4 Ways to Use the Ad Insights Report

The Ad Insights report leverages Terminus’s native Data Studio integrations to combine CRM events and website engagement with Terminus advertising data, empowering users to see how their advertising campaigns are driving success in brand awareness, lead and opportunity creation, pipeline acceleration, and closed won revenue.

In this article, we’ll walk you through four ways you can use the Ad Insights report to  better understand the influence of your Terminus advertising efforts, and to optimize and plan future advertising efforts.

Correlate Terminus Advertising to Go-to-Market Success

One of the biggest benefits of the Ad Insights report is its ability to show how your Terminus advertising efforts are influencing desired outcomes, (like brand awareness, lead & opportunity creation, pipeline acceleration, and closed won deals), in your target accounts. Here are a few steps you can take to show this:

1.  Set your reporting period (for CRM events), and the lookback window (for advertising influence)

• Set the date range for your report to establish which page views, lead creation, campaign responses, pipeline creation, open pipeline influence, and revenue / closed won deals will be measured.

2.  Open “Report Settings,” and set the Lookback Window of your advertising influence. We recommend using a lookback period of 90 days to align with quarterly campaign execution. For organizations with longer deal cycles, a larger window, (such as 180 or 365), days may be more applicable.

3.  Once your reporting cohort and report settings have been applied, you can use the data in the report to do several things:

• Measure the breadth of your advertising program: Use the summary metrics on the Overview page to see how many accounts your Terminus ads have reached, the total amount spent during the reporting period, and the total number of unique tactics that were run.

• Give an executive summary of advertising performance: During a performance review with your stakeholders, use the Overview page to demonstrate how six key business metrics have been influenced by Terminus advertising. Use the performance graphs to identify potential areas of further data exploration.

• See what ad tactics are driving outcomes: Use the detail reports to dive deeper, and understand how Terminus advertising is helping to move the needle, and see which specific ad tactics are generating the most influence.

A/B Test Levels of Advertising Exposure on Target Accounts

Terminus advertising customers often want to understand how changes in advertising spend and impression exposure influence desired results, like page views, lead/contact creation, opportunity creation, and revenue. Here are a few steps you can take to test this:

1.  Open “Report Settings,” and set a custom range of Account Ad Impressions (for example: 1-500 impressions). This will allow you to set a minimum threshold of impressions served to filter out accounts without enough ad exposure, or A/B test to compare influence across thresholds of impressions served.

• For example, setting a range of [1 to 500] will only report on accounts that had up to 500 impressions during the reporting period, and will exclude accounts that had 501+ impressions, (and their influenced events).  

2.  Compare the results in the account summary metrics of both the Overview and Detail reports, and make note of any trends or differences. You can use this insight to uncover a relative range of ad impressions required to drive meaningful activities in your target accounts, or showcase the difference in performance between accounts with less ad influence vs. accounts with more ad influence.

• For example, you might compare the results of a particular cohort of impressions [1-500] to a cohort of [501-1,000] to determine where your “sweet spot” for impressions and spend might be for a particular segment of accounts, or to help set general baselines for spend and bidding in future ad campaigns. You could also compare a specific threshold of impressions against all accounts with at least one impression.

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3.  Using the Insights information panel, you can also quickly identify opportunities to optimize performance in your ad programs, (based on accounts that are undeserving or underperforming), and add accounts to priority lists in Data Studio for further analysis & outreach.

Compare Advertising Impact Across Account Segments

In addition to being able view performance at the metric and tacit level, the Ad Insights report can be adjusted using Global Filters. With global filters, users can segment the data in Ad Insights to understand how their Terminus advertising campaigns are impacting accounts in specific lists, or other key segments. Here are a few steps you can take to do this:

1.  Open the Global Filters panel by clicking on the funnel icon, on the right hand side panel.

2.  Select either an account list filter, individual global filters, or a combination of both. Compare the performance metrics in these segments to the overall performance, when no filters are applied, or compare performance in different segments of accounts, to see if one is performing better than the other.

Measure the Effectiveness of Ads

One of the questions that constantly get asked is: "Are my ads driving a return on investment?" Within the New and Existing Pipeline Influenced, you can see your opportunity lift with ads. A positive percentage indicates that your ads are generating new or existing opportunities. A negative percentage means that your ads are not currently generating new or existing opportunities. Note: One large account has the potential to sway these numbers. You can use the report settings and global filters to further understand this metric.