When PR, paid marketing, email, search, and product changes run together, a sale or lead may have several contributing causes. Do not add each channel's claimed return as though every one produced the full outcome independently. Start with a joint objective, record the complete cost of the campaign, and report observed results separately from any modeled attribution.
Build a joint measurement map
Shared outcome
Choose one business result and definition: qualified leads, verified signups, donations, retained customers, or another measure.
Channel roles
Describe what PR, paid media, owned content, email, and sales activity were expected to do, from awareness to conversion.
Complete cost
Include relevant staff, agency, production, distribution, and media spending for the same period and audience.
Comparable baseline
Record the pre-campaign level and important external changes such as price, seasonality, or product availability.
Attribution limit
State whether results are directly observed, linked by a tracking method, or inferred by a model with assumptions.
Illustrative calculation
Suppose a combined campaign costs $40,000 and the organization estimates $60,000 in incremental contribution after variable costs. A simple modeled return would be ($60,000 - $40,000) / $40,000 = 50%. That number is only as reliable as the 'incremental' estimate and the completeness of the cost ledger. It is not a measured fact simply because the arithmetic is correct.
Do not assign the same $60,000 fully to PR and fully to paid marketing, then sum the two returns. If attribution is uncertain, show a range or report the joint outcome with a clear caveat. Qualitative evidence, such as interviews explaining how buyers learned about the offer, can help interpret the path but should not be converted into money without an explicit method.
A useful final report
Show activities and outputs, audience understanding or engagement, business outcomes, costs, attribution assumptions, and uncertainties in separate rows. AMEC's framework is useful for distinguishing these layers. The goal is a decision about what to repeat or improve, not the largest possible ROI percentage.