It’s a basic question most marketers ask themselves and I'm sure many struggle with the right answer…How should we be measuring the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns?

In addition to direct ROI, we also look at a pipe-to-spend ratio for each campaign we run. This allows us to see for every marketing dollar we spend how many dollars of pipeline are we generating in return. Using a basic calculated field, all of our marketing managers can easily see how their campaigns stack up against the rest.

You can set this up as a calculated field directly on the campaign object, or just build it in to one of your standard performance reports. In this example, I have it built in to the report. Start off with a campaign report, and select a summary report type. When you get to the second step “select campaigns to total” scroll to the bottom and insert a new custom formula field. The formula should be the total value of your opportunities divided by the actual cost of these programs.

The result is a report like the one below that benchmarks all of your campaigns against each other.

Now your marketing managers can see which of their programs are effective (in real time!) and management can make educated decisions based on hard data rather than gut feel.