Determining Period Costs

[Anonymous]

Hello All,

We're about to set the process to set the Period Costs for our various programs/campaigns.

What we need to figure out is a good way to cost up programs that didn’t involve a direct hard dollar spend. If we treat lead nurturing as ‘zero cost’ for example it makes the ROI look ridiculous when in reality we invested $xx in Marketo, in employee time to develop the program and content, in translation costs for the emails/landing pages etc.

Does anyone have a magic formulas they use or do you have any recommended best practice approaches for this to share?

With kind regards, Victoria

[Anonymous]

Hi Victoria, In 2013 we just added $1 for each program. Else it doesn't show up in reports (you can't devide by 0). Right now we only at out-of-pocket costs, which indeed isn't fair. We're discussing to multiply hours with a fixed amount. It would be hard to work with different hour fees. For us it's still hard to determine the exact hours, as multiple people work on it (e.g. copywriter for text, designer for images, marketer sets up the campaign, marketo expert reviews/activates). We are going to test it, but getting proper cost data from this will be hard. It would be great if program costs would be split into internal and external cost.