True CAC reconciliation. Directive accuracy methodology. The seven cost layers your ad dashboard does not show. Insights for paid acquisition operations where dashboard CPL is not the full story.
Your ad platform reports one of seven cost layers. The gap between dashboard CPL and true customer acquisition cost runs 30 to 70 percent. Here is what is hiding — and how to calculate the real number.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the attribution standard. It also cannot reconcile platform fees, broker payouts, refunds, or financing fees to campaign-level margin. The architectural gap, side by side.
PACE charges 5-6%. GreenSky merchant fees run 5-10%. Service Finance hits 12%. None of it shows up in your ad dashboard. Here is how to reconcile financing fees back to campaign margin.
Complete methodology for calculating marketing contribution margin per campaign. Formulas, the seven cost layers, common mistakes, and a worked example from dashboard reporting through full reconciliation.
Google Tag Manager fires events. It does not reconcile cost layers. The architectural reason your tag-based ROI reporting is structurally incomplete — and what closes the gap.
Every marketing tool tells you what to do. None of them check whether they were right. Allocera's CDAI engine retests every directive 30 days later — and scores 80 percent measured accuracy.
Florida impact window operation reports $156 CPL at 4.8x ROAS. Reconciled across all seven cost layers — broker payouts, refunds, chargebacks, financing fees — the true cost per closed install runs 78 percent higher.
56 directives issued. 55 scored at 80 percent measured accuracy. 44 correct, 11 incorrect. The methodology breakdown that produces a number no other marketing analytics platform reports.
A layer-by-layer breakdown of every cost the dashboard does not report — platform fees, broker payouts, refunds, chargebacks, compliance, financing — with verified industry ranges for each.
In categories where 60 to 70 percent of jobs are financed, merchant fees compress contractor margin by 5 to 12 percent before any other cost layer enters the picture. The broader story across the vertical.
How the major attribution platforms compare against true margin reconciliation. Where each is strong, where each was never built to answer the margin question, and why it matters.
The five enforceable directives Allocera's engine issues for every campaign — with confidence scores, reason codes, and the 30-day retest that validates whether each call was right.