Campaign-level reporting and ROI per campaign
Campaign ROI analysis that proves what works, and what doesn’t. See the real revenue impact of every marketing effort.
Campaign ROI analysis: how to prove your marketing efforts
When marketers talk about reporting on performance, there are really two big ways to look back at the numbers.
The first is the most common:
“Let’s look back over the last month or the last quarter and see how many leads came in, and maybe tag them with a lead source.”
That’s fine for a general pulse check. You might see something like, 20 leads total, 10 from partners, five from the website, two from an ad. It’s quick, easy, and helps you spot shifts in traffic.
The second is where things start to get genuinely useful: reporting by campaign.
Instead of looking at an entire month in a lump, you zero in on a specific marketing effort - say, a trade show or webinar - and track all the leads it generated in a cohorted view.
You follow those leads through the funnel to see exactly how the effort performed from start to finish.
Why campaign ROI reporting works
Think of every marketing campaign as an experiment.
You’re spending time, budget, and energy to make something happen, so you should know, without guesswork, if it’s working.
“You’re basically just running experiments as a marketer. If you’re gonna run the experiment, you need to be able to see the results of that, and that’s what campaign ROI reporting is all about.” - Tate Stone
Without this kind of reporting, campaigns become gut-feel exercises. And gut feel doesn’t stand up well in a boardroom or a budget meeting.
Designing a campaign that’s measurable
A campaign is not just “website leads” or “email outreach.” That’s too broad to measure meaningfully.
Instead, you need constraints. A timeframe, channel, and specific offer - so you can tell a clear story about the results.
Someone might decide they’re going to build “a campaign tracking leads from the website.”
That’s too broad to be useful… You’ll end up with a mix of traffic from dozens of sources, over an undefined timeframe, with no clear way to connect the results back to one specific effort.
A stronger example would be this: a trade show is happening next weekend.
You’ve got 12 hours on the floor, a known audience profile, and a finite number of people you can talk to. Every lead collected is tied to that one event, making it easy to measure what happens next;
- How many became MQLs,
- how many reps followed up,
- how many turned into opportunities, and,
- ultimately, how much revenue closed.
By tightening the scope like this, you can also compare it against other clearly defined campaigns.
That’s how you figure out whether the trade show beats the webinar, or the direct mail drop beats the Google Ads push.
Without that level of specificity, you’re just lumping everything into one bucket and hoping the numbers make sense.
Breaking down the funnel
The power of campaign ROI reporting is in seeing how leads move from awareness to revenue.
Here’s how to measure it step-by-step:
- Top of Funnel: How many total people were touched by this campaign?
- MQL Stage: Of those, how many met your firmographic or demographic criteria and showed interest? (“They raised their hand.”)
- SQL Stage: Did sales qualify them as genuinely great potential customers?
- Opportunity Stage: Did they make it into the pipeline as an open opportunity?
- Closed Won/Lost: Did they become a customer or not?
“If you can get that funnel report from the campaign, then you have struck gold because you’re able to truly take that funnel and compare it to other campaigns.” - Tate
The more campaigns you can track like this, the easier it becomes to benchmark. You can see which efforts are driving higher conversion rates and which are quietly wasting budget.
Was the campaign successful?
At the end of the day, the penultimate ROI signal is revenue. Not clicks, not downloads, but money in the bank.
At the end of every campaign, you should be able to summarize the payoff like this:
“We spent $10,000 on this trade show and generated $250,000 of business.”
“We spent $2,500 on this webinar and generated $30,000 of revenue.”
Numbers like these are what leadership cares about.
And as a marketer it will also help you justify walking away from a poor-performing initiative sooner, rather than later.
Clean the data before you celebrate
One of the fastest ways to distort your ROI analysis is by counting the wrong contacts.
If your campaign criteria for lead qualification aren’t crystal clear, and your process for processing those leads isn’t standardized, things get messy fast.
You can end up mixing in existing customers, competitors, vendors, or irrelevant contacts, and suddenly your “success” numbers don’t actually represent new revenue potential.
“It doesn’t really do you any favors to try and inflate the ROI numbers as much as possible. The only thing that really matters is how much revenue came back from this one specific initiative.” - Tate
The fix is simple but non-negotiable: decide in advance exactly which contacts should be counted for the campaign, and enforce that filter at every stage.
Knowing when to kill a campaign
Not all experiments will pay off. Sometimes you have to cut your losses.
“If the lead cost $400 to get, but then they only end up having an average contract value of $200, that doesn’t make a lot of sense.” - Tate
The ROI needs to justify your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) and your payback period. If it doesn’t, shut it down and put your resources where they’ll work harder.
One last note: Salesforce vs. HubSpot
Don’t get tripped up by terminology. A Salesforce campaign and a HubSpot campaign share the same name but work differently.
- Salesforce campaigns track people and their journey through the funnel.
- HubSpot campaigns track assets - landing pages, emails, and other content tied to an initiative.
If you’re running reports, make sure you understand which one you’re using and what it’s actually telling you.
In summary
Campaign ROI reporting is how marketers prove value.
It’s the tool that turns “I think this worked” into “Here’s exactly how much revenue this generated.”
It’s also the tool that lets you say, confidently, when it’s time to pull the plug.
Need the real picture?
If your CRM’s a mess, your ROI reports are just guesses.
RevBlack builds clean, no-BS systems so you can see exactly which campaigns make money and which don’t.
We’re RevOps experts. We live in CRMs. Let’s get yours telling the truth - book a call today.
