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Share of Spend vs Share of Paid Media Contributions

Learn how to interpret the Share of Spend vs Share of Paid Media Contributions charts.

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Written by Sowjenya Parthasarathy
Updated this week

The Triangulation dashboard includes visualisations that compare your share of spend against your share of paid media contributions. You can use this comparison to assess the efficiency of individual channels and to identify areas that may require further optimisation. These charts help you:

  • Identify tactics where the spend exceeds the return

  • Spot areas where underinvestment limits performance

  • Interpret the alignment between spend and contribution

You can use the scatter plot to evaluate performance by tactic. Larger bubbles indicate higher spend. The position of each bubble reflects the relative efficiency of that tactic.

You can use these charts to easily identify the over-performing and under-performing sources.

Interpreting the charts

  • The bar chart on the left compares three metrics side by side for each paid media channel:

    • Spend share

    • Conversion share

    • Revenue share

  • This format allows you to quickly identify channels that receive a high proportion of spend but contribute less to conversions or revenue.

  • The scatter plot on the right visualises each channel as a bubble:

    • The horizontal axis represents the channel's share of total spend.

    • The vertical axis represents the channel’s share of total contributions, which are the conversions or revenue.

    • The size of each bubble reflects a selected efficiency metric, such as return on ad spend (ROAS) or cost per action (CPA).

    • A diagonal reference line or the slope indicates the point at which a channel's contribution share matches its spend share.

Channels that appear above the slope, or the diagonal line, are contributing more than they spend. These channels are the overperformers. Those below the slope, such as the TV in this example, are contributing less relative to their share of spend. These channels are the underperformers.

This view supports deeper performance evaluation and helps prioritise areas for reallocation or strategic review.

Example

Let’s take a look at an example. Assume that your Performing Table has the following values for your sources.

Channel

Conversions

Revenue

CPA

Spend

Affiliate

168,561

$7,511,743

$23.49

$3.96m

Baseline

7,488,095

$333,644,883

-

-

Display Brand

137,554

$6,139,628

$0.34

$46.31k

Email

133,204

$5,959,058

-

-

Paid Social Prospecting

78,630

$3,509,796

$0.90

$70.83k

Paid Social Retargeting

150,787

$6,716,660

$0.27

$40.02k

Price Comparison

198,301

$8,818,070

$15.96

$3.16m

Retail Media

200,577

$8,941,665

$28.91

$5.80m

Search - Branded

137,306

$6,119,395

$94.06

$12.92m

Search - Generic

167,660

$7,470,223

$46.45

$7.79m

TV

114,892

$ 5,121,696

$ 501.71

$ 57.64m

The charts showing your share of spend and the share of paid media contributions might look like this.

In this example, the TV channel contributed 114,892 conversions out of approximately 1.4 million total conversions across all paid media channels. This equates to a contribution share of approximately 8%. However, TV accounts for 57.64 million dollars in spend out of a total media spend of approximately 91.42 million dollars, giving it a spend share of approximately 63.05%.

This means TV receives a significant portion of the budget but delivers a relatively small share of conversions. This imbalance may indicate underperformance. You may want to investigate whether this is acceptable given TV's strategic role, such as driving long-term brand awareness, or whether budget reallocations are necessary.

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