When it comes to business, a dollar is a dollar, right? Not quite.

Revenue might look like one big number, but not every order tells the same story. Sometimes, the best way to understand your revenue and profitability is to look at what kind of order you’re actually getting, not just where it came from.

To that end, we’ve launched order segmentation to give you clean visibility into how your media spend contributes to different types of orders. You can create custom segments based on the order data you already have, like order tags, discount codes, or shipping country and then see attributed revenue and orders for each segment alongside your existing performance data in Northbeam.

Let’s say you sell both DTC and wholesale. You know each segment has different margins and CAC:LTV ratios. You suspect the channels that help you acquire wholesale customers aren’t the same ones driving direct orders on your site.

Until now, you’ve probably been manually exporting and analyzing your Northbeam data to back into these metrics so you can understand the health of your business.

Now, you can do these comparisons directly in Northbeam.

➡️ Step 1: Select “Order Segmentations” from the top right-hand menu.

➡️ Step 2: Name your segmentation and set the parameters. You can filter by order tag, discount code, or shipping country code.

In this example, I’m filtering by order tags, because that’s how I differentiate wholesale vs. DTC within Shopify.

You can also use AND conditions when multiple conditions must be true, and OR groups when an order can match one of several sets of conditions.

➡️ Step 3: Test your segmentation. Northbeam will show how many orders matched each segment during the selected lookback period. If this looks right, save your segment.

➡️ Step 4: View your segments. To add segment metrics to the Sales page:

Now I can easily see metrics like AOV and CAC, split out by revenue type, reported by channel, campaign, or ad. What used to take hours of analysis now takes just a few minutes of setup.

🌎 Break down performance by market

Selling across multiple countries? Create segments based on shipping country to see how revenue and orders break down by market. You could also combine this with another segmentation. For example, look at Promo Code: Podcast + Market: United States to understand where specific partner programs are driving business.

🎟️ Understand your promotions

Want to know whether your influencer codes, affiliate codes, or other promotions are actually bringing in customers? Group discount codes into segments and compare the resulting orders, revenue, AOV, CAC, or ROAS. You can even combine individual segments into a broader reporting group when you want to see the total performance of several programs together.

The idea is simple: instead of treating every order the same, create the breakdowns that make sense for your business.

Order Segmentation is available in the Sales page, Metrics Explorer, Creative Analytics, Overview, Custom Metrics, and Orders, so once you've created your segments, you can use them throughout your reporting.

Last week's issue of The Media Buyer covered one Q4 number most media buyers never calculate for their own business: conversion lag — the gap between someone seeing your ad and actually buying.

It matters more than it sounds. One apparel brand's same-day Meta ROAS of 1.0 closes at 1.35x after 30 days. Judge that campaign on day-one data and you're looking at a 35% gap.

And the gap widens as you get closer to the sale. For another apparel brand, the day-1 to day-14 difference ran 25% in October, 29% in early November, and 36–37% during BFCM week itself because everyone's sitting on a full cart waiting for the discount code.

The fix is one piece of arithmetic: day-one target = long-window target ÷ your multiplier. A 2.0 30-day ROAS target against a 1.36 cyber-week multiplier means 1.47 on Black Friday morning is on plan, not a campaign to cut.

The issue walks through how to calculate your own multipliers and distribution by channel, and there's homework. Build these benchmarks now, in September, while the data's clean, and save yourself some panic in mid-November.

We've partnered with ad platforms to get these exclusive credit offers for Northbeam customers. To claim an offer, reach out to [email protected].