Let the Results Do the Talking (cohereone.com)
Last week I wrote an article about why Contribution Per Order (CPO) should be the critical revenue metric that businesses use rather than Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). As a reminder, while ROAS is an efficient measuring metric, it cannot assign health to a channel, making it a relatively useless tool. In contrast to ROAS, Contribution Per Order (CPO) brings in the magnitude of the campaign segment targeted. This metric subtracts the marketing cost and cost of goods from each order to determine how profitable each of those segments is contributing to top-line demand and bottom-line profits. In one of my side comments in this blog, I mentioned the need to analyze Paid Search programs utilizing the same metrics and by further separating into branded terms vs. non-branded terms. In a recent year-end seasonal review with one of my clients, Paid Search was only reporting at a macro level (combining branded and non-branded search), which can be misleading. As shown below, Paid Search has a relatively positive CPO compared to traditional print prospecting (+$1.16 vs. -$2.15). Without understanding the full impact, this client was considering marketing decisions to expand Paid Search, reduce print prospecting, and potentially eliminate print programs—leading to potentially devastating results.