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Revenue & return

Attributed revenue

The money from closed deals that an attribution rule assigned to marketing — the numerator of half your metrics, and a number that almost never matches the one finance reports.

Formula
sum of closed deals assigned to the channel
Unit
Currency
Direction
Higher is better
Across periods
Adds up across periods
In KO
revenue

Attributed revenue is the money from successfully closed deals that an attribution rule assigned to a particular marketing touch. It sits in the numerator of return on marketing investment, in every channel report, and in any conversation about what pays for itself.

The load-bearing word is attributed. This is not company revenue and not the figure from the books: it is revenue with your chosen rule applied to it.

The formula

Attributed revenue = Σ amounts of deals closed won and assigned to the channel

It adds up honestly — this is a sum, not a ratio, so a quarter really does equal three months added together. The averaging mistake that ruins CPL and ROMI cannot happen here.

A different one can. The sum across channels is not obliged to equal total revenue. Under last touch it does; under any-touch it does not — one deal is credited to several channels, and adding those rows into a total double-counts the money.

What it does not show

It is not profit. Revenue still contains cost of goods, delivery, support and discounts. A campaign with excellent attributed revenue can be loss-making at a 20% gross margin, and no metric built on revenue will mention it.

It says nothing about when the money arrives. A closed deal is not a payment. Between “won” in the CRM and cash in the account sit the invoice, the payment terms, the partial payment and the refund. A revenue report and a cash report always diverge; the only question is whether you know by how much.

It does not survive refunds and cancellations. A deal cancelled a month later usually stays in last month’s report. Channels with a high cancellation rate — aggressive discounting, retargeting into cold audiences — look better than they are, right up until somebody reconciles revenue against refunds.

It is not the same as “conversion value” in an ad platform. The platform counts what its own pixel saw, inside its own attribution window, before cancellations and usually including VAT. That is a different number, and substituting it for CRM revenue in the same formulas is the fastest route to a report nobody in finance recognises.

How it breaks

Deals with no amount. Some won deals close with the amount field empty — forgotten, left blank on principle, or filled in later. Those deals drop out of revenue but stay in the sales count, so revenue per deal quietly falls. This is the most common source of disagreement with finance and the least visible: the report is not empty, it is merely understated.

Double counting. Under any-touch attribution one deal is split across several channels. Add the channel rows together and revenue exceeds what was actually earned, and the ROMI built on that sum is overstated for everyone at once. Totals must come from deals, not from summed rows.

Several currencies in one column. Deals in different currencies added without conversion at the closing date produce a sum with no meaning. The rate on the report date and the rate on the deal date are two different answers as well.

The date the revenue is booked to. A lead arrives in March and closes in June. Cohort logic puts it in the March report, calendar logic in the June one. Both are defensible, they answer different questions, and a report of one kind cannot be compared with a report of the other. Before explaining a revenue dip, make sure it is not a change in how revenue is spread across dates.

A change of attribution model. The same revenue, a different rule, and the money moves between channels while nothing in marketing changes. This is why revenue by channel without a named model and window is comparable to nothing — including your own previous quarter.

How KO calculates it

KO takes revenue from the CRM, not from the ad platforms’ conversion value: it is the sum of the income field on leads that reached a stage declared as a successful close. Which stages count as successful is a project setting rather than a product constant — for a subscription and for a one-off sale, “won” sits at different points of the funnel.

The Revenue metric card: name, value for the period, comparison with the previous period and a trend chart
The revenue card in the Metrics section: value for the period, comparison with the previous one, and the trend

The metric is additive: it adds across periods and across report rows with no recomputation. That is what makes it usable as an input for derived metrics — ROMI at any level is computed from summed revenue and summed spend, never from averaged row-level ROMIs.

Deals with no amount are counted separately: the Stages section shows, next to each outcome, how many deals carry no amount at all. A deal without money is not a zero, it is missing data, and the difference between those two statements is usually the gap with finance.

  • Return on marketing investment — what happens to this number once it is divided by spend.
  • Attribution — the rule that decides which channel gets it.
  • Key event — the funnel step where something can still be done, unlike a deal that has already closed.