Calculating ROI (Return on Investment) is based on a simple formula involving the gain from an investment, the cost of the investment and the resulting ROI. Here it is:
Yet, to many, it is one of the most desired but vexing business measurements. Why?
Here are the 10 most common mistakes businesses make in calculating ROI.
CONFUSION BETWEEN CASH FLOW AND GAINS: A common mistake in calculating ROI is comparing the initial investment, which is always in cash, with the gain as measured by profit or (in some cases) revenue. And not basing the gain on cash flow. For example, customers might be billed but that doesn’t mean they all pay on time. Or shipments might have gone out. But some goods might have been returned. The correct approach is always to base the gain, either profits or revenue, on the cash flow received.
UNDERESTIMATE INITIAL COSTS: Many businesses try calculating ROI without first properly accounting for all initial costs. As a result, they may end up underestimating initial costs. Before you start your calculations, know what your initial costs are. Here are some of the areas that might be missed.
FAIL TO INCLUDE PEOPLE’S TIME: One of the reason ROI is a highly regarded measurement is it includes not just out-of-pocket costs but operational costs like labor. Most business owners are aware that time is money for any company. However, when it comes to calculating ROI, they forget to consider the value of their time or that of their employees.
DON’T KNOW THE MINIMUM RETURN REQUIRED: Take into consideration the minimum ROI that your company requires because there probably is one. Look at the relative risks, cost of capital, and opportunity costs. Here’s what experts say is a good ROI for various industries. Even if it hasn’t been formally stated, have the discussion to bring it out when you start calculating ROI.
MEASURE THE WRONG THING: In 2010, Pepsi launched the Pepsi Refresh Project, an initiative where people could submit and vote for their favorite nonprofit projects to receive grants from Pepsi. The project generated 3.5 million Facebook likes, 60,000 Twitter followers, and over 80 million votes for nonprofits. But it didn’t sell more Pepsi. Pepsi cancelled the project in 2012 after falling from second to third place in national soda market share. It was a noble initiative, but likes, followers and votes were not the right measurements for ROI.
MEASURE TOO MANY THINGS: In data-rich environments, it’s easy to lose sight of the metrics that really matter. Before calculating ROI, know the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your business. KPIs are the metrics that matter for any business. They are metrics that, just like your ROI, have a target. If you don’t know them, you may find yourself measuring too many things.
DON’T LEVERAGE EXISTING CAPABILITIES: A manager at a large wireless telecommunications firm recently called for help with her budget. She’d “taken a stab” at quantifying the ROI for the company’s data warehouse and wanted to review her calculations. Her worksheet—which included a rigorous mix of hardware, software licenses, maintenance, burdened staff, and consultant costs, etc.—made clear that she’d forgotten an important step: Leverage current IT infrastructure and resources to reduce cost estimates and make a project more attractive to business executives.
DON’T GET THE BUSINESS TEAM INVOLVED: No one wants to own ROI. Calculating ROI can be difficult; understanding all the required skill and resource components can challenge even the best manager. When the planning phase of a project occurs, most managers take it upon themselves to calculate ROI on their own. It’s important that baseline ROI numbers are adopted by a team and accepted by the key business stakeholders.
DON’T ACCOUNT FOR THE FULL SALES CYCLES: In the B2B buying process, it can take many months for a prospect to go from first touch to closed sale. If you try to calculate your ROI too soon, you may undervalue the amount of impact that investments are making. In the B2C buying process, it may take time to generate awareness, educate consumers and gain trial. But, once you do, buying frequency might increase at that point. Pick a time period to measure your ROI that makes the most of the resources invested.
DON’T ACCOUNT FOR CHANGE: Nothing is certain. You can’t know what competitive developments, new trends or surprises might occur during the measurement period for your ROI. So don’t treat ROI as an area that you “set and forget.” Look at it regularly. Evaluate against KPIs. And be prepared to make revisions as necessary. Anything worth measurement should be view with the most current data.
Do these mistakes help you to understand the correct way to calculating ROI. Does your business need help in doing and managing ROI.
Geotargeting is the practice of delivering content to a user based on his or her geographic location. This can be done on the city, zip code or address level via IP address or device ID. Or on a more granular level through GPS signals, geo-fencing, and more.
Geotargeting is an obvious choice with any internet based campaign for a local business like restaurants, realtors, doctors and anyone whose customer base is concentrated in a specific area. But it also can be a better way for larger, national brand to achieve higher results by recognizing regional strengths, key cities, key accounts and differences in target users.
Who is doing geotargeting and making a difference? Here are 11 goetargeting case studies that prove location is everything.
AT&T: Offered consumers ShopAlerts, which consisted of messages, offers, rewards or coupons sent to their mobile phones when they were near a store or brand. The pilot included eight major marketers, four of which—Del Monte, Kmart, MilkPEP (the Milk Processor Education Program) and SC Johnson. With a nearly 100% open rate on the alerts, 50% of consumers who opted in to receive messages from the brands wanted more information. In some cases there was a 22% to 25% purchase conversion on some of the offers.
ASHEVILLE, N.C.: A river city that sits near the western border of North Carolina, wanted to determine which ad vendors and platforms perform best for inspiring people to visit. Asheville looked at how quickly ad vendors and partners motivate travel to the city. When Asheville aimed ads to residents of nearby Raleigh, N.C., between January and September 2016, the percentage who arrived within seven days was 16.8% higher than the average of all other markets during the same period.
BROWN FORMAN: Maker of Herradura, partnered with Foursquare for geotargeting to let premium spirits drinkers know where the boutique tequila brand is available. During the holiday season, Foursquare used Brown-Forman’s list of “accounts” where the brand is sold to target programmatic mobile and desktop display and video ads for Herradura to people whose mobile devices were found near those shops, bars or restaurants, or had been seen there in the past. Foursquare ads resulted in 23% incremental lift in visits to places selling Herradura among people who were exposed.
FIVE GUYS: Monitored a variety of different hashtags on social media through Hootsuite to react quickly to negative experiences and to reach out to those individuals who are either trying Five Guys for the first time saying they enjoy the food. They respond to messages and improve customer service and sales.
HYUNDAI: Had a sales problem. The brand was falling out of consideration when people went to car dealerships because, the company believed, consumers thought its cars were “staid” and “cheap.” A campaign code-named “Dealer Stealer” was created. The geotargeting process digitally mapped 115 Mazda, 282 Toyota, and 152 Hyundai dealerships. Those who came into proximity of its rival’s stores had their “unique and anonymous” device IDs collected, allowing the display of Hyundai advertising deals on the smartphones of people who were in the market for a Mazda or Toyota. The campaign attracted 815,000 unique eyeballs viewing the ad, according to the case study, with 41,000 people “reconsidering Hyundai as an option.”
LEXUS: 1 in 3 shoppers use their smartphones to search for information when in the market to purchase a new vehicle. The Regional Lexus Dealer Associations set out to target affluent in-market car consumers in the African American and Hispanic communities across four different cities in the US. They executed a mobile-to-store campaign with Walton Isaacson and S4M and was able to boost foot traffic into dealerships by 3.8 times.
PERNOD RICHARD: Which boasts brands including Absolut, Chivas Regal, Jacob’s Creek, and Jameson – had the aim of reaching consumers in transit at airports and driving them to the duty free store. A mobile campaign geo-targeted international terminals and provided travelers with a map and directions to their nearest duty-free store on a customized landing page. Over the month-long period of the campaign, 306 visits into duty-free stores were measured – with 126 incremental visits attributed from the campaign. Monday was the most effective day, generating 20 per cent of visits.
STX ENTERTAINMENT: Aimed to measure the impact of digital ads on ticket sales for “Bad Moms,” a summer comedy featuring Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell and Christina Applegate. STX targeted ads mainly to women aged 18 and over. Women who were exposed to the ads were 22% more likely to have gone to see “Bad Moms” in the theater, and STX saw incremental ticket sales of over 428,000 more tickets for “Bad Moms.” In addition, the campaign turned every $1 spent on digital advertising into $2.31 in incremental ticket sales.
TIMBERLAND: Had the goal to change perceptions of a “boots-only” brand and increase sales of their new boat shoes. Audience Targeting was used to reach young urban fashionistas seeking real adventures, and to drive awareness of the new SensorFlex boat shoe range among this key group. Location Targeting was used to identify those in the market for footwear and those in close proximity to key stores. The campaign generated +25% increase in store visits and won Best Use of Location Services at the Drum MOMA Awards.
URBAN OUTFITTERS: Used dynamic audience filters to deliver messages based on shoppers’ real-world locations. For example, the company sent push notifications promoting party dresses to females who had recently visited bars and nightclubs. The targeted campaign resulted in a 75% increase in conversions and a 146% lift in revenue.
WHOLE FOODS: Placed geo-fences around a number of store locations. Shoppers who entered these geo-fenced areas saw special offers on their smartphones. Whole Foods also took part in a practice called geo-conquesting by targeting ads to consumers visiting nearby supermarkets and encouraging them to come to Whole Foods in exchange for better deals. Together, the campaigns resulted in a 4.69% post-click conversion rate, which is more than 3x the industry average.
Do these case studies show you how effective geotargeting can be? Does your business need help with geotargeting?
Data mining process is the discovery through large data sets of patterns, relationships and insights that guide enterprises measuring and managing where they are and predicting where they will be in the future.
The data mining process requires commitment. But experts agree, across all industries, the data mining process is the same. And should follow a prescribed path.
Here are the 6 essential steps of the data mining process.
1. Business understanding
In the business understanding phase:
First, it is required to understand business objectives clearly and find out what are the business’s needs.
Next, assess the current situation by finding the resources, assumptions, constraints and other important factors which should be considered.
Then, from the business objectives and current situations, create data mining goals to achieve the business objectives within the current situation.
Finally, a good data mining plan has to be established to achieve both business and data mining goals. The plan should be as detailed as possible.
2. Data understanding
The data understanding phase starts with initial data collection, which is collected from available data sources, to help get familiar with the data. Some important activities must be performed including data load and data integration in order to make the data collection successfully.
Next, the “gross” or “surface” properties of acquired data need to be examined carefully and reported.
Then, the data needs to be explored by tackling the data mining questions, which can be addressed using querying, reporting, and visualization.
Finally, the data quality must be examined by answering some important questions such as “Is the acquired data complete?”, “Is there any missing values in the acquired data?”
3. Data preparation
The data preparation typically consumes about 90% of the time of the project. The outcome of the data preparation phase is the final data set. Once available data sources are identified, they need to be selected, cleaned, constructed and formatted into the desired form. The data exploration task at a greater depth may be carried during this phase to notice the patterns based on business understanding.
4. Modeling
First, modeling techniques have to be selected to be used for the prepared data set.
Next, the test scenario must be generated to validate the quality and validity of the model.
Then, one or more models are created on the prepared data set.
Finally, models need to be assessed carefully involving stakeholders to make sure that created models are met business initiatives.
5. Evaluation
In the evaluation phase, the model results must be evaluated in the context of business objectives in the first phase. In this phase, new business requirements may be raised due to the new patterns that have been discovered in the model results or from other factors. Gaining business understanding is an iterative process in data mining. The go or no-go decision must be made in this step to move to the deployment phase.
6. Deployment
The knowledge or information, which is gained through data mining process, needs to be presented in such a way that stakeholders can use it when they want it. Based on the business requirements, the deployment phase could be as simple as creating a report or as complex as a repeatable data mining process across the organization. In the deployment phase, the plans for deployment, maintenance, and monitoring have to be created for implementation and also future supports. From the project point of view, the final report of the project needs to summary the project experiences and review the project to see what need to improved created learned lessons.
These 6 steps describe the Cross-industry standard process for data mining, known as CRISP-DM. It is an open standard process model that describes common approaches used by data mining experts. It is the most widely-used analytics model.
Do these 6 steps help you understand the data mining process? What is your organization’s readiness for date mining?
Influencer is someone who helps other people buy from you. How do they do this? Influencers have a combination of three assets: Reach, contextual credibility and salesmanship.
38% of marketers say they are unable to tell whether influencers activity actually drives sales
How to determine if influencers are going to deliver a return on investment for your business?
Here’s how 10 experts calculate the ROI of influencers.
UNIQUE CODE: If you sell products online and want to measure ROI of your influencer campaign by direct sales, give influencers a unique code to give to their audience that they can use at checkout for a percentage off their purchase. A good amount is 15%-20% off. Calculate the amount of sales you earned from your influencer’s unique discount code and divide it by the dollars you spent on the campaign. – Kristen Matthews, Social Media Examin
INFLUENCER LANDING PAGE: You must tie your influencer campaign into a branded landing page in order to measure the ROI of that influencer. The influencers can have as much free reign as you’ll permit, as long as they drive their audience where you want them to go. Once on the landing page, you, as the brand, can incentivize the users and capture their lead info for measurement data and future communication. – Kenny Eicher, The CSI Group
SOCIAL MEDIA AND WEBSITE ANALYTICS: One of the easiest metrics to track when using an influencer is social engagement. Track your social accounts for changes in total followers as well as new unfollows. Monitor your website traffic for an increase or decline in website visits from the social network. Are there spikes that align with the influencer’s activity? Do you see an increase in sales (or inquiries) directly following their activity? – Korena Keys, KeyMedia Solutions
HASHTAG CAMPAIGN: You could tailor your social media campaign to use a specific hashtag encourage influencers to use your hashtag with their followers. You can then tally uses of the hashtag, considering its use to be part of your influencer marketing campaign. – Influencer Marketing Hub
KPI DEFINITION AND TRACKING: Establish metrics for measuring the performance of your campaign. This means identifying your campaign objectives and metrics (KPIs) for tracking these objectives. The following KPIs are the most common for gauging influencer campaign success: 1) Engagement, 2) Reach/Impressions, 3) Follower growth and 4) Traffic. – Magda Houalla, Revfluence
PIXEL TRACKING: TapInfluence partnered with a Fortune 500 Food Brand and Nielsen Catalina Solutions to complete the first ever Influencer Marketing Sales Effects Study. Special NCS tracking pixelautomatically inserted by software into blog content for every post. 1000 people viewing influencer contentgenerated $285 of incremental sales over the control group. Influencer Marketing delivered 11X ROI over all other forms of digital media. – Bill Carmody, CEO, Trepoint
CONVERSIONS: One of the simplest ways to do this on Instagram is to track direct conversions through the “comment to buy” feature. This allows consumers to comment directly on an influencer’s post expressing their interest in purchasing the product or products featured in the post. Consumers then receive a personalized link via email. Tracking “comment to buy” not only provides revenue information for the campaign, it’s also an excellent source of brand demographic information. – Andrew Higgins, Product Marketing and Product Management, Pixlee
COMPARE VS OTHER INVESTMENTS: Be sure to track wherever possible: custom links, landing pages, influencer promo codes, giveaways, anything you can. Consider an influencer marketing campaign’s performance against your other marketing strategies. How much would you have to pay on Google PPC to gain the same exposure? Keep things in perspective and consider lifetime value. – Bernard May, National Positions
ENGAGEMENT: If your campaign focuses on social media exposure with influencers, look at engagement on your social channels after the influencer initiative. Do you have an increase in engagement on your channels? New followers are important, but it’s key to have the right followers. If your engagement increases, you know you reached your target audience who actually wants to engage with your content. – Lisa Arledge Powell, MediaSource
LIVE EVENT: A live experience is the ultimate influencer ecosystem. Getting like-minded people together who have a passion for a particular subject matter creates an environment for influencing, whether it be comics, cars or causes. Once at a live event, the social amplification through influencers is exponential and can be measured in real time through social posts, brand activation and word of mouth. – Chris Cavanaugh, Freeman
Does the advice of these experts help you in calculating the ROI of influencers? Are you looking for help in how to effectively use influencers for your company?
Measures, metrics, KPIs – It’s all about data, data and more data. We have never had more data in our hands. Understanding and making productive use of it is essential to your business.
How many people have opened your email? How many sales did your team bring in? And most importantly, how much time do you spend creating spreadsheets and getting buried in reports? Wouldn’t it be easier if there was a way to display your data so that you know exactly what’s going on in your business at all times?
What is a dashboard?
The go-to solution you are looking for is dashboards. A tool that cuts through data clutter and helps you get down to what really matters. But more concretely, what is a dashboard?
Founder of Perceptual Edge, Stephen Few describes dashboards as a visual display of your business’ data that is essential to achieve your goals. This data is consolidated and showcased on a single screen so that it can be tracked and monitored at a glance. Truly helpful is the fact that the data is automatically updating itself without any assistance from the user. With the right dashboard, you can experience the satisfaction of leading your business to success.
I know what you’re thinking: so, how do I spot the right dashboard?
As the Partnerships Manager at Airtame, I’ve spent months researching dashboards that work with Airtame.
Provided that these executive dashboard templates have a shareable public link, you can copy-paste it into your Airtame’s settings, and your dashboard will display on the screen. Once your dashboard is up on a large screen, it becomes a wallboard, a term you might have heard before but never really knew what it was. The main benefit of wallboards is that they are highly visible and easy to understand for everyone around them.
Here I found not one but 26 executive dashboard template, that will easily help you showcase your company’s indispensable data on any office screen. To make your life easier, I’ve split them into Executive Dashboards and Social Walls, according to their focus.
Executive Dashboard Templates
If what you’re looking for is the classic KPI dashboard that helps you keep track of your business performance, then Executive Dashboards are for you. This includes your accounting software data, your CRM, website analytics, or email system data for a broader perspective. Here are some recommendations:
Used by more than 4,500 companies, and integrating data from Dropbox, Marketo, Moz, and so forth, our partner, Klipfolio makes sure that your web analytics, sales and finances, and project management goals are transparent throughout your company. I personally have a screen dedicated to Klipfolio dashboards in front of my desk and it really makes my life easier.
An all-in-one business dashboard app, Cyfe’s goal is to help you make better business decisions by bringing all of your business performance data under one roof. However, to benefit from its full potential, you would have to sign up for a Premium account.
With varied integrations, such as Zendesk, Pipedrive, Podio, leaderboards and custom recognition features, Plecto will drive your team’s motivation sky high. If sales are your main focus, Plecto is what you’re looking for. Also, I must say the pricing plan is quite eye-catching.
Small, medium, large companies – it doesn’t matter. Datapine can provide you with accurate KPIs in the most professional way, be it management, finance, sales or marketing related. Plus, I really enjoyed their customer support. For example, booking a demo and understanding their product took no time at all.
Monitor your workflow, connect to an ever-growing list of tools and services, and make sure that all relevant stakeholders in your projects get the essential details with Axosoft. I would also add that these dashboards load very fast, so you won’t have to worry about delays in your content.
By connecting and visualizing your data in a matter of minutes, Tableau Public is one of those executive dashboard templates that can make you forget about the old-school spreadsheets and reports that used to clutter your life.
I like the fact that Tableau has a broad service offering. Also, they are pretty active in terms of social events. So if you have any doubts, you can always check if they’re holding an event in your neighborhood.
Integrating Facebook, MailChimp, Google Analytics and Adwords and many more, Cervinoboard focuses on online marketing agencies. They deliver smart services that save a lot of time for agencies that wish to deploy and maintain large amounts of dashboards. A few newer services are still in beta, but this is a young startup to watch.
A business solution that is able to monitor data from a wide range of industries. From banking and finance, education, government to pharmaceutical transport and logistics, retail, and so on. With more than 20 years of experience on the market, Dundas has dedicated over 7 of them to their dashboard project development.
However, if you want to explore their service offering, you should definitely consider signing up for a Premium account. If this sounds like a deal, get started with a free trial!
Boosting your sales, managing daily activities or stepping up your productivity game – Zoho has helped business professionals take care of all these for more than a decade. If I were looking for a very complex software provider, I would most likely choose Zoho.
Want to get a better sense of your data? Watch this video!
Be it SEO, SEM, PPC or social media, DashThis has got your back. It automatically gathers all your client data into one dashboard report.
If you are a digital agency, DashThis dashboards might be just what you’re looking for. But feel free to check their demo video here and read more about their features.
Lets you easily combine the data your team needs and has customizable dashboards. What else is there? Oh, yes, the fact that it can be tailored to nearly every market from digital agencies to server admins and sales teams. Quite a tool for startups, I’d say.
Start with a free trial to get better sense of these dashboards.
Incredibly user-friendly features and very intuitive executive dashboard templates. Not to mention the sharp design of their live graphs. Sometimes, it can take a while to load, but it’s worth the wait. The pricing plan: really appealing.
This is a very useful Business Intelligence tool for Microsoft users. It’s connected with Excel and Microsoft Office 365 and has a publish to web function that can be used with Airtame.
The name says it all, because SimpleKPI is just that – simple. And when it comes to monitoring your business reports, that’s what you want from executive dashboard templates. The visuals are nicely put together and easy to understand.
Databox has a clever drag-and-drop editor that makes data visualization a breeze. It has a ton of integration options so you can connect all data sources, no matter where you want your information to come from.
A great thing with Dasheroo is that you can have several different executive dashboard templates to suit different needs or even different people. Organize data and set up dashboards for you SoMe presence, your sales team, your support… Everything your heart desires. Oh, and it’s free!
Many services can’t offer a swift implementation but take months to get your solution up and running. Grow claims they implement 8x faster than competitors, meaning you don’t have to wait to get started with analyzing data. You can create role-specific KPI dashboards for an unlimited amount of team members, which is also a nice feature.
Sometimes, one dashboard just isn’t enough. That’s why Geckoboards lets you display several different dashboards on the same screen. You can even add your own logo for a customized look and feel that matches your brand.
You can automatically merge data with this service. That makes it easy for you to get an overview of all metrics, goals and KPIs without having to worry about the time spent trying to do it yourself. Target Dashboard includes support in their pricing plan, and that’s something we applaud. Bills can pile up when problems arise if support isn’t included, so that’s definitely something to look for when choosing a dashboard service.
With Octoboard, you can create public dashboards for easy sharing with other teams or clients. Octoboard also offers activity monitoring for brands and bloggers on social platforms. For those out there that want to glance at competitors while simultaneously looking at their own engagement, this is superb. That’s why I’ve put it as the last in the executive dashboard section, because it would fit just as well in the next section; social walls.
Social Walls
Presumably, you want to track your social media lifespan, or organize a kick-ass event. Social walls can help you stay on the pulse of your social media community. These are some suggestions that caught my eye.
Want to keep track of your social media activity for a certain event or conference? With so many platforms out there, why not bring all of them into one easy-to-use display so that everyone can see your tailored stream of content unfolding in real time? Start with a free trial and then you can decide among Plus, Premium or customized plans.
Meet Juicer, a social media aggregator that sets your filters up, moderates your posts, and analyzes your social media engagement. What’s more, Juicer has 18 integrations and a modest pricing plan.
Unleashing your hashtags and building your social wall with data integrated from over 15 platforms is a no-brainer if you go with Walls.io. Keep your audience updated with Walls.io’s customizable next-generation social wall and your next event is sure to be a success.
Basic no-frills executive dashboard templates
Suppose you are only looking to create and share your slide decks. Or maybe you want to focus on showcasing your data through charts. Here are some no-frills options that work great:
Slides allows you to create and share great complex presentations online, in your very own browser without the need to download anything. See for yourself by clicking here.
On the hunt for real-time executive dashboard templates for your business? With Project Manager, you can combine powerful project planning and scheduling features with collaboration tools for teams, plan waterfall projects, and adjust due dates. Project Manager takes project planning to a whole new level, I must say.
Into maps & charts? Then Datawrapper is one of the optimum executive dashboard templates for you. Back up your presentation with this great visualization tool and you might just get some applause by the end of it.
What’s your favorite dashboard? Who should I look into next on my hunt for great dashboards you can use with Airtame? Let us know in the comments!
Patricia is a Marketing & Partnerships Manager at Airtame. She’s a technology aficionado always looking to learn and share relevant insights from within the industry.
I am an affiliate for some of the products featured on this website. This means if you purchase them through a link or banner, I earn a commission. I recommend these products because of my regard for them, not because of the commission. Whether or not you decide they are right for your business and purchase them is completely up to you.
BarnRaisers builds brands with proven relationship principles and ROI. We are a full service digital marketing agency. Our expertise is strategy, search and data-driven results.
