ROI: The gold standard for measuring impact

It’s no secret that retail fuel is a challenging industry. Staying competitive on sign price and leveraging on-site marketing may be critical strategies for keeping pace with your competitors, but what can you do to outpace them? You need to identify & invest in strategies that will give you a true competitive advantage, and drive profitable growth for your business.  Doing so starts with a robust method of evaluation- and ROI is the gold standard. Measuring the ROI of every investment is the best way to track success based on what actually matters for the long-term health of your business: incremental profitability.

How does Upside measure ROI? 

Let’s look at an example of this calculation: 

In this example, the retailer invested $15K to receive $24K in return, amounting to $9K in incremental net profit and a 60% ROI.  

An ROI of 60% means that you received $1.60 for every $1.00 invested, or $0.60 in return after accounting for the initial investment cost. Simple enough, right?

The challenges to accurately calculating ROI

The ROI calculation itself is straightforward, but accurately quantifying the components for any initiative you’re running can be challenging - especially for brick and mortar businesses. In order to measure ROI, you have to be able to measure the incremental net profit of your investment. 

Very few investments - including most digital strategies - come with the ability to quantify the incremental profit they deliver - that is, the profit that would not have been captured otherwise, after factoring in all other considerations.

Example: Loyalty program

Let’s look at a specific example in more detail. Loyalty programs give you more visibility into attribution than say, a bathroom upgrade, but how much of the revenue that flows through your loyalty program is truly incremental? How many transactions are you discounting that would have occurred anyway? To accurately calculate ROI, you need to be able to measure and understand customer behavior. This requires robust analytical capabilities and in some cases, that’s simply impossible to do. Plus, loyalty programs can be costly to implement and maintain, making it challenging to achieve a positive ROI in the near term, if ever. 

Apples vs. oranges: when ROI comparisons lose their meaning

The challenges to accurately calculating ROI don’t stop many companies - particularly in the digital marketing & advertising space - from reporting impressive-sounding figures. The problem is, ROI calculation methods vary widely, and typically replace incremental net profit with gross profit or revenue. These substitutions essentially add some extra cushion to account for the inability to accurately measure things like attribution and incrementality. This uncertainty doesn’t mean the investments aren’t valuable, it just means their true value is unknown, making comparison with other potential investments difficult.

Whenever you’re presented with an ROI metric, make sure the calculation method is transparent so that you can compare apples to apples when measuring success across initiatives.

Upside was designed to deliver a measurable, incremental and profitable ROI

Upside is designed to prove our impact on every transaction - guaranteeing a measurable, incremental, and profitable ROI. With Upside, you don’t have to estimate ROI - we calculate it on every transaction to clearly quantify our impact on your business.

Visit your Upside dashboard to view the program and transaction-level ROI Upside delivers to your business.

The ROI we deliver to you is a result of our incremental impact - after all program costs and expected profit is accounted for.

Upside fuel retailers see a 65% ROI, on average. That’s real net profit that Upside delivers to your business - not your competitors. Plus, we introduce new customers to your stations, giving you the chance to earn their loyalty and boost the ROI of the investments you’ve already made. 

Measurable, incremental profit that helps you beat the competition? That’s the Upside effect.

We’re determined to deliver you incremental profit - if your quarterly ROI drops below 15%, we’ll issue you a refund.