The Campaign Page

A campaign represents a marketing effort, and its page is built from sections (labeled panels and tabs) aimed at one question: is this campaign worth what it costs? (New to the idea? See Sections of a record.)

The Head of the Campaign

The head answers the question before you scroll: it opens with what the campaign has cost so far (including staff labor), the cost per lead, and the conversion rate. Below that, the campaign’s fields:

• Name and Category: what the campaign is and what kind. The Category is picked from a built-in list that covers every common type of marketing activity, including Ad, Agencies, Bar Association, Bulletins, Chamber of Commerce, Charity and Community Events, Networking Group, Newsletter, Periodical, Personal Contact, Search Engines (Google or Bing ads), Social Media, Sponsorship, Walk-In, and Website. A few notes worth knowing: printed ads go under Ad, but pay-per-click such as Google Ads goes under Search Engines; Search Engines and Social Media are meant to cover both the cost of the ads and the time spent making and managing them; and Networking Group is meant to capture dues and, especially, the time spent at the meetings.
• Website: where the campaign points or runs.
• Date Range: when it runs. Leave the end date blank for an auto-renewing campaign; mark Closed when it’s done.
• Recurring: if the campaign repeats, set how often (“every 1 month”, “every 2 weeks”). This is what generates the per-period rows in Campaign Costs; if the cost is the same every period, set the fixed amount once and every period prefills. Once real recurring costs are entered, the period locks: a campaign whose cadence changes is a new campaign.

The cost-per-lead and conversion figures combine three cost streams: hard costs, recurring costs, and the labor of the campaign’s own tasks. Your team’s time is marketing spend too.

Connecting Clients to a Campaign

A campaign only earns credit for the business it brings in if you connect that business back to it, and that starts with one habit: always ask a new lead how they found you, and ask them to be specific. Was it a web search, and if so, was it Google, and what did they search for? Or do they mean your website, and what about it made them call? Did they hear about you from more than one place, like a friend and a search?

The detail matters because Outlaw tracks all of the sources for a potential client, not just the last one they used. You can attach as many campaigns to a lead as you like, and referrals are tracked separately from campaigns (see The Lead Page). The point is to know which efforts actually deserve the credit, so you can put your money where the paying clients come from.

Cost vs. Return

• Campaign Costs: what the campaign costs you, split into Hard Costs (one-off) and Recurring Costs (ongoing).
• Leads & Cases: the leads and cases the campaign brought in, the return side of the equation.
• Time Entries: staff time spent on the campaign.

Put the spend next to the business produced and the campaign’s return on investment falls out, explored further in the campaign reporting under Marketing.

The Numbers That Tell You If It’s Working

Marketing should not just pay for itself, it should pay for itself several times over. As a rule of thumb, 5x is good, 10x is outstanding, and 20x is exceptional. A campaign you invest $1,000 in should bring in around $5,000 of business before you call it a success.

Outlaw expresses the return as two separate numbers, and the difference between them matters:

• Billed ROI is the return measured against the amounts you have billed.
• Collected ROI is the return measured against the invoices clients have actually paid. This is the more important of the two, because it tells you the true value of the campaign. A campaign that brings in lots of clients who never pay their bills is a terrible campaign, and only Collected ROI will show you that.

Alongside ROI, the campaign reporting tracks three KPIs (Key Performance Indicators):

• Leads: how many leads the campaign created.
• $/Lead: the average cost of each lead this campaign brought in.
• Conv%: the conversion rate, the share of this campaign’s leads that became clients. A 50% conversion rate means half of the leads turned into clients.

A worked example makes it concrete. Say you spend two hours a month at a networking group. That is 24 hours a year, and at a $250 hourly rate it represents a $6,000 investment. If that group brings you less than $30,000 of business a year (5x), you are wasting your money. If it brings $60,000, it is a great campaign and you should invest more in it.

On Every Record

• Notes & Attachments: creative, contracts, and notes for the campaign.
• Private Comments: internal notes.

How This Connects

• Flows in. A campaign’s cost is three streams: its hard costs, its recurring costs, and the labor of its own tasks — your team’s time is marketing spend too.
• Flows out. A campaign earns credit when a lead names it as a source; those leads become cases, and what the cases bill and collect is the campaign’s return. The same links drive the marketing reports (Billed vs. Collected ROI, cost per lead, conversion) and the “which campaigns bring risk” view that ties a campaign to the red flags its leads raise.
• In time. A campaign accrues cost and return across its whole run, so its ROI is a moving picture rather than a snapshot, and like every record it keeps a full Blame Log. See How Outlaw Fits Together for the loop.