Measuring marketing and sales results in single-channel campaigns is usually a more straightforward process: choosing a goal that reflects the performance of a specific channel and, based on that, calculating ROI. But what about when a customer searches for a product on your website, asks a salesperson in-store, and completes the purchase through the app? In omnichannel, every touchpoint counts—and this channel integration, while valuable for boosting results, makes measuring return on investment much more complex.
In an omnichannel context, ROI measures how much an action that integrates multiple channels, whether physical and/or digital, generates in financial return relative to the investment made. However, while in single-channel campaigns it’s possible to directly correlate investment and return, when multiple channels are targeted, the return comes from the sum of interactions across different touchpoints, often with longer, non-linear purchasing journeys—making this a very complex task for many companies.
In addition to the complexity of evaluating impacts from different channels, it’s also important to consider other key challenges in this journey: data integration, as each channel collects information in different formats and metrics; visibility of the entire journey, as parts of the experience are often not recorded in a traceable and measurable way; and the overlapping results that can occur without an integrated view, when the same conversion is recorded across more than one channel, thus distorting the ROI.
And what are the drawbacks of not paying attention to these precautions, especially in a highly digital and connected market? According to a survey by ILUMEO, approximately 20% of media investments show no statistically significant correlation with business results, such as sales or lead generation. This means that, without proper measurement, a fifth of the marketing budget can be wasted.
This data reinforces the importance of centralizing information from different sources into a single channel and standardizing metrics, channel names, and tracking. This provides a 360-degree view of the customer journey and, therefore, a clear and objective understanding of the company’s return on each campaign. In this regard, we must emphasize the valuable ally technology can be.
There are several tools on the market capable of assisting with this measurement, such as integrated CRMs that help track all interactions throughout the customer lifecycle and consolidate behavioral, transactional, and engagement data; as well as BI solutions that help transform large volumes of data into easy-to-interpret dashboards. Many of them even allow you to map journeys and assign weights to each channel, making this analysis even more comprehensive and reliable to support future decision-making.
In this sense, there’s not just one single indicator companies should use; everything depends on the strategy they adopt and the goals they want to achieve. Despite this, some essential metrics should be prioritized, such as the campaign’s overall ROI, CAC before and after omnichannel implementation, LTV (which measures the total value a customer generates over the course of the relationship), conversion rate by channel and cross-channel (identifying where consumers progress in the journey), engagement, and retention rate.
This data analysis allows you to continually test hypotheses, adjusting messages, segmentations, and formats to create more personalized experiences, increasing engagement and, consequently, return on investment. Perform these checks frequently, as consumer behavior changes and this directly impacts the performance of channels within your omnichannel campaign strategy.
The most important thing in all of this is to ensure the quality and constant updating of this data, as it can compromise the entire ROI analysis and lead to misleading business decisions. The secret is to turn numbers into insights actionable, since, by identifying which channels have the greatest impact at each stage of the funnel, it is possible to redistribute budget and efforts in a more intelligent and strategic way to increase the achievement of the desired results.
