Working with Your Campaigns

The Campaigns page lines up every marketing channel you spend on, your website, referral lunches, a bar-association sponsorship, a mailer, side by side so you can see which ones actually pay for themselves. Each row is one campaign, and the columns turn what you put in against what you got out into numbers you can compare. Clicking a row opens the full campaign described in The Campaign Page, where you record its costs and connect the leads it brought in. This page is about reading the comparison.

Reading the Columns

The columns are grouped under four headings so the story reads left to right, from what a campaign costs to what it returns.

• Basic Info is the campaign’s name and its category.
• Costs breaks spending into hard costs (money out the door), recurring costs (the monthly subscriptions and retainers), and labor costs (your team’s time), then adds them into a bold total cost so you see the real price of the channel.
• KPIs are the performance numbers: how many leads the campaign produced, the cost per lead it works out to, and the conversion rate of those leads into clients.
• ROI is the bottom line, shown two ways. Billed ROI measures the return against what you have invoiced from the campaign’s work; Collected ROI measures it against what you have actually been paid. The gap between the two is the money still owed.

You can sort by any column, so sorting Collected ROI highest-first ranks your channels by real, banked return, the single most useful view when you are deciding where next year’s marketing budget should go.

Finding a Campaign

The search box matches a campaign’s name and category, with attached document text reachable through the deeper search options. If you search and the list empties out, Outlaw tells you plainly that the campaigns are hidden by your search rather than leaving you staring at a blank page. Closed campaigns stay in the list (shown with a muted row) rather than disappearing, so the history of what you have tried stays intact.

Adding a Campaign

Administrators can add a campaign with the toolbar control; a campaign needs a name and a category to save, and Outlaw warns you if the name matches one you already have so you do not split a channel’s numbers across two entries. Editing a campaign is open to everyone, while adding and deleting are reserved for administrators. To work the numbers outside Outlaw, export the whole comparison to a spreadsheet from the toolbar.

For the people who send you business rather than the channels you pay for, see Referrers and Referrals.