Marketing reports that calculate campaign ROI

As a marketing analytics consultant, I've seen brands make big mistakes because of the marketing reports they use. They reallocated too much budget from top-funnel to bottom-funnel marketing initiatives because of last-touch attribution model, leading to sales contraction. They overinvested in campaigns with a cheap customer acquisition cost (CAC) but low lifetime value (LTV), leading to lost return on investment (ROI).

The reports you choose for measuring marketing results directly impacts the decisions you make.  

Using reports simply because they are available out of the box in your analytics tool can lead to a false sense of confidence in the data.

In this article, we'll cover how to build three different types of marketing reports on Mixpanel. Each of these reports measures different key performance indicators (KPIs) and is a better fit for certain types of campaigns. They will help you assess how each initiative is performing on your marketing funnel, from driving reach to recurring purchases.

Measures: Reach

Good for: Top-funnel campaigns

Attribution model: Event-level first-touch

This report tracks sessions, unique users, and new users generated by each campaign, with unique users counted via device IDs. New users are defined as those making their first visit to the site. To assess top-of-funnel efforts, we apply a first-touch attribution model, which is ideal for understanding initial engagement.

On a tool like Google Analytics, attribution models are defined on a property-level. Therefore, you can only create this report if you have selected "First Touch" as the way you attribute conversions. The standard attribution model for new Google Analytics accounts is a multi-touch attribution model that is called "Data-driven." 

Measures: Quality of reach (engaged users)

Good for: Top- or mid-funnel campaigns

Attribution model: Event-level first-touch

This report uses a first-touch attribution model to evaluate prospecting campaigns, focusing not only on new user reach but also on traffic quality. It measures two key indicators: sign-ups (capturing users who created an account after initial engagement) and pricing visits (showing the number of users who visited the pricing page) after their first exposure to a campaign.

Measures: Revenue (Campaign revenue)

Good for: Bottom-funnel campaigns

Attribution model: Event-level last-touch

This report uses a common approach to measure revenue on a per-event basis, calculating the number of purchases and their attributed value for each campaign. Here, we apply a last-touch model to identify the campaign that engaged the user just before conversion. Although not shown in this example, certain touchpoints (e.g., organic, email) can be excluded from this model if needed.

This type of reporting is standard and can be found in tools like Google Analytics. The only caveat, as mentioned earlier, is on which attribution model you have picked for your property. 

Measures: Revenue (user revenue)

Good for: Top- or mid-funnel campaign

Attribution model: User-level first-touch

For this report, we’re leveraging a first-touch user-level attribution model to calculate the revenue generated by users initially reached by specific campaigns. This provides a clear measure of the impact of top-funnel initiatives. In Mixpanel, we can accomplish this using the built-in Initial UTM Campaign user variable.

A tool like Google Analytics only attributes events. The ability to report on a user activity (e.g., account created) and join that with all the revenue from that user requires using SQL and BigQuery.

Marketing reporting isn’t just about CAC; it links campaigns to real business metrics like LTV and ROI. With centralized analytics tools like Mixpanel and varied attribution models, you can pinpoint which strategies attract high-value users and optimize your marketing spend.