Calculation examples for the adCost and attributedAdCost fields

OWOX BI allows assessing the effectiveness of your ad channels based on the calculated session cost. The total session cost is attributed evenly between sessions according to the UTM tags 'source', 'medium', 'campaign', 'keyword', and 'content' and written to the field attributedAdCost.

Calculation logic for the attributedAdCost field

When one or more tags are unknown, the cost is attributed evenly between the sessions according to the known tags and written to the attributedAdCost field.

Processed cases:

1. No 'utm_content' tag — costs are attributed accordingly to 'utm_source', 'utm_medium', 'utm_campaign', 'utm_term'.
2. No 'utm_term' and 'utm_content' tags — costs are attributed accordingly to 'utm_source', 'utm_medium', 'utm_campaign' and 'utm_term'.
3. Only the 'utm_source' and 'utm_medium' tags are known — costs are attributed accordingly to these known tags.

Note:To distribute the attributed ad cost to a session, the presence of the 'source' and 'medium' tags is required. If even one of these tags is absent, then costs won't be attributed.

Examples

We know we've spent 100$ (adCost = 100) on sessions with the following tags:

• 'utm_source' = 'google'
• 'utm_medium' = 'cpc'
• 'utm_campaign' = 'spring_sale'
• 'utm_term' = 'running+shoes'
• 'utm_content' = 'logolink'

We also know had 5 sessions total with the same values of the tags 'utm_source', 'utm_medium', utm_campaign', 'utm_term', and 'utm_content'.

Since all the tags perfectly match in all sessions, the field adCost will get the value calculated as 100$ / 5 sessions = 20$.

In this case, the costs are calculated for the attributedAdCost field in the same way:

Another case: Google Analytics has cost data for 100$ more with this set of tags:

• 'utm_source' = 'google'
• 'utm_medium' = 'cpc'
• 'utm_campaign' = 'sale'
• 'utm_term' = 'running+shoes'
• 'utm_content' = 'logolink'

However, Google Analytics didn't have data on sessions with this set of tags. In this case, the sum of 'google / cpc / sale' costs will be attributed to all 'google / cpc' sources as (100$ + 100$) / 5 sessions = 40$. But the value in the adCost field won't change, since this time we don't give a perfect match by tags: