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ROI Reporting in Dotdigital

Rachael Norris
Rachael Norris
  • Updated

This article explains how to view and configure return on investment (ROI) reporting in Dotdigital. It also covers how to use the ROI report data from Dotdigital to build an itemised report in Excel.

TIP: ROI reporting in Dotdigital is different from the Spektrix ROI report. Read more about the differences between the two reports later in this article.

 

Before Starting

ROI Reporting in Dotdigital is made possible with Order Syncing. Before starting, you should be familiar with:

 

What is ROI?

ROI, or Return on Investment, is a metric used in marketing to measure the cost effectiveness of promotional activities.

The ROI Report in Dotdigital helps you measure the impact of your email marketing by determining the initial cost of sending the email versus the income you have generated in Spektrix.

You can use ROI data to measure how effective your email campaigns are and develop your strategy for future email campaigns.
 

How does the Dotdigital ROI report work?

Income generated through Spektrix is attributed to an email campaign when a customer engages (clicks or opens) with a Dotdigital email campaign and then makes an Order in Spektrix within a specified time period (the conversion window).

ROI report data is available in Dotdigital because Ticket, Donation, Membership and Merchandise Order data is synced from Spektrix to Dotdigital. In Dotdigital, this is referred to as commerce data.

You can configure the primary engagement metric and set the conversion window for your organisation’s Dotdigital account.

  • Conversion Window: The conversion window is the time period after an email is sent. Iduring which if a customer places an order during this period, it can be attributed to that campaign. The default conversion window is five days.

    Shorter windows (3–7 days) can show how immediately impactful your campaigns are, while longer windows (7+ days) can capture slower purchase journeys but increase assisted revenue.
  • Primary engagement metric: You can choose whether you use clicks or opens as the primary metric for revenue attribution. We recommend using clicks as a more reliable metric than opens.

Dotdigital uses two metrics to attribute revenue: Direct Revenue and Assisted Revenue.

  • Direct Revenue: Direct Revenue is attributed to the campaign that the customer last engaged with before making the purchase. The full value of the Spektrix Order (including Donations, Merchandise and Memberships) is credited to that campaign.
  • Assisted Revenue: Revenue is proportionally attributed to any campaigns the customer engaged with within the conversion window before they make a purchase. The value of the Spektrix Order is shared across multiple campaigns.

 

Example

Let's say you have sent out three email campaigns (A. B and C) to promote an upcoming event. Your primary engagement metric is clicks, and your conversion window is 5 days.

  • Day 1: Customer clicks Email A but doesn't buy any tickets.
  • Day 3: Customer clicks Email B but doesn't buy any tickets.
  • Day 4: Customer clicks Email C and buys £100 worth of tickets.
     

The result of this scenario is:

  • Email C is attributed £100 Direct Revenue
  • Email A and B each are attributed £50 Assisted Revenue

The assisted revenue figure helps you demonstrate the importance of your email campaigns in the customer journey, even when tickets are not immediately purchased.
 

Spektrix ROI report

You may notice that the revenue figures in Dotdigital do not match the ROI reports generated within Spektrix. This is because the two systems use different logic to calculate ROI.

  • Spektrix ROI Report: The Spektrix ROI report attributes income by identifying the customer list for a mailing and whether they have purchased a ticket to the target Event(s).

The Spektrix ROI report only attributes tickets which were purchased the following day after the mailing is sent. There is no limit on how many days after the mailing is sent that ticket orders are attributed to that campaign.

  • Dotdigital ROI: ROI in Dotdigital attributes income based on a customer’s email engagement (clicks or opens) and then an Order within a set window (e.g. 5 days).
     

How to configure the Dotdigital ROI Report

There are two ways to configure settings related to your ROI reporting in Dotdigital:

TIP: It can take up to 30 minutes for reports to recalculate once your settings are updated.

 

Configure Conversion Window

To update your conversion window settings in Dotdigital:

  1. Go to Settings > Commerce > Commerce Settings
  2. Under revenue attribution, select the attribution method: Advanced Revenue Attribution

  3. In the conversion window box, enter the number of days to define the period in which orders will be attributed to a campaign:

  4. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save
     

Configure Engagement Type

To update your engagement type settings in Dotdigital:

  1. Go to Settings > General > Account Settings
  2. Scroll to the Features section

  3. Check the Use clicks as the primary metric box:

    TIP: This will also change the primary metric for Send Time Optimization.

 

How to View ROI in Dotdigital

There are two ways you can view ROI in Dotdigital:

 

Summary across all campaigns

To view ROI data as a summary across all campaigns:

  1. Navigate to Analytics > Reports
  2. On the right of the page, click Display to open the table settings
  3. Check the Revenue, Assisted Revenue, and Conversion Rate boxes
  4. Click APPLY

This allows you to compare performance across your entire history when viewing the Campaign Reports screen. You can also filter by time period and compare campaigns.
 

By Individual Campaign

To view ROI data on individual campaigns:

  1. Go to Analytics > Reports > click to open a specific Sent campaign.

  2. In the top right corner, you will see the Revenue / Assisted Revenue:

  3. Hover over the tile and click View Full Report to see the list of attributed ticket Orders from Spektrix.

  4. Click the Details tab on any Order to see specific items:


 

How to create an itemised ROI Report

To be able to see which of your Events performed the best, you can export the ROI data from Dotdigital and use it to create a summary table of specific items sold.

You’ll need to export the report and then sort this data in Excel.
 

Export your ROI data

To export your ROI data:

  1. Go to Analytics > Reports
  2. Choose the campaign you want to view the report for
  3. Expand the MORE REPORTS dropdown menu, then select Revenue

On the Campaign Revenue page, click the Export dropdown and select Export with product breakdown:

 

Create a pivot table in Excel

  1. Open the exported file from Dotdigital in Excel

  2. Highlight the Price column and use Find and Replace (Ctrl+H) to remove the currency abbreviation(e.g. GBP or USD), leaving only the number:

  3. Select the entire sheet and go to Insert > Pivot Table.
  4. Drag Product Name to Rows and Price to Values

This gives you a total sum of revenue for every unique event or ticket type sold through that email. You can also add quantity to values to see the number sold:

 

Where else can I see revenue data?

You can view Order totals across your email campaigns in the Dotdigital Retail Dashboard. To view this go to Dashboards > More Dashboards > Retail:

To view trends or running averages in total revenue, average value of a single order (AOV) or the average customer lifetime value (CLV) you can run the Commerce Report.

Go to Reports > More Reports > Commerce:

To view revenue data for Programs, go to Reports > More Reports > Programs. This will give you total revenue for the entire Program rather than on an individual campaign basis.