XCD: Using the Cross-Channel Dashboard

Getting Started

The Cross-Channel Dashboard (XCD) is a high-level report that shows the performance of all of your marketing platforms in one place, alongside transaction and experiment data. It also provides incrementality metrics for both your business as a whole as well as your individual channels and tactics.

Uses for this include:

• Understanding and managing how you spend on marketing 
• Making better budget decisions for your channels and tactics
• Seeing what metrics marketing platforms are over or under-reporting
• Finding new opportunities to explore and invest in

If you’d like clarification on the terms and acronyms you see throughout the dashboard, see our Product Glossary article.

What Is the Cross-Channel Dashboard?

The XCD provides a snapshot of your overall business, as well as incrementality metrics for your channels and tactics. These are the more accurate versions of what other platforms may be over or under-reporting.

For example, a tactic’s ROAS that a platform reports as being very low may actually be doing much better when incrementality is applied to it. This would mean it’s worth increasing your spending there, or even launching a geo test to explore it further.

Alternatively, if your platform was reporting ROAS as being high but your incrementality metrics were telling you otherwise, you would know it may be worth scaling spending back. Then, you can use that part of your budget elsewhere.

Click here to learn more about how the Measured Incrementality Model leads to more accurate results for your business.

How Does the Cross-Channel Dashboard Work?

The XCD is powered by lining up what your marketing vendors are reporting against Measured’s vast amounts of incrementality data from ongoing in-market tests. 

First, it draws data from your marketing platforms by using vendor APIs or custom uploads.

Next, Measured groups that data into tactics, which are specific efforts within a given marketing channel (e.g. Brand Search vs. Non-Brand Search). This way, you get a focused view into the various ways you’re making budget decisions.

How Incrementality Is Determined

Once tactics are established for your channels, tactic-level incrementality is determined by one of two methods:

• An in-market test is run for the tactic to get insights on its unique conditions.
• The Measured Incrementality Model (MIM) is applied, drawing on Measured's bank of over 25,000 existing test results.

For either case, incrementality for campaigns and sub-campaigns is also provided by your calibrated MIM. It proportionally divides the tactic-level incrementality among the campaigns within the tactic based on our testing.

Here's a step-by-step example of the process:

1. A test is run on one of your tactics, and that tactic contains multiple campaigns
2. The results come in, and we now know the tactic's incrementality. Since the tactic is made up of campaigns, the tactic-level incrementality is an aggregate of the campaign/sub-campaign-level incrementality for each of them.
3. We then use your calibrated MIM to assign the correct incrementality to the campaigns in the tactic. This process takes things into account like changes in attribution lag and the amount of conversions from clicks versus views.

By focusing on these factors, we can maintain the relative differences in campaign incrementality and ensure the output of those campaigns sum up to the broad tactic-level incrementality. The result is highly-accurate incrementality measurements on tactic and campaign/sub-campaign levels.

In a case where we do not have enough campaign data to derive incrementality from, we take the information from the tactic or campaign that it stems from. This is due to the minimum threshold we apply to the incrementality for campaigns and sub-campaigns.

Note: We recommend viewing incrementality metrics on a weekly basis, at most. Taken day by day, any metric will fluctuate more rapidly than if it were viewed by week or month. We recommend expanding your date range if you feel you don’t have enough data to make an educated decision about future budgeting.

Getting to Know the Layout

Various settings are available within your dashboard to let you specify the data you’d like to see. Adjust them to focus on specific channels and tactics. This will affect what is displayed across the page.

Global Filters

First, along the top of the page, there are global filters that will affect metrics shown over the entire dashboard.

• Time Period lets you set the date range for the data you'll see. This date range will determine further filtering options based on what was present during that time.
  
  If Compare is enabled, you will be able to hover over metrics throughout the dashboard and see how they have changed over time and why. The contributing factors will be listed in order of having the most impact on the change.

Like with your selected time period, be aware that selections in the filters below will affect the options provided in successive filters.

• Conversion Type lets you choose between viewing all of your business’s conversions or only specific kinds.
• Channel shows all of your channels by default but can be used to only show the ones you choose.
• Segments lets you decide which part of the marketing funnel you want your reporting to represent.
• Tactics lets you select certain tactics to analyze, which are groups of campaigns with similar strategies (e.g. Brand Search vs. Non-Brand Search).
• Campaign lets you narrow down which campaigns you would like to view data for.

Portfolio-Level Metrics

After setting the global filters, the first reporting data you will see are the overall metrics for your selected criteria.

• Incremental metrics measure the true results of your performance. The most important takeaways here are your end results, such as Incremental ROAS and CPO.
  
  The incrementality percentage by itself is neither good nor bad — the best gauge of your performance will be your end metrics which represent your bottom line.
• Observed metrics represent the data we pull from your transaction data systems and ad accounts.
• Platform metrics show the figures your media platforms are reporting. Those platforms tend to over or under-report performance since their attribution models are based on what might have happened instead of what actually happened.
  
  Platform metrics stand in direct comparison to your incremental metrics, which are more accurate.

Performance Over Time

The next reporting data you’ll see is a visual display you can use to compare two metrics over your chosen date range. This is useful for placing an incremental metric against what was reported by the platform to see what has been over or under-reported.

If the metrics you are comparing are measured by different dimensions, click Show Multiple Axes to incorporate both into the graph. The appropriate scales will then appear on either end of the graph, color-coded to their line.

Summary Table

At the bottom of your XCD page, you’ll see all of the factors that contribute to your hero metrics listed in a table.

Different categories of data will be available as tabs across the top of the table. Remember, these options will be dependent on what you have selected in the global filters at the top of the page.

Channel, Tactic, Campaign, and Sub-Campaign will all display their respective data type within the table. For all of these, if there they stem from a prior category, it will be listed on the row below.

Note: Currently, sub-campaign data is available for Google, Facebook, Snapchat, and Pinterest. We will be adding sub-campaign support for more platforms in the future.

At the upper-right of the table, clicking Metrics will let you set the table’s columns, with Clear Filters reverting the table to its default.

Export allows you to download the table as you have set it up in one of multiple spreadsheet formats.