Analytics → Metrics Overview → Operations Tab
Analytics data refreshes on a schedule, not instantly. Under the dashboard title you’ll see when the data was last updated and when the next refresh is due. If a change you just made in Owlery isn’t showing yet, check there first.
The Question the Metric Answers
Spot savings answers one question: what would this load have cost without a competitive bidding process? Without one, you’d have called a broker or two and taken what came back. It’s fair to object that you’d still have taken the cheaper of those two calls, which would put you below the midpoint of five bids rather than at it. But that objection assumes those brokers would have quoted you the same numbers either way, and they wouldn’t have. A carrier bidding into an open event knows it is being compared. A carrier quoting a shipper who rang them directly knows it isn’t. Running the event doesn’t just show you more of the market — it changes the prices the market shows you. So the right comparison isn’t the cheapest quote from a smaller sample. It’s an ordinary price from a market that was never under pressure to sharpen its pencil, and the midpoint is Owlery’s estimate of that price.Comparing Like With Like
Note the word comparable. Before any benchmark gets picked, the field has to be drawn, and Owlery draws it inside a single mode class: LTL bids are compared against LTL bids, non-LTL against non-LTL. Whichever group you tendered from is the group the midpoint comes from. The reason is that mixing them measures the wrong thing. The gap between an LTL rate on a partial load and a truckload rate on the same lane is mostly the gap between two different products — you are buying part of a trailer in one case and all of it in the other. Put both in one field and the midpoint drifts up into truckload territory, and every LTL tender starts reporting savings it did nothing to earn. The metric would be crediting your bidding event for a decision made in load planning.A Worked Mixed-Mode Example
Take a quote that drew six bids across both modes:
Thrown into one field, the midpoint lands at $1,540 and the load reports $590 saved. But nothing about your bidding event produced that gap — most of it is the ordinary distance between shipping a partial load LTL and buying a whole truck. You’d be taking credit for choosing a mode.
Measured against the LTL bids alone, the midpoint is $1,010 and the load reports $60. That’s the honest number: what running the event was worth once mode is held constant. The $590 isn’t a measure of competitive pressure — it’s a measure of trailer size.
This cuts against the number, which is the point. Where a choice about scope could plausibly go either way, Owlery takes the one that reports less, so that the figure survives someone checking it.
Mode conversion savings are real — moving freight off truckload and onto LTL where it fits is worth money. They’re just a different metric, sized in load planning, and keeping them out of spot savings is what lets either number mean something on its own.
The Benchmarks Considered
Four benchmarks were considered. Applied to the five comparable bids in A Worked Example — Carriers A through E bidding $950, $955, $1,100, $1,200, and $2,400, with Carrier A’s $950 tendered and $1,100 the midpoint:On the Second-Cheapest Bid
Measuring against the second-cheapest bid is a reasonable answer to a different question: what would this load have cost if my best carrier hadn’t shown up? That’s worth knowing, and it’s a fair way to size how exposed a lane is to a single carrier. It just isn’t a measure of what competitive bidding is worth to you. It also behaves backwards as a headline number. In that example, Carrier A and Carrier B came in at $950 and $955, while the rest of the field sat at $1,100 and above. Against the second-cheapest bid, that load reports $5 saved. Against the midpoint, it reports $150. The $5 figure is small precisely because you got two of your carriers to fight hard, which means the measure shows the least impact when your event worked best. It also only ever looks at the top two bids, when what you built was competitive pressure across the whole field. That field is what is worth measuring against. It also depends too much on who happened to show up. Suppose Carrier A sits that event out — truck already booked, dispatcher missed the email, nothing to do with your lane. The other four bids come in unchanged, and you tender Carrier B at $955.
You paid five dollars more, and the second-cheapest measure rewards you with twenty-nine times the savings. Nothing about the lane changed; one carrier didn’t answer the phone.
That’s the deeper problem. Second-cheapest rests on a single bid, and which bid that is depends entirely on who turned up. Lose one carrier and the benchmark relocates. The midpoint rests on the shape of the whole comparable field, so the same missing carrier nudges it instead of moving it. It does rise — from $1,100 to $1,150, lifting reported savings by about 30% — because with the cheap end of the field gone, the market you’d have faced without an event genuinely was more expensive. That’s a real shift, sized to a real change. The 29x jump is not.
This is the ordinary reason to reach for a median instead of a single ranked bid: medians are hard to push around. A benchmark should move when your market moves, and sit still when it doesn’t.