Why You Need a Combined ROAS or ROI View on Your Marketing Spend

When you run a business, it’s tempting to look at individual marketing channels in isolation. You might look at Facebook ads, Google search, email marketing, or organic social media and ask: “How is this specific platform performing?” While this view provides useful insights, it doesn’t paint the full picture. To get a true understanding of how your marketing efforts are paying off, you need to have a combined view of your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) or Return on Investment (ROI) across all platforms. This holistic approach is crucial to knowing if your marketing spend is truly driving profitability.

The Problem with Channel-Specific Views

Imagine you’re running ad campaigns on Facebook, Google, and Instagram, and also investing in email marketing and influencer partnerships. You might have different metrics from each platform showing various levels of success, but the story they tell in isolation can be misleading. Facebook might show a high ROAS, while Google ads look average, and Instagram lags behind. If you focus only on these numbers separately, you miss out on how these platforms are working together.

Here’s the key: customers don’t stick to just one platform. They might see an ad on Facebook, search for your brand on Google, and then convert through your website. By focusing only on the individual metrics of each platform, you’re missing the broader picture of how your marketing channels work together to drive sales.

The Power of a Combined View

When you combine ROAS or ROI across platforms, you’re able to get a comprehensive view of how your marketing dollars are performing as a whole. This approach helps answer crucial questions such as:

• Is your total marketing investment profitable?
• Are some platforms driving traffic but not conversions, while others are converting at a higher rate?
• How do your marketing channels interact to drive customer behavior?

By looking at your entire marketing spend across all channels, you can see how your combined efforts translate to revenue. For example, if you spend $10,000 across Facebook, Google, and Instagram and generate $50,000 in revenue, you now know that, overall, your marketing has a 5x ROAS. That big picture is what matters for your business.

Attribution: Connecting the Dots Between Platforms

Another important reason for having a combined view is that modern customer journeys are complex. People interact with your brand on multiple touchpoints before making a purchase. Maybe they clicked a Google ad, visited your website, signed up for your email list, saw a Facebook retargeting ad, and then finally purchased after reading a blog post.

If you look at each channel in isolation, the Google ad might appear to have had little impact because the conversion happened elsewhere. But the truth is, that ad played an important role in the journey. A combined ROAS view helps you see how each platform contributes to the overall success, rather than assigning 100% of the credit to the final click.

This is where attribution models come in. A combined view forces you to look at multi-touch attribution, ensuring you don’t undervalue any of your marketing efforts. By understanding the whole funnel, you can make more informed decisions about where to allocate your budget.

How a Combined View Leads to Better Decision-Making

A combined view of ROAS or ROI enables you to make more strategic, data-driven decisions about your marketing budget. With a clear understanding of how all platforms work together, you can:

1. Optimize spending based on the entire customer journey: You’ll know which platforms are driving awareness, consideration, and conversions. You can then adjust budgets to focus on what’s working across the whole funnel.
2. Cut wasteful spending: If your combined view shows that despite great engagement, some platforms don’t drive enough sales, you’ll have the data to trim the fat and focus on more profitable channels.
3. Identify high-performing combinations: Certain platforms work better together than others. A combined view can help you see patterns where, for instance, people exposed to both Facebook ads and Google search ads are more likely to convert. You can then design campaigns that capitalize on these synergies.
4. Align your marketing goals with overall business profitability: Instead of measuring success by how each platform performs, you’re focused on the ultimate goal—driving profitable revenue. This keeps your eye on the bottom line and ensures your marketing efforts are contributing to your business’s growth.

Tools and Strategies to Help You Track Combined ROAS/ROI

To successfully track ROAS or ROI across all your marketing channels, you’ll need the right tools. Here are some ways to ensure you’re getting accurate, combined data:

• Google Analytics: This is a great starting point for understanding cross-channel attribution and combined ROI. Google Analytics lets you track conversions from multiple platforms and apply attribution models that give credit to the right touchpoints in the customer journey.
• Marketing Dashboards: Tools like HubSpot, Databox, or Datorama allow you to pull in data from various sources and visualize it in one place. A good dashboard will show you a top-level view of your combined ROAS while letting you drill down into specific channels when needed.
• UTM Tracking and Tagging: Ensure every link you share in ads, emails, or on social platforms is tagged with UTM parameters. This helps you track traffic sources in Google Analytics or your dashboard and connect the dots between clicks and conversions.
• CRM Systems: A CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot can show you the bigger picture of how leads and customers flow through your funnel. Combining marketing spend data with CRM data helps you assess the overall ROI of your marketing efforts, especially for longer sales cycles.

The Bottom Line: Keep Your Eye on Profitability

Ultimately, the goal of marketing is to grow your business profitably. That means focusing on how much you’re spending across all channels versus how much revenue you’re generating. A combined view of ROAS or ROI ensures you’re not only focusing on the performance of individual channels but also understanding how they contribute to the bottom line.

By keeping a combined view of your marketing spend, you can ensure your investments are driving sales in the most efficient way possible. This approach helps you stay profitable while making more informed decisions about where to allocate your marketing dollars.