How To Use The Northbeam Sales Page

Welcome to the ultimate guidebook to Northbeam’s Sales Page. The Sales Page is the bread and butter of Northbeam’s analytics offerings because it gives you the most flexibility and control in how to view and analyze your data. In this article we’ll cover what the sales page is, what it’s meant to be used for, and go over some common use cases. 

Unlike the Overview Page, which is meant for a high-level view of your business metrics for a specific time period, the Sales Page is best for answering detailed questions from your marketing team about active campaigns. Questions such as: 

How have our top 2 channels performed in the last 90 days vs. the previous year? 

Within our Meta campaigns, which adsets and ads are driving the bulk of performance gains? 

How does reporting change if I toggle between different attribution windows and models? 

To help you give a handle on using the Sales Page, let’s first discuss how it’s structured. The Sales Page is split into four sections: global navigation, chart module, detailed table, and benchmark info. 

We recommend you open Northbeam and follow along!

The Global Navigation

The very top of the Sales Page is the Global Navigation area which controls what data is shown throughout each of the other modules. By default, Attribution is set to 1 Day, Clicks Only which is a good starting point for most brands.

It’s the most “conservative” of our models and holds your ads against the strictest standard.

This is probably the model you want if you’re using “last click” in-platform.

If your consideration window is longer, feel free to modify the attribution window to 7 days or longer based on your products.

There’s several different models you can use depending on your brand’s consideration phase, AOV, top-of-funnel efforts, whatever works best for your strategic goals. 

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In the gray area right below those 3 toggles, we have the Global Filter and Breakdown functionalities. The best way to think about them is that Global Filters allows you to select a few specific things out of your data (e.g. only Facebook Ads or just Top of Funnel campaigns) while Breakdowns quickly segments all of your data into broad categories (by ad channel, SKU, creative concept and so on).

Let’s say your top two channels are Facebook and Google Ads. You can use Filters to partition those channels out from the rest of your campaigns to look at performance.

Notice that both the Charts Module and Data Table are affected by this Global Filter. We can see there are only two rows in the Data Table: one for Facebook and one for Google.

On the other hand, let’s say your brand runs ads on many more channels. We can use Breakdowns by Platform to quickly segment the data by channel with highest spend first. You can see that the Data Table is now organized with each row showing a different channel and performance metrics to the right.

These are just a few examples of what Filters and Breakdowns can do. An easy way to think about it is Filters are best for separating out a few things from the rest of your data while Breakdowns are great for quickly organizing all of your data into some common frameworks (channels, audiences, ad formats, etc.). You can save any combination of Filters, Breakdowns and Attribution settings as a view using the Save button in the top right so you don’t have to manually enter them everytime. Trust me, it saves a lot of time. 

The Chart Module

The Chart Module is the section right below Global Navigation in the Sales Page. This module was built to give marketers a simple way to visualize trends in data over time. The Charts are designed to compare multiple metrics (such as spend, CAC, revenue, and much more) over any period of time that you have data for. For example, in the screenshot below we’re looking at total marketing spend vs. total attributed revenue over the last 7 days. 

You can see Spend as the solid blue line with Attributed Revenue as the dashed line. If you wanted to see more than just the past week of data, go to the “Time Period” section above the charts and select the desired frame. In the below screenshot we selected a custom period starting from November 1st to December 31st: the bulk of the Q4 promotional calendar. It’s early January as we write this (Happy New Year from the team at Northbeam) so many marketing teams are probably evaluating holiday performance. 

Once we hit apply we’ll now see data from the last two months split by day. If that’s a little too unwieldy, we can change the Granularity to Weekly in the upper left for a bit of a cleaner x-axis. This is more useful for looking at quarterly or annual data, but in case you’re wondering how to change the time granularity, this is how to do it.

What if we want to compare different metrics other than Spend and Revenue? Let’s walk through a common use case to show you how the Metric menus work. We’ll select ROAS (1d) as the first metric to compare to.

We’ll compare that to ROAS (1d) using a different attribution model (the first metric uses the Attribution settings from Global Navigation), in this case we’ll select last non-direct touch because that’s what most folks are familiar with coming from GA4 or a similar environment. In the “Compare To” box select Attribution Model to find last non-direct touch.

I also like to view this in Bar Chart form because it’s a bit easier to see which model has a higher ROAS. In this case we can see that last non-direct touch consistently shows higher ROAS vs Northbeam’s Clicks Only model, potentially giving false signals for scaling spend. Although this is just an example, we find this pretty consistently across most of our brands.

The chart module can also be used to compare data over time. Let’s say your brand is very relevant for New Year’s Resolutions so you want to look at when traffic spiked last December to help plan for this year’s campaigns. Use the Time Period menu to select December, and then change the Time Comparison option to “Same Period, Prior Year.”

In the Metric toggles, select Visits for the first box and select “Comparison time period” in the second “Compare To” box. This will show Visits data from the last two years (Dec ‘23 + Dec ‘22) to identify spikes in traffic. In this case it looks like visits peaked in early December. Note that the Chart Module is useful for visualizing a data trend over time, but the Data Table (see below) is best suited for detailed YoY analysis when looking at several KPIs and channels.

So far we’ve only been comparing two metrics but the Chart Module gives you the ability to add a third if you wish. For example, you might want to look at Spend vs. ROAS vs. CAC for in order to layer that extra dimension of customer acquisition cost. Simply select whichever metric you want to see in the box to the right of the first “Compare To” box.

Another common three metric combination is Spend vs. Revenue vs. CAC; we can actually view both charts at the same time by selecting “Add Chart” at the bottom of the chart module. Select the three metrics you want to view just like the first chart we built.

This functionality isn’t the most utilized by Northbeam customers, but it can be extremely useful for the right reporting or analytics use cases.

Earlier in Global Navigation we talked about Global Filters which affect everything in the Chart Module and Data Tables. If you look below the Metric menus, you’ll notice a small “Add Filter” button. These sub filters apply only to that specific Metric in the Chart Module and won’t affect other modules in the Sales Page.

Earlier we looked at total marketing spend, but what if we only wanted to look at our Facebook and Google Ads spend? Just like how the Global Filters work, select Facebook and Google from the Platform options.

You can also apply the same filters to the second Metric (Attributed Revenue in this case) using the same method if you want to see revenue generated from just those two channels. 

You’ll notice that the Chart shows FB and Google Ad spend as an aggregate line. To break them out, we offer a Split chart funtion. This is helpful to see how individual trends and channels look.

Many of our brands also use this sub-filter to compare Total Marketing Spend vs Amazon Revenue (since Amazon tends to benefit from general marketing activity). Just like before, go to Attributed Revenue and select Amazon from the Platform options.

Another common use case is using the Chart Module to compare Facebook marketing spend to email signups: a good proxy for how effective your website is at capturing new visitors and getting them into the funnel.

The Data Table

The Data Table is the workhorse of Northbeam’s analytics platform. Our brands consistently tell us they rely on this module more than any other when making allocation decisions or judging performance.

It’s the best way within Northbeam to get a detailed look at your various channels and campaigns to identify winners and losers.

The Data Table can help you answer questions such as: which of my channels are performing better than others? Why is my top performing channel doing so well? Which adsets or creative concepts are driving that growth?

In the screenshot above I can see that Facebook, Google and YouTube ads (my top 3 biggest channels) are performing well with revenue up +50%, +39% and +15% respectively.

TikTok isn’t doing so hot at down -20%, but spend is also down around -20% so it’s not as concerning.

Let’s look at Facebook first since it’s our biggest channel and top performer. Once I click into “Facebook Ads” I’ll see a list of all campaigns and their performance metrics.

From there I’m going to double click into the first campaign (a prospecting one in this case) because it has the highest spend and drives the most revenue. In the screenshot below we can see that there are two active adsets (note that we are now in the adset tab of the Data Table) with adset 1 getting ⅔ of spend and adset 2 getting the remaining 1/3.

Both are performing well and look healthy, so I’m going to look at them one at a time to see if I notice anything. Double clicking into the first adset reveals a long list of active ads.

If we descramble the data (Please forgive the garbled names but we need to anonymize the data for privacy), we can see that the top performing ads tend to be video assets which are all selling the same product.

We can identify winners in this list to double down on and ramp down spend on poor performers.

We would then repeat this process for the other adset in this campaign, and also for any other campaigns in other channels that catch our attention. In this case I’d most likely also look at Google Ads since it’s our second biggest channel. 

The same analysis process would reveal that Branded Search, Shopping and Performance Max are all performing well for this brand. I would conduct then go through the same exercise with adsets and ads, and so on for all of my top channels. 

So far we’ve looked at the Data Table to primarily look at spend and attributed revenue, but the table is best suited for looking at a large number of KPIs (scroll to the right to see them all) simultaneously and evaluating historical performance.

You have the ability to change the metrics displayed in each column using the Customize Table button.

Metrics are organized by category on the left so select whichever ones are relevant for your brand. In this example the team looks at almost every Northbeam recommended metric (a great place to start before customizing later on).

You’ll see a Column Order widget to the right where you can organize which metrics you want to see first. If you turn the toggle on for any metric, the Data Table will display a mini-graph for the period of time selected in Global Navigation.

Here we can see that the brand has three ROAS toggles turned on: ROAS (1d), LTV ROAS and FB ROAS. Each of those metrics will show historical performance in the Data Table, which is handy when you’re comparing multiple campaigns with similar absolute ROAS figures. Mini-graphs can show you if one is ascending or if the other is experiencing diminishing returns. 

Finally let’s cover two advanced functions: Custom Metrics and the Search bar. Custom Metrics allows you to build a bespoke KPI through some mathematical manipulation of two existing metrics. Let’s walk through a few Custom Metrics available out of the box to see what that means. New Customer Percentage looks at the ratio of new transactions to overall transactions.

To calculate that, we divide Transactions (1st time) by overall Transactions to get this percentage.

We can even see a preview of how this would be calculated for our top 4 channels at the bottom of the menu. Note that because this is a template Custom Metric, it cannot be modified or deleted just like Revenue Per Visit and the other templates in the left menu.

If I want to create a new Custom Metric, I can click Add New Metric in the left menu to do that. Let’s say that I’m a subscription-heavy brand that’s more interested in returning customers than new ones and want to create a Returning Customer % instead.

We’ll input the formula to calculate this percentage: transactions from returning customers divided by total transactions. Click “Save” so that this metric is readily available in the Data Table. The Customize Table feature includes the ability to add Custom Metrics as a column so this is a really powerful tool for brands that have KPIs not available with Northbeam out of the box.

We also have a video tutorial if you’d prefer to follow along on how to create a new Custom Metric.

Last but not least, the Search bar is another way to organize your data beyond the options in Global Navigation. If you require even more flexibility than Filters and Breakdowns, you can directly search for any Breakdown Label or tag associated with your campaigns.

For example, I could type “Nonbranded” to only look at those campaigns or I could search for “TOF” to quickly look at all top of funnel ads.

Benchmarks

If you haven’t set up the Benchmark tool yet in your Sales Page, check out this article. The onboarding process is pretty intuitive but we recorded a quick video if you find it helpful.

One of the most common questions we get is about forecasting and planning ahead using Northbeam. If I have a 30 (or 60/ 90) day target metric (let’s say ROAS), what performance do I need to see today to know that I’m headed on the right path?

Most of our media buyers are looking at 1 day metrics when making decisions, but how do they square that with a future goal? You could of course reverse engineer your own conversion lag numbers (like many of our savviest brands) to figure out incremental revenue lift after the date of purchase.

To make it even easier, we created this benchmarking module to crunch the math so you can access these insights within Northbeam. The Benchmark tool is currently available for three channels: Google, Facebook, and YouTube. In addition to ROAS, we also offer CAC targets if your brand prefers to look at customer acquisition economics first and foremost.

For each channel, we’ve broken down each metric into blended, first time and returning customers. This is because our brands often find that they can be a bit more forgiving on ROAS and CAC targets for returning customers vs. new ones.

This view is great for for brands who heavily skew in one way (subscription products for example) because the blended numbers can be biased in either direction by an aggressive first time or returning target.

In the screenshot above, if our brand only used the Google blended ROAS target of 5.55, several campaigns below that mark could potentially get shut down even though they can afford a lower ROAS at 4.66 for retargeting (or similar) campaigns. To interpret the numbers, let’s look at the Facebook numbers from above. This brand’s 30 day ROAS target is 1.5, which means they have to have a blended ROAS of 1.14 today in order to get there within a month.

These benchmarks help give you context on your day-to-day performance numbers and how they ladder up. 

Thank you for reading our conclusive guide to the Sales Page, we hope this was helpful!