reads conversions by channel, source, campaign, and landing page, and it checks your property's attribution settings so its numbers match what you see in Google Analytics.
• From the lead to the deal. In HubSpot, Kite reads each contact's properties, the deals tied to them, and the revenue HubSpot attributes to each marketing campaign. In Salesforce, it reads each opportunity's stage, amount, close date, and primary campaign, along with the Lead Source of the person behind it, and it can run the reports your team already built.
• From the deal to the revenue. If you sell self-serve, Kite reads your Stripe customers and subscriptions to see which signups became paying customers.

Say your team ran a webinar in March. Kite finds the 85 people who registered, sees that 30 of them became contacts in HubSpot, and follows those contacts to the 4 deals they're attached to. Two of those deals have closed, for $26,000 in total. That revenue belongs to the webinar series in this month's review, no matter how many ad platforms also counted those buyers as their own conversions.

Related How-to pages

• How to see which campaigns and landing pages lead to Stripe customers with Google Analytics: Connect the campaigns and landing pages that bring visitors to the payments those visitors later make in Stripe, so self-serve programs are judged on revenue rather than signups.

Once Kite has a cost and a return for every program, it compares them using a few measures that work across very different kinds of marketing. Those measures are cost per lead, cost per opportunity, cost per customer, and revenue per dollar spent. Cost per customer is usually the most useful, because a cheap lead that never buys is still wasted money.

Here's how that can change the picture for three programs in one quarter:

By leads, the trade show looks like the clear winner. By cost per customer, the webinar series is the best program and the trade show is the worst. But the trade show also has five open opportunities worth $90,000, and your deals usually take four months to close. Kite reports the trade show's return so far, shows its open pipeline beside it, and marks it to be judged again once those deals have had time to close.

Kite also explains why a program's numbers moved. If cost per customer from Google Ads doubled this month, Kite finds the campaign whose spend rose while its customers stayed flat and shows you the numbers behind it. If LinkedIn reports 20 conversions but only 4 of those people appear as new leads in your CRM, Kite points out the gap so the platform's count doesn't quietly inflate the program's return.

For a closer look at specific kinds of programs, see Measure the ROI of your events Coming soon and Measure which content drives pipeline Coming soon . To trace revenue across your analytics, CRM, and billing tools by channel, see Connect marketing channels to revenue Coming soon .

A return measured once is a snapshot, so Kite runs the review on a schedule. You agree on the day, the programs, and where the review goes, and each month Kite delivers it to a Slack channel, by email, or as a conversation in the Kite web app. Kite can also publish the comparison as a live dashboard at a stable link that pulls fresh numbers from your connected tools whenever someone opens it.

Each review ends with a recommendation for every program. Kite suggests whether to put more money in, hold steady, change something, or stop. A program with strong cost per customer and room to grow is a candidate for more budget. A program whose cost per customer has climbed for three months needs a closer look before it gets another dollar. A new program with too little history gets marked as too early to judge, with a date for its next check.

Then Kite does the follow-up work it can:

• LinkedIn Ads. Kite pauses campaigns that are spending without results on its own, because pausing only stops spending. It proposes budget and bid changes to running campaigns, with the current and new values side by side, and makes the change once someone on your team approves it.
• Google Ads and Meta Ads. Kite names the exact campaigns and budgets to change, and your team makes the change inside each platform.
• The programs worth growing. Kite writes and builds the landing pages, ad copy, emails, and content that let a working program reach more people, and it publishes once you approve.
• Salesforce campaigns. Kite keeps each campaign's actual cost up to date, so your CRM reports carry the same numbers as the review.

Kite records what each review found and what you decided in your team's knowledge base. Next month's review starts from those decisions, so you can see whether the budget you moved actually earned more.

For the decision about whether a new program deserves more time, see Decide whether to keep or kill a new bet. To turn the review into next year's plan, see Plan your marketing budget and vendors.