| Course | MKT 449 Marketing Analytics (MKT/449) |
|---|---|
| Week | 5 |
| Paper type | Marketing performance dashboard and evaluation |
| Length | about 1,032 words, 4 double-spaced pages plus title page and references |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | University of Phoenix |
| Program | BS in Business |
| Updated | October 2026 |
Free sample paper for MKT 449 Week 5
One Page Every Month: A Marketing Performance Dashboard and Return on Marketing Review for a Burlington Wool Sock Company
[Student Name]
University of Phoenix
MKT/449: Marketing Analytics
Week 5 Final Assignment
[Instructor Name]
[Date]
Hollow Brook Sock Company, its budget and all results are composites written for a model paper.
Four earlier papers looked at Hollow Brook, the invented Vermont sock brand, from different sides. Week 1 inventoried its scattered data systems. Week 2 put its reach at roughly one household in 25 in New England and far fewer in the West. Week 3 found moderate recognition at home and low recognition in the West. Week 4 found that about 8 percent of direct customers bring in close to a third of website revenue and that two of every three first-time buyers do not return. Founder Grace Thibault now wants to know which parts of last year's $780,000 marketing budget paid off and how to watch performance from now on. This paper evaluates the budget and presents a monthly dashboard.
Measuring Marketing Productivity
Rust et al. (2004) described a chain of marketing productivity. Marketing actions, such as advertising and promotions, affect customers' thoughts, feelings and behavior, which affect market outcomes, such as sales and market share, which in turn affect financial results and the value of the firm. They argued that firms should measure links along the whole chain, not just final sales, and that customer measures such as lifetime value help connect marketing to financial results.
What Dashboards Should Do
Pauwels et al. (2009) described marketing dashboards as tools that bring a small number of key performance drivers together in one display, shared across the organization. They argued that good dashboards balance short-term and long-term measures, include leading indicators that predict later results and help managers make decisions rather than merely monitor. They also warned against dashboards crowded with measures nobody uses.
Evaluating Last Year's Budget
Each channel's new customers were estimated from web analytics, marketplace reports, discount codes and the shop sampling records. First-year margin and lifetime value come from the Week 4 analysis, adjusted by the share of each channel's customers who became repeat buyers.
Search ads, $210,000: 6,400 new customers, $32.81 each, average lifetime margin $66
Social ads, $190,000: 3,800 new customers, $50.00 each, average lifetime margin $48
Marketplace ads, $120,000: 4,100 new customers, $29.27 each, average lifetime margin $41
Email, $45,000: mostly repeat sales, about $310,000 in margin from tracked orders
Trade shows, $135,000: 11 new shop accounts, $12,273 each, about $96,000 in first-year wholesale margin
Shop sampling and displays, $80,000: 26 new shop accounts, $3,077 each, about $180,000 in first-year wholesale margin
Reading the Evaluation
Search ads bring customers at a cost below their lifetime margin, so they create value. Social ads cost about as much as each customer's lifetime margin is worth, so they barely pay for themselves, and the broad audiences they reach in the West have low recognition of the brand. Marketplace ads bring cheap customers, but their low repeat rate and the company's lack of access to them reduce their value. Email produces strong margin from existing customers, though some of those orders would have happened anyway. Trade shows produce shop accounts at a high cost, while sampling programs for shop staff bring accounts at a quarter of the price.
The evaluation does not find one bad channel and one good one; it finds that some money is working hard and some is barely working at all.
Limits of the Evaluation
These figures show association, not proof. Customers who saw several channels are credited to the last one, and some customers attributed to search might have bought after seeing the brand in a shop. Measuring true returns is hard even for the largest advertisers: Lewis and Rao (2015) reviewed 25 big online advertising experiments and showed that purchases vary so much from person to person that even millions of observations often leave the return of a campaign uncertain. A small company should therefore treat channel returns as rough guides and use the planned tests below to check the biggest ones.
The Dashboard
The dashboard fits on one page and has nine measures in three rows. Leading indicators: aided brand recognition in the Colorado test area, from the quarterly tracker, target 20 percent; branded search per 100,000 residents by region, target up 25 percent in the West; and new shop accounts, target 40 for the year. Customer outcomes: new customers by channel per month; first-year retention of new buyers, target 40 percent; and champion retention, target 80 percent. Financial results: cost per new customer against lifetime margin by channel; marketing spending as a share of revenue, target under 12 percent; and gross margin from marketing-driven sales.
Each measure has a definition, a data source, an owner and a target. The marketing manager owns the customer measures, the wholesale manager owns shop accounts and the founder reviews the whole page monthly.
Recommended Budget
The budget stays at $780,000 but shifts. Search ads rise to $240,000. Social ads fall to $110,000 and focus on the Colorado test area and on retargeting. Marketplace ads fall to $90,000. Email rises to $60,000 to fund the Week 4 segment programs. Trade shows fall to $60,000, attending only the two largest. Shop sampling and displays rise to $160,000 to support the Colorado expansion. A reserve of $60,000 is held for whichever test produces the best result.
Two Tests
First, the Colorado shop and recognition test designed in Weeks 2 and 3 will run with Utah as a comparison region. Second, brand search ads will be paused for four weeks in a randomly selected half of New England states to measure how many of those sales arrive anyway.
Quarterly Review
Each quarter, the founder and managers will review the dashboard, the test results and the brand tracker, and move the reserve and up to 15 percent of any channel's budget toward measures that are improving.
Conclusion
Marketing performance is a chain from actions to customers to financial results. Research on marketing productivity and dashboards supports a short page of leading indicators, customer outcomes and financial measures with clear targets and owners. Applied to Hollow Brook Sock Company, the evaluation shows strong value from search, email and shop sampling and weak value from broad social ads and trade shows, and planned tests will confirm how much of each result marketing actually caused.
References
Lewis, R. A., & Rao, J. M. (2015). The unfavorable economics of measuring the returns to advertising. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 130(4), 1941-1973. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjv023
Pauwels, K., Ambler, T., Clark, B. H., LaPointe, P., Reibstein, D., Skiera, B., Wierenga, B., & Wiesel, T. (2009). Dashboards as a service: Why, what, how, and what research is needed? Journal of Service Research, 12(2), 175-189. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094670509344213
Rust, R. T., Ambler, T., Carpenter, G. S., Kumar, V., & Srivastava, R. K. (2004). Measuring marketing productivity: Current knowledge and future directions. Journal of Marketing, 68(4), 76-89. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.68.4.76.42721
What the MKT 449 Week 5 instructions ask
The final MKT 449 assignment often asks students to evaluate an organization's overall marketing performance using analytics and to recommend improvements, sometimes by building a marketing dashboard or a performance report. Expect to bring together earlier work on penetration, brand recognition and loyalty, to calculate measures such as cost per acquisition, return on marketing investment and customer lifetime value by channel and to present them in a form managers can use. Many prompts ask students to explain how they would use the dashboard to adjust spending. A strong paper links marketing activity to customer outcomes and then to financial results, keeps the dashboard short, explains how each metric is calculated and cites research on marketing measurement in APA format.
How this MKT 449 Week 5 example is built
The founder of Hollow Brook has received four separate reports every month for years, and the final paper replaces them with one page. It begins with research describing a chain from marketing actions to customer impact to market and financial results, and with research on what marketing dashboards should contain. Last year's $780,000 budget is then evaluated channel by channel, using cost per new customer, first-year margin and the lifetime value estimates from Week 4. The evaluation finds trade shows and broad social ads weak and email and shop sampling strong. A nine-measure dashboard follows, arranged from leading indicators to outcomes and finances, with targets and owners. The paper closes with a reallocated budget, two planned tests and a quarterly review routine.
MKT 449 Week 5 grading rubric: where the points go
Final performance evaluations earn top marks when they connect marketing actions to customer and financial outcomes with sound calculations. Graders look for integration of the course's earlier analyses, metrics defined and computed accurately, return on marketing evaluated with appropriate caution and a dashboard that is focused, readable and tied to decisions. Research on marketing productivity and dashboards should support the design. Recommendations should follow from the evaluation, with tests or controls to confirm them. A clear structure, tables summarizing results, correct APA citations and professional writing suited to a management audience complete a strong submission, and acknowledging the limits of attribution signals mature judgment.
MKT 449 Week 5 help: mistakes to avoid
Final papers often fall short by presenting a dashboard with 25 metrics, which no manager reads. Choose fewer than a dozen and explain why each earns its place. Another common issue is calculating return on marketing with revenue instead of margin, or with first-purchase value only, which undervalues channels that bring loyal customers. Use margin and lifetime value where possible. Students also present every return figure as if it proved cause; mention that some customers would have bought anyway and suggest tests. Some papers ignore the earlier weeks and start over. Pull in the penetration, recognition and loyalty findings. Finally, give each metric a target and an owner, because a dashboard without targets shows numbers but does not show whether marketing is succeeding.
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- MKT 449 Week 1: Web Analytics and Marketing Data
- MKT 449 Week 2: Analyzing Market Penetration
- MKT 449 Week 3: Measuring Brand Recognition
- MKT 449 Week 4: Customer Loyalty Analytics
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MKT 449 Week 5 questions, answered
What does MKT 449 Week 5 usually cover?
It usually covers evaluating overall marketing performance with analytics, often by building a marketing dashboard that links activities to customer outcomes and financial results and by recommending changes in spending.
Where can I find a free MKT 449 Week 5 sample paper?
The final marketing performance evaluation and dashboard for a composite Burlington wool sock company is available in full above, with its channel table.
What should a marketing dashboard include?
A focused set of leading indicators, customer outcomes and financial results, each with a definition, target and owner, arranged so managers can see causes and effects at a glance.
How do you calculate return on marketing investment?
Subtract marketing spending from the incremental gross margin it produced, then divide by the spending; using lifetime margin rather than first-purchase revenue gives a fairer view for channels that bring repeat buyers.
Why are controlled tests used in marketing analytics?
Because dashboards show correlations, a test that holds out a comparison group shows how much of a result the marketing actually caused, which guides budget decisions more reliably.
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