The term “full-funnel” has been a buzzword for years in advertising circles. It’s something that is referenced but not always put into practice. Full-funnel approaches to media planning are all hands on deck. You cannot silo each marketing channel into their own lanes, especially when it comes to paid media. 

Advertising on social platforms influences branded search volume on Google Ads. Implementing a retargeting strategy with strong remarketing audiences on Youtube, can be repurposed for the likes of Meta. Forecasting budgets need to be done in conjunction with all paid channels in order to accurately estimate traffic, conversion volume, and overall customer acquisition costs. 

Without a coherent objective across all channels, your marketing strategy is hindered before it even has a chance to start the race. Here’s how Tuff looks at owning every stage of the funnel with paid media. 

Table of Contents

• A look under the hood of paid media
• Create a full-funnel paid media plan
• Forecasting a paid media strategy
• Full-funnel measurement

Full-funnel approach to media planning 

When creating a full-funnel paid media plan, we think about three key areas of focus:

• Optimizing performance on each platform
• Setting up campaigns to work together in sync
• Balancing and integrating priorities 

Our focus is long-term growth, not just one-off wins. We use data to weed out underperforming assets, optimize the best ideas, and build on what’s working. Every part of a paid media strategy should relate somehow back to the overall business objectives. If marketing dollars are being allocated somewhere, stakeholders should be rest assured knowing that these dollars tie into specific goals. How do we go about this?

We use these these 3 things to continually tie our paid media planning into a partner’s business objectives:

1. Quarterly planning sessions – These are used on a quarterly basis to align all business objectives to actional tasks and projects for the upcoming quarter. This would also include all owned media planning in order to create a business strategy that is all encompassing. 
2. Executive summaries – During weekly external meetings with partners, our Growth Markets will include what we call executive summaries at the top of any notes involved in the week. This may include to do lists for internal & external teams, approvals, and high level reporting. 
3. Project retros – This may sound obvious, but after a project the prioritization of a recap can be incredibly beneficial when relating back to business objectives. What went well? What went wrong? Did we further our goals? How can we learn from the data for the next project?

Now, from a platform perspective, we manage campaigns across all of the major channels and lean on that knowledge to decide what and how we want to test and allocate resources to drive growth across brand and performance objectives. We find the perfect mix of channels specifically tailored to each partner. Not every channel is necessary, but the right channel mix can be instrumental for setting yourself up for success. 

We will dive deeper into how to find the right channel mix below, but the next step to creating a full funnel paid media plan is audience segmentation. 

Targeting top, middle, and bottom funnel users

Proper audience utilization can be the catalyst for a successful paid media plan. They are an abundant resource with virtually unlimited variations when you factor in the different options on every channel. There of course is some overlap since most users tend to be active across all kinds of marketing channels, but this can be used to your advantage. 

Targeting the same users on Google, Facebook, and Tik Tok for example is one way to set up campaigns to work in sync with one another. This allows you to keep a thread throughout multiple touch points as well. The same message on multiple platforms amplifies its effectiveness. Here are a few of the audience buckets we consider when focusing on creating & capturing demand:

• Awareness – These are the users that are furthest away from converting. The top of funnel audiences are not familiar with your brand and not actively searching for your product or service. Brand campaigns on Youtube, Display, Facebook, or Spotify are effective with this audience type. Some examples of the audiences available include Affinity audiences and Interest Audiences. Focus on views, impressions, and reach when evaluating performance.
• Consideration – This is the stage of the funnel where users start to become leads. They are starting to actively search out your brand or brands similar to yours. Some audiences include In-Market, Lookalike to website visitors, and Competitor Keyword audiences. Campaigns on Google Search, Facebook, and Tik Tok work really well in this stage of the funnel to capture high intent users. They are in the research phase and ready to make a decision sooner than later. 
• Intent – The bottom of the funnel where users are the highest intent, most likely to become customers, or repeat purchasers. Retargeting audiences are a great user base to lean on in this stage of the funnel.  Google Search is a top quality platform for this audience type. Target the highest intent keywords where a user is ready to buy immediately. They are familiar with the product or service and tend to convert quickly. 

Strategically retargeting users across multiple channels

Retargeting is something that we constantly find ourselves talking about. When done well, retargeting campaigns are highly impactful, easily scalable, and cost efficient. These can be utilized by any business in any industry. A truly impactful retargeting strategy combines all paid channels into one umbrella. Of course each channel will have some quirks of their own, but thinking about retargeting as a full channel mix is paramount to finding success. 

Lean on website traffic to target users who have not converted across multiple touch points. Crafting a similar message for website visitors on Facebook and on Youtube for example helps reinforce your value props and allows you to further stand out from competitors. 

Building performance creative to maximize media

What is the backbone for success in almost all paid media campaigns? That’s right – Performance creative. What is performance creative and how is it different from “regular” creative? Great question. Performance creative closes the gap between data and creative. 

Putting it simply (read more here!), we approach performance creative by developing assets quickly and by diversifying the look, feel, messaging and ad archetype to get a speedy but data-backed idea of what is providing the most value. Then, we launch ads in a strategic way, measure performance and assess high-level trends, findings and hypotheses to help to develop our next tests and ideas. 

Backing up to one of the most important parts of this – Measuring performance and gathering the findings, hypotheses around these findings and recommendations for the next round of creative. The intention behind this exercise is to closely collaborate across paid media <> creative at Tuff to put all of our brains together and develop a new round of creative assets that are fueled by data-driven insights. 

We structure this conversation like this – where we discuss paid media spend throughout the funnel, notable audience insights, relevant competitor creative focuses and then move into talking through the performance from the previous round grounded by historical benchmarks to provide context and then collaborate on the key takeaways from all of the above. All of these variables help inform the creative brief which ultimately connects directly back to paid media performance.

One last take away from performance creative is the ability to apply learnings across multiple paid channels. Repurpose creative for different channels. Simply resizing graphics or videos from Meta to fit on Youtube or Display will help you get more out of your creative workload. That same “resizing” can be applied to general success. If a certain video resonates with an audience on Facebook, test it on Youtube. Maybe a specific CTA works really well for Display. This is a great place to start when designing the next Facebook ad targeting a similar audience. 

A look under the hood of paid media planning

At Tuff, we have a full-funnel approach to paid media. What does that mean to us exactly? 

We prioritize performance across all channels to make sure your paid efforts are working their hardest for your brand. We think intentionally and deeply about how we can generate demand at the top of the funnel and capture it in the mid and bottom of the funnel, designing a clear plan  for which channels best relate to your brand, audience and product from Google and YouTube to Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok (and beyond).

Investing in paid social channels

Similarly to how we prioritize your brand, audience and product when we think about your full-funnel approach to media, we do the same when digging into specific paid social media channels. Not every brand is right for Facebook – or TikTok – or LinkedIn. Prioritizing what your brand represents, who your audience is and what problem(s) your product solves helps us get a clear picture of which social channels you should be investing in. 

A few years ago, the go-to social advertising platform was Facebook/Instagram across brands and industries. There was rarely any consideration of the above factors – The decision was more-so based on, “Facebook and Instagram have the most daily active users so we should invest there.” 

While the number of active users has continued to grow on Meta over the years – So have the number of active users across other platforms, like TikTok, LinkedIn and Pinterest. These platforms have continued to elevate their offerings for advertisers, and there are unique and incredibly valuable audiences to speak to here. 

Breaking it down by audience size alone:

• Meta (Facebook/Instagram): 3 billion active users
• TikTok: 1 billion active users
• LinkedIn: 675 million active users
• Pinterest: 475 million active users

And now by what the user’s mindset is on each:

• Meta (Facebook/Instagram): Connection & Idea Sharing – While this is still the largest social platform in the world, people are coming to Facebook and Instagram for connection with their circle and to share their own ideas, thoughts and experiences.
• TikTok: Entertainment — When people visit TikTok, they’re distracted from reality and are aiming to be entertained whether that’s through a viral dance, a new trend or item to purchase or for a teaching moment. 
• LinkedIn: Growth – When people visit LinkedIn, they’re more than likely looking for new professional and or educational opportunities.
• Pinterest: Inspiration – When people visit Pinterest, the whole idea is to pin things to your board and share ideas and pins.

Marrying what each platform is good for, who is on them, what the user’s mindset is on each with your business’s goals and ICPs, we’re able to customize a strategy that makes sense and allows us to not only effectively invest your advertising dollars but also show up where your audience is.

Allocating budget to PPC

PPC, or Pay Per Click, usually refers to all other paid media platforms outside of social media. The main player in this space is Google Ads of course which also includes Youtube and Google Display Network. They certainly have a chokehold on much of the PPC industry. Options don’t stop with Google though. PPC would also include all Microsoft advertising, Programmatic platforms such as StackAdapt or TradeDesk, or even audio ads! 

Similarly to social advertising, not every PPC channel is perfect for every business. Youtube may work much better for a fintech company than it does for an ecommerce clothing company. Audio Ads might be more effective for your local therapy practice than it would be for the highly visible sunglasses seller. Part of the initial Paid Media strategy we develop is choosing which channels work best right away, then choosing which ones are up next to test. 

Let’s get into what some of these channels work best for before we tackle the nitty gritty of developing the full funnel strategy. 

Common PPC Channels

• Google Search: High Intent – It’s no secret that Google Search tends to have some of the highest intent users on the internet. Ads targeting search terms are hitting users when they are actively looking to buy or sign up. Finding a mix of Branded terms, Non-Branded terms, and Competitor bidding makes way for the most effective strategy with Search ads. 
• Google Shopping Ads: Ready to Buy – Shopping is similar to Google Search where ads can show up when users are in the decision making process of what product to buy. These ads are highly visible and tend to bring in a high number of impressions. If you are selling a product, Google Shopping is an absolute must. 
• Youtube: Visually Compelling – 2 billion monthly active users constantly watching videos surrounding all kinds of content. The options on Youtube are endless, but it is key to have quality video assets at your disposal. Whether you’re targeting content, keywords, or in market audiences, Youtube can be a viable platform regardless of your business goals. Industries that have lots of organic video content on the platform tend to translate well to Youtube Ads. 
• Display Advertising: Retargeting Maximization – Display ads can be run in the Google Ads platform or on a separate programmatic platform such as StackAdapt or TradeDesk, but they tend to work pretty similarly to one another. These ads serve all over the internet while you are browsing articles, reading recipes, or playing games. Although it is certainly viable to create a robust prospecting strategy through Display ads, retargeting is one of the strong suits of this kind of platform. Focus your Display ads on users who have been to your site but have not converted. This effectively helps push customers further down the funnel. 
• Microsoft Ads: Incremental Conversions – Advertising on Bing is not nearly as robust as Google, but it can be truly successful at bringing in incremental conversions. Microsoft makes it really easy to import existing Google Ads campaigns directly into Bing, so you can easily run the exact same ads targeting the same keywords on both platforms. Bing has around 10% of the search volume that Google does, so it’s a much smaller pond, but costs tend to be lower and competition tends to be less aggressive. 
• Audio: Highly Local – Another channel that can be effective in all kinds of strategies, but audio ads are especially effective on a local level. Ads can be put on certain radio stations in the geographies your business operates for example. You can also go more broad and use Spotify Ads or StackAdapt to target the full US with ads while users are listening to music, podcasts, or audio books. 

With the right budget allocation, all of these PPC channels work beautifully together. LEarning from one platform can easily be translated to another. Creative can be repurposed. Audiences can be shared. This is the simple idea behind creating a full funnel plan. Now it’s time to merge Social with PPC.  Full-funnel media plan here we come!

Media planning that forecasts revenue

At Tuff, we lead with transparency in everything we do – especially when it comes to forecasting. 

We aim to have continued dialogue with our partners around, “what does growth look like for your business?” so that we’re pivoting as much as needed while remaining true to our established growth expectations and goals. We understand that clarity walks hand-in-hand with vision – understanding all of the levers that can be pulled to reduce costs helps us align across teams to put together a clear, action-packed game plan that ultimately allows us to strategize, prioritize, link up cross-channel insights, and, ultimately, grow.

What does all of this actually mean?  Well, here’s an example of what a Paid Media budget plan looks like:

Leaning on benchmarks like the ones we put together for 2022 here for example, we can create an accurate forecast of campaign performance solidified through recent data. These are living breathing documents. When spend, CPC, or conversion rate is changed, all other metrics shift with it. Those are the main metrics that can be influenced by a marketing team. Additional budget changes performance. Optimizing ads to lower CPC allows for additional traffic. Utilizing conversion rate optimization creates all sorts of efficiencies. Focus on these data points when testing on a regular basis. 

Creating a simple Google Sheet like the one above allows us to work with an accurate forecasting model when developing a paid media plan. We want to be able to show partners what they can expect from their paid media dollars. Expectations are different depending on the campaign type, so that’s why we separate measurement out between Brand and Performance campaigns. 

Did somebody say measurement! It is about that time, let’s jump in!

Measuring success across the full funnel

Measuring paid media effectiveness is a key component of a successful growth marketing strategy, but there are many ways to go about this. Just as there are several platforms to run ads on, there are just as many platforms for reporting, measurement, and tracking. Let’s take a look at a few of the most important things to keep in mind when measuring the success of your full funnel paid media plan. 

Brand vs. performance campaigns

Measurement varies heavily depending on the objective of the campaigns in hand. Performance campaigns are easy. At least on the surface. Data is readily available to prove the success of campaigns and easily compare that success to other channels. Here’s some of the easy metrics we use to evaluate conversion campaigns. 

• Clicks
• CPC
• Conversions
• CPA 
• Conversion Rate

Seeing a lift in conversion volume or a decrease in cost per acquisition tells us a story of success and we can point to the who, where, when, how, and why fairly easily. Sorting by audience or creative. Breaking down KPIS by geography or time of day. Segmenting traffic by landing page behavior. All of these things can be utilized to help paint a fuller picture of the success of performance campaigns, but at their root, the numbers are simple. Costs go up or down. Conversions scale or they don’t. People convert more or less often on a landing page. 

All of this thinking applies to all paid media. Now, Google Ads will have different benchmarks than Facebook for example, but comparing performance campaigns on Google to Facebook is easier than a comparison for Brand campaigns. We actually wrote a whole article about measuring brand campaigns, but here is the TLDR. 

Measuring awareness campaigns

First and foremost, the metrics that you want to track are going to be different. Direct conversions from these campaigns means much less when the goal is Brand Awareness and the audience is mostly top of the funnel. Here’s what we look deeply at optimizing constantly:

• Impressions
• CPM
• Traffic
• CPC
• Impression Share
• Lift in direct / organic traffic

Brand campaigns are all about improving the recognition of the brand. More traffic from other sources. Cheaper traffic from campaigns. Higher impression share. All of these things are what we are looking to achieve when running a Brand campaign. They all indicate success. If you chose to only look at the last click conversions from a Display campaign for example, it may look like the campaign is not working when compared to Paid Search. But zooming out on the whole paid media mix lifts the curtain to tell a different story. Here are a few tips for measuring Brand campaign performance:

• Track branded search volume – This can be done on Google Ads or Search Console. Measure the volume before and after campaign flights to understand the impact of campaigns.
  
• Segment by geography – Launching campaigns in only a few states or locations allows for an easy form of measurement when looking at the data. If your Youtube campaign only ran in Dallas and Dallas saw a 3x increase in new users from Direct traffic, that is a very strong correlation to the ads. 
• Compare overall conversions/revenue – Once your Branded campaigns are running, use month over month, quarter over quarter, or year over year lookback dates to monitor the overall performance lift from all sources. Brand campaigns can sometimes pay dividends months down the road. 

Relying at multiple forms of attribution

Attribution for Paid Media has always been tricky to nail down perfectly. After all, there are so many ways to attribute conversions across a full media mix. Tools like Google Analytics show multiple points of attribution across a conversion journey. Looking at just one of them doesn’t paint a complete picture. Measuring the success of a Display campaign for example by Last Click Attribution can send a misleading message when compared to a First Click model. Here’s a quick summary of attribution methods we use in tandem with one another.

Common Types of Attribution

• First Click Attribution – As the name suggests, conversions would be attributed to the channel with a user’s first click for this attribution model. This is incredibly useful when running brand campaigns that are used for visibility. Many times paid ads tend to be the first click on a conversion journey while the last click falls to Direct or Organic traffic. This method widens the lens of reporting on paid media effectiveness. 
• Last Click Attribution – Possibly the most common form of attribution, Last Click gives full conversion credit to the last click a user makes before converting. This is defined slightly differently depending on the platform you use, so be sure to read the fine print. Last Click on Google Analytics for example defaults to Last Non-Direct Click. This attributes a conversion action to the click before a Direct source. 
• Data Driven Attribution – Google’s newest attribution model that is rolled out in Google Ads and GA4. This model uses an algorithm to share the attribution across multiple touch points on a conversion journey. It is backed by data as the name suggests, but can 
• Assisted / View Through – These conversions can be seen in multiple reporting or ad platforms such as Google Ads and Analytics. They are defined as conversions that had more than one source touch point in the conversion journey. A very common example of this is a user clicking on a Google Search Ad, then later typing a website name directly into the internet browser. Google Search would receive an “Assisted Conversion” here because it was on the conversion path. Even if you are using only one attribution method, these conversions are a good way to prove out the effectiveness of specifica paid media channels. 

Reporting with various forms of attribution may require some additional work, but it will be worth it in the long run for the health of a business. Understanding user behavior is invaluable information, regardless of the industry. Especially when there are multiple marketing channels in the mix, having more than one form of attribution to report on can give you the upper hand. 

Test, learn, report, repeat!

When it comes to Full Funnel Measurement of paid media campaigns, testing and reporting are where everything starts to come together. We already tackled creating a paid media plan, forecasting a strategy, and measuring success with different campaign types. These are the last pieces of the puzzle and they go hand in hand. 

With all of the work that goes into a full funnel approach like this, testing and proper reporting must be top of mind. Testing to ensure that performance is constantly improving and reporting to make sure the most accurate data is readily available when making decisions. 

Reporting on a full-funnel media plan

Reporting can of course take many shapes and there are endless platforms you can utilize to get from point A to point B. Here’s just one very simple example of a way that Tuff reports on campaigns, using Google Sheets. Reporting doesn’t have to be complicated to be impactful. A simple weekly reporting table broken out by marketing channel, audience, or campaign type can go a long way.  

Once there is confidence behind the reporting associate with your paid media mix, lean into testing. All successful digital marketing requires some form of testing to be the best it can be. Here are two tips on what to focus on from the jump:

• Creative, creative, creative – Did we mention creative? This is one of the biggest opportunities to test for all paid channels, audiences, and placements. This is where you can test different messaging or ad copy. Video ads vs. static ads. UGC content or animation. We recommend 2-3 different assets for any marketing channel that requires creative as its main driving force (Meta, Youtube, Display)
• Landing page optimization – This is where CRO can come in to save the day. Paid media is only as effective as the landing page a user comes to from an ad. Focus on improving the conversion rate, exit rate, and overall TOS. These metrics indicate ad effectiveness and user quality. 
• Audience sourcing – Different audiences work well for different platforms. Depending on the stage of the funnel you want to target, there are countless user segments on each platform to experiment with. Lean on In Market audiences for Youtube campaigns. Lookalike audiences on Meta. Take advantage of remarketing lists for Display networks. Not every audience is going to be effective, but after a few weeks of gathering data, you can pivot, expand, or retest.

Media strategies in perfect harmony 

There you have it. Paid media planning, forecasting, measurement, and everything in between. Digital marketing is an ever changing landscape with endless potential. Combining all paid efforts under one umbrella is your head start at unlocking that potential and building upon it. There’s not a one size fits all approach, but working with the information laid out above brings you closer to finding that approach that fits like a glove. 

Chris Alarcon

Chris is a PPC Strategist based in Nashville, Tennessee. When he’s not scaling Google Ads & YouTube campaigns, he enjoys longboarding, tinkering with automation tools, and a little bit of gaming.

The post The Art of Media Planning: Data-Driven Decisions to Own Every Stage of the Funnel appeared first on Tuff.

As a growth marketing agency, we are constantly seeking ways to grow revenue for our partners. We often do that by analyzing each marketing channel, and scaling those that have the best ROI. Sounds simple, right?

When you start to think through how user behavior differs across channels, marketing decisions quickly become anything but simple – especially if you operate under a freemium business model with a lead cycle that can take a significant amount of time. Sophisticated data systems can often tell you your exact return on investment, broken down by channel and even campaign. But sometimes, that data story isn’t intuitive.

What happens when we don’t see bottom of funnel conversions on a channel we know works for lead gen, but hasn’t yielded many paying customers? Where should we dive in? Can we better understand our audience? How can we find the cog in our marketing wheel? Intent metrics. 

Intent metrics allow us to assess the layer between qualified lead and paying customer to better understand our audience and ultimately make optimizations to drive more down funnel results upper and mid funnel channels. 

What is an intent metric? 

Intent metrics are a set of measurements used to gauge the level of interest, engagement, and intention displayed by users or potential customers towards a particular brand, product, or service.

These metrics help assess the effectiveness of marketing efforts at various stages of the customer journey, particularly in the upper and mid-funnel stages where the focus is on generating awareness, capturing attention, and nurturing interest.

Intent metrics often go beyond traditional metrics like qualified leads or conversion. They typically aim to capture deeper insights into consumer behavior and intent. They provide qualitative and quantitative data that indicates the likelihood of a user taking a desired action, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or requesting more information.

Who is an intent metric best for? 

If your business or product offers a free account or free trail feature, an intent metric could be helpful for you. If your product sees a longer than normal sales cycle, an intent metric may be helpful for you. With the longer sales cycle, you can make faster decisions around campaign optimizations before a user drops off. There is no more

With Teachable, we were able to take insights from our free users to optimize campaigns at the top of the funnel and the middle of the funnel, which ultimately drove more paid users over time. 

Creating intent metrics unique to your business

Creating intent metrics for your brand involves a strategic approach to tracking and measuring user behavior and engagement throughout the customer journey. The intent metrics you track should be unique to your audience, your customer journey, and the leading indicators that often precede conversion actions on your site. 

Start by identifying the key actions or behaviors that indicate user intent and align with your marketing objectives. These actions can vary depending on your industry and business model. Examples include clicking on a specific call-to-action, downloading a resource, adding items to a cart, or subscribing to a newsletter.

This takes a lot of research from both marketing and product teams. You first try to find where the conversion rate drops in your user flows. We often analyze this by channel – the point of drop off can be different from a Meta ad compared to a Google search ad because the users intent with your brand is drastically different. 

How we built intent metrics for our partner Teachable

With our partner Teachable, an online course creation platform, intent metrics allowed us to flip our top of funnel and middle of funnel strategy upside down.

A bit of helpful background: In Teachable’s user flow, there are three distinct actions that we track and optimize for:

• Lead (email capture)
• Free Account Created
• Subscriber

Through paid social channels, we had successfully driven a ton of leads (top of funnel) and free account (middle of funnel) users to the Teachable product. Our CPLs and CPAs were incredibly healthy. But we weren’t seeing a ton of those free accounts convert to paying subscribers.

We asked ourselves, “Is this a product issue? Are free users unhappy with what they are getting? Is paid social simply not the channel for us? Is the right audience even on paid social? How do we drive higher intent users to the product from top of funnel channels?” Before we would open the “product versus marketing” can of worms, the intent metric was introduced. 

Historically with Teachable, if a lead or free user did not come back to the product within 5 days after signing up for a free account, they were likely to never convert to a paid account. The Teachable team had done enough research internally to know this to be true. With that information, the team was able to roll out an intent metric to track users who came back to the product after signing up for a free account within: 

• 1 day
• 3 days
• 5 days

With the above information, we were able to assess what was driving the highest intent among users by:

• Channel
• Campaign
• Audience
• Creative asset

We were able to look at everything above and see which was driving the most 1 day, 3 day, and 5 day logins. This allowed us to assess the success of every aspect of a media mix – channel, campaign, audience and creative – to make better campaign optimization decisions. 

How to use intent metrics in your marketing plan

By reporting on intent metrics as well as leads and free accounts, we were able to completely shift our approach to campaign optimizations. Rather than look at hard and dry KPIs, we could look at more holistic metrics to allow us to better understand the behavior of those we were reaching. 

We could finally see who was coming back to the product to log in, and from where they converted onto the free product in the first place. We used this data to adjust campaigns based on where we were seeing the highest intent.

There are a multitude of insights an intent metric can provide, but we lean on them to answer questions that help shape our growth strategy when we aren’t seeing immediate revenue-generating success on certain channels. 

• Can we justify spend on this channel? 
• What should our budget breakdown across channels look like based on ROI? 
• Are we reaching our audience on this platform? 
• Which piece of creative is working? 
• Ultimately, did this drive down funnel results? 

A holistic approach to intent metrics

Not only could we get in the granular details with intent metrics, we could also zoom out more holistically. I often get the question, “How do you back into budgets? How do you decipher where to properly allocate dollars?” We could now assess channel health as a whole, and look at where we wanted to allocate ad budgets. This allowed us to truly see where we should be spending our time and money. 

With Teachable, we learned that although we saw intent from our paid social channels, we saw the highest intent on paid search (naturally). Because of this, we were able to make monthly and quarterly budget recommendations that would provide the most value and return to the business. This didn’t mean we would use the intent metric to shut off channels entirely, but it did allow us to make more strategic budgetary decisions across channels. Because of this, we have been able to drive more down funnel results. 

Re-optimizing campaigns based on intent metrics

You have all of this data now, so what do you do with it? With Teachable, we used this to assess if anything was working within upper and mid funnel channels. Specifically, we looked at: 

• Intent by campaign: Is one campaign driving higher intent than another? Perhaps messaging is stronger on one campaign than the other. 
• Intent by audience: Is one audience driving higher intent than another? Perhaps targeting on this social platform is more spot on for this audience than the other. 
• Intent by creative: Is one piece of creative driving higher intent than another? We can use this information to inform our next round of evergreen production. We can also shift budgets to certain pieces of creative that are driving the highest intent. 

This allowed us to make smarter decisions on our top of funnel channels, justifying to a Board of Directors or a C-Suite the spend on specific channels.

This also allowed us to make more informed decisions on creative and messaging. We could now look at an ad headline and say, “This is bringing users back to the product for 4 days, rather than 1. Let’s lean into this messaging. This is bringing a stronger user to the product.” 

How to evolve your reporting

Intent metrics are tricky metrics to layer in reporting. It’s not an easy item to introduce. 

Today, we use the intent metric as a holistic metric to assess the health of channels, campaigns, audiences, and creative. Right now we keep this out of our daily and weekly reporting. We don’t believe a variation in intent percentages on a Monday versus a Tuesday are good enough reason to remove a creative asset from the mix. Because of that, we report on a monthly and quarterly basis. We dive in and take a look at:

• Highest intent by channel
• Highest intent by campaign
• Highest intent by audience
• Highest intent by creative

And vice versa we will look at:

• Lowest intent by channel
• Lowest intent by campaign
• Lowest intent by audience
• Lowest intent by creative

As we look at this, we make shifts within campaigns based on where we are seeing success. We may realize that a creative asset with a wonderful CPL doesn’t have high intent down funnel, with that we will likely sunset that creative asset. Holistically, we are shifting budgets within campaigns and making monthly and quarterly budget recommendations based on our findings.

That’s not to say we are not frequently sitting with the intent metric on a daily basis. For example, when kicking off a new round of creative production, we will go to the intent metric to glean insights for the next round. When asked questions from leadership such as, “Which audience is performing the best on Facebook right now?” We can quickly lean into the intent metric for an answer.

Validating that intent metrics lead to conversions

The most important thing is to correlate the intent metric with revenue. If you can’t do that, the metric will become obsolete to leadership. 

Once you lean into intent metrics, what changes? Do you see a faster free to paid conversion rate? Do you see an uptick in paid subscriptions from a certain channel? Use this information to not only justify the importance of intent metric usage, but to make strategic decisions across your marketing channels. 

With Teachable, we have seen a direct correlation with intent percentages and Free User to Paid User conversions. It’s actually uncanny. When assessing intent percentages on a graph, and layering the free to paid conversion rate over this, the trend is nearly identical. Intent = Paid Conversions for Teachable. Because of this insight, we can confidently sunset a campaign or creative asset and have a very clear why behind it.

Because of this, we have proven to see a direct ROI by leaning into the intent metric. By finding learnings like this, you will see faster adoption by executive and marketing teams. Lean into these metrics, and they will soon be a leading indicator your team uses for marketing channel, campaign, and creative health. 

Why you should incorporate intent metrics into your planning process

The intent metric has allowed us to learn so much about our audience. As a growth partner, usually we’re assessing key performance indicators, conversion rates, and making strategic decisions from there. The intent metric has allowed us to look a layer deeper after that original conversion event takes place.

Because of this, we know our audience better, we make smarter decisions surrounding advertising spend, and we feel confident we’re moving the needle in the right direction to provide down funnel revenue results.  

Interested in talking to Hannah about intent metrics for your business? Let’s talk! 

Richard Meyer

Richard has spent the last five years working at digital agencies, exploring various industries and company lifecycles. I’ve created and implemented growth campaigns on just about every platform for startups, $20,000,000 a year companies, and everything in-between. When not at work, I can be found cheering on the Penguins or Steelers, spending time with my wife and son, playing disc golf, baking, or walking my dogs.

The post Quantifying Impact: How Intent Metrics Validate Upper and Mid-Funnel Marketing Channels appeared first on Tuff.

We’ve all had to do more with less with something at one point or another – whether it’s time, resources, or budget. Doing more with less is intrinsically part of the growth process. We get more efficient, and that creates a new benchmark that we need to meet or exceed the next go-around. 

If you’re reading this, you’re likely a marketing leader feeling pressure to generate the same or more total results with less total ad spend. Why is that? And more importantly, how the heck do you manage to pull that off? Let’s dig in. 

Why Marketers are Being Asked to Do More With Less

Since April 2022, growth marketing as a concept has been flipped on its head. Growth in pre-2022 terms, as defined by most marketers, would be the practice of scaling results as quickly as possible to maximize total results. 

Often, the scaling was done at break-even CACs, or at a loss with the hope that the LTV of a newly acquired customer would eventually offset the cost of growth and fuel another round of funding. 

In mid-2022, recessionary fears began looming, and skyrocketing interest rates caused inflationary pressures to mount. 

As a result, most scaleups and enterprise brands have since had to adapt their growth strategies and models to do more with fewer paid resources. Performance marketing managers are feeling pressure from their CMOs to optimize for efficiency over volume, and CMOs are feeling pressure from CFOs to reduce spend as much as possible. 

But… why? 

For scaleups, a fear of uncertainty in venture capital markets caused organizations to create as close to a positive cash flow rate as possible to ensure they can keep the lights on for as long as possible. 

For enterprise brands, the choice is often between growth and headcount. CFOs are trying to maximize the total human resources available to the organization (as it makes fiscal sense) while balancing paid growth. As a result, paid media budgets for both enterprise and scaleup brands are under direct scrutiny. 

Cue the scramble to redefine what growth means. 

If I’m a CMO that is being asked to hit growth targets (my job depends on my ability to hit them!), and I’m working with fewer resources, I need to make every dollar count. Growth at all costs is no longer the philosophy: creating sustainable, holistic growth is my new path forward. 

Table of Contents

• Creating frameworks for sustainable paid growth
• Getting the most out of non-branded search
• Developing ad creative that forks for all parts of the funnel
• Targeting the same audience with different campaign optimization events
• Optimize the UX for traffic you’re already paying for

Creating Frameworks for Sustainable Paid Growth

If you’re in this situation currently, the good news is that you’re not alone. As a growth marketing agency, the large majority of our partners (90%+) have been tackling this same question over the last year and change. 

We get it, budgets aren’t increasing anytime soon, and you have to make the most of every dollar to continue to grow results. So let’s dive in on how to do that. 

We’ve created several frameworks for creating sustainable paid growth that can be adopted individually or in tandem with other growth strategies to maximize your ad dollars as much as possible. 

• Maximize non-branded search 
• Develop ad creative that works for every part of your funnel
• Utilize content in multiple optimization events
• Optimize the user experience for the traffic you’re already paying for
• Convert more leads with lifecycle marketing
  

Get the Most Out of Non-Branded Search

Paid search presents a huge opportunity for scaling for established brands that have some form of brand recognition and a clearly defined service or product that fits neatly into the search landscape. Search is high-intent because it’s action-oriented. 

When bidding on a term, you know that you’re showing up in a placement where someone is showing some form of intent for seeing a result similar to what you’re targeting. Additionally, non-branded search typically takes up most of your paid search budget, so tweaking your philosophy on non-branded search is an easy way to make significant changes to your bottom line. 

Because paid search is constantly evolving, staying on top of trends is important, but creating a testing framework to validate what works in your strategy should be a part of your evergreen approach. A methodology of “throw a bunch of keywords to the wall, see what works, and go from there” isn’t going to cut it. 

There are two components to getting the most out of non-branded search: 

• On established non-branded terms that drive revenue, maximize impression share
• For non-validated non-branded terms, dedicate a part of your budget to testing and weeding out ineffective terms

Maximizing Impression Share for Validated Non-Branded Search

Say you have 1,500 non-branded keywords that you’re targeting (which isn’t crazy for established brands who are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month). Within this search structure, it’s unlikely that you are spending enough for each of your keywords to tell if each keyword you’re targeting is effective or not. 

It’s incredibly easy to create wasted spend by simply creating too many keywords to effectively test at a single time. However, most organizations will still keep this approach because they’re getting enough volume and a reasonable enough CPA that it’s fine to keep the status quo. 

That’s not a good enough answer when it comes to making the most of every dollar.

How We Validate Non-Branded Search Terms

If you are trying to make the absolute most of your non-branded budget, you need to create a more robust process around validating non-branded terms in a quick, efficient manner. Here’s how we tackle this for Tuff:

1. We define a target CPA threshold we’re comfortable spending up to. If this is not established, we work with our partner to establish this based on typical ROI metrics in their pipeline. 
2. We look at all the keywords we’re targeting and bucket them on their average CPA:
   👉Validated Search Terms: Keywords that are converting within our target CPA (likely a small portion of your total keywords → 5 – 10%)
   👉Terms in Need of Optimization: Keywords that have spent more than our target CPA but we believe could work.
   👉Unvalidated Search Terms: Keywords that haven’t spent up to our target CPA (likely the majority of your total keywords)
3. We assign budgets and campaign structures to maximize non-branded results by asking these questions:
   👉Validated Search Terms: What’s the max impression share I can hold for these terms and maintain our target CPA? That’s my new target spend.
   👉Terms in Need of Optimization: Why aren’t these keywords working? Is it a poor-quality score? Do I need to adjust the ad copy or the landing page experience? Does another bidding type work? Are there negative keywords I can add to improve their performance?
   👉Unvalidated Search Terms: How can I bucket these keywords to get them to my target spend level and learn if they are validated or need optimization?

For a recent Tuff partner, we applied this framework to their current search efforts and found the following. For context, their target CPA is $165 and they felt confident that they were in the ballpark of their goals.

More importantly, if this brand had capped their “needs optimization” keywords at their target CPA threshold (and turned off keywords after CPA exceeded their target of $165), blended CPA dropped to $171 (an 8% decrease) and saved them over $30,000 in wasted spend that could be utilized towards testing other keywords that hadn’t been tested, or maximizing the reach of their validated terms with more dedicated search impression share. 

Maximizing Volume Within Target CPA Constraints

Our process in this situation is to take the validated non-branded terms and maximize their volume within the constraints of our target CPA. From there, look at the remaining monthly budget, and determine how many unvalidated non-branded terms you can get to your target CPA threshold within a month. Then, pause underperforming keywords when they hit the target CPA spend without a conversion. For keywords that need optimization, we recommended which to keep and re-test and those we were comfortable pausing. 

In this scenario, we’re able to get the most out of non-branded terms we know work, implement a testing budget we’re comfortable with to keep blended CPA at a healthy benchmark and work through our non-validated keywords faster → scaling results while keeping ad spend stable. 

Develop Ad Creative That Works for Every Part of Your Funnel

Did you know that ad creative can be responsible for 80% of the results you get from running paid acquisition strategies? Sure, targeting, tactic, budget, optimization, and copy are all critical components to a successful ad, but creative (asset design and messaging) is the single biggest lever you can pull. 

Utilizing performance-based creative, whose primary function is to drive revenue, is incredibly impactful for brands that are trying to get the most out of their advertising budget. 

Why? Increasing your click-through rate has direct correlations on your ad’s delivery and the number of people that are arriving at your site to perform the action you want them to. 

Why Performance Creative Matters

In Q1, one of Tuff’s partners implemented two rounds of performance creative updates, where we took the learnings from what was working (and what wasn’t), and revised the creative we were running based on these findings.

The results were a 55% increase in CTR in three months. 🤯

If your benchmark was 10,000 sessions in the previous quarter, with a 3% CVR on site (300 signups), that’s the equivalent of driving an additional 5,500 sessions and 165 signups (assuming spend / CPC is level). What could a 55% increase in total results do for you? It truly can be as simple as applying a performance based-lens to your ad creative. 

Developing Performance Creative Tailored to Your Funnel

Your target audience is being approached by hundreds of other brands daily. And you’re competing directly with them for their attention, time, and resources.  

A common mistake made with ad creative is taking a broad brush and assuming that your target audience is going to resonate with your message, regardless of their familiarity with your brand or their previous interactions. This leads to wasted impressions and as a result, wasted dollars. 

Do you know what each part of your advertising funnel requires from a messaging perspective? How about a CTA perspective? 

It’s a mistake to treat people who are in the awareness stage of their journey the same as someone who has had multiple touch points with your brand in the last 30 days, or someone who has taken action on your site already. Little things, such as your call to action for late-stage targeting vs. early-stage targeting, can add up quickly to become big things. Your creative message and desired action of the target audience should vary depending on where they are in the customer journey. 

By mapping out what your creative messaging and CTA is at each stage of the funnel, you’ll end up with something that looks universally friendly to your brand but specific to each person depending on their familiarity with your business. 👇

Your creative messaging needs to work as hard as your ad dollars and targeting/tactic strategy. Don’t let ad creative be an afterthought: use it to make the most of your budget. 

Target the Same Audiences with Different Campaign Optimization Events

For organizations that rely on internal content production for advertising assets, it can be tricky to increase results without increasing the total content output. Suppose you’re a B2B organization that relies on case studies and whitepapers for advertising assets. In this example, it can be tricky to ask your internal team to produce more whitepapers and case studies without costing your organization more in total paid resources.

Traffic Campaigns, Document Downloads, and Message Ads

To circumvent this, we’ve taken a multiple-touch approach with creative concepts. If we’re using a whitepaper, we’ll develop scrappy performance-based assets to promote said whitepaper across multiple optimization events: sponsored content (traffic/engagement), document ads (download), and message ads (speak to sales). Over the course of several weeks, we’ll launch each tactic to the same target audience, meaning that we’re able to quickly pivot messaging and optimize for each part of the target audience’s journey. 

Why start with sponsored content? It’s the cheapest way to get insight into which messages are effective, what creative components resonate with the target audience, and to build top-line engagement with the target audience for that content piece. 

From there, document ads provide a great way for someone to engage with the content and, should they desire, download the content. This provides a measurable KPI as well that is valuable to stakeholders: new leads generated, even if it’s not the primary goal of what we’re trying to accomplish. 

Lastly, message (or conversation ads) allow us to follow up with a program or service-related inquiry related to the content the target audience has been consuming. This creates a natural touch point for sales to step in and take new business meetings with prospects. 

Tailor Creative for Desired Action

The key to all this? Like optimizing creative for different funnel stages, we’re also tweaking the optimization event to deliver the most relevant desired action for each stage in a target audience’s awareness. 

The benefits of taking this approach are that you’re creating measurable engagement at each level of awareness in your audience’s journey and can create additional efficiencies at the lower funnel as well – making a direct impact on your bottom line. 

Optimize the User Experience for the Traffic You’re Already Paying For

There’s often so much thought into the ad targeting, messaging, and creative design that the user experience is left as a “final element.” The landing page experience and associated lead flows can make a significant impact on your ad dollars simply by ensuring that once you acquire users to your site, you’re able to convert them at the best possible rate. 

Two main ways optimizing the user experience can help make the most of your ad dollars: 

• Implementing strategic CRO tests to improve the conversion rate
• Making your landing page experience more relevant to drive down ad costs

What is CRO? 

Conversion rate optimization is so much more than making tweaks to visual design because “you think it makes it better.” It’s the ongoing practice of implementing structured tests to gain insight as to what works and, often more importantly, what doesn’t work on your website as it pertains to the desired action you want your visitors to take. 

Say you have 10,000 site visitors a month. If you’re currently converting at a 2% rate, that means you’re having 200 people take your desired action in a single month. 

Because you’re not able to increase total traffic to your site (because your ad budgets are frozen at their current levels), you take the opportunity to dig into your lead flows and start making structured tests that increase the conversion rate by 5% each month. If you were to do this for 6 months – you’d be making a significant impact on your bottom line – a 34% increase in total monthly conversions without increasing total traffic. 

Think that a 5% monthly increase isn’t realistic? In a recent test on our website, we were able to generate a 210% lift in conversions just by testing the hero copy on our homepage. 

You don’t have to hit a home run on your first attempt at CRO: just get better each time, and you’ll build compounding (and ad dollar saving) growth soon enough. 

How Can My Landing Pages Help Drive Down Ad Costs? 

Are you utilizing the same landing pages for paid search that you’re using for paid social? Are you utilizing the same landing page for all your paid search campaigns? Are you driving paid traffic in each stage of the funnel to the same lead flow? 

If you answered “yes” to any of the above questions, you have room to improve your landing page experience. Landing page experience is how relevant your site content is to the user that is arriving at it. Google rewards users with a strong landing page experience with improved quality scores, meaning they have higher expected click-through rates and lower overall costs. That means if you have a validated keyword (see above!), it may be worth creating a paid landing page for that keyword or ad group on its own so you can maximize your quality score and decrease your ad costs. 

Same for paid social. If your landing page isn’t as relevant as it could be or is speaking too broadly, your audience won’t resonate with it. Tailoring the landing page for the different stages in your funnel ensures you’re driving the most relevant action to improve conversion rates. 

If your landing page is as relevant as it can be, you’ll make the most of your ad dollars – and cut down on wasted spend on higher CPCs, or low converting traffic. 

Convert More Leads with Lifecycle Marketing 

Moreover, when ad budgets remain flat, it’s time to put non-paid resources TO WORK. If we’re doing everything that we can in the acquisition funnels to ensure that we’re not wasting spend, then your non-paid formats need to be working just as hard to make sure they aren’t leaking potential revenue. 

Lifecycle marketing is a lot more than the prototypical email campaign structure of “We have a promotion for Labor Day.” Instead, it’s creating clearly defined segments of users and working them through a series of tailored messages and experiences to maximize revenue from them. 

If you have a group of highly engaged customers? Let’s turn them into brand evangelists and super users.

If you have a group of unengaged prospects who submitted their lead details but haven’t become paying customers? Let’s warm them back up. 

Have someone that has been stuck in the sales cycle? Let’s get that conversation started back up. 

Lifecycle is the way you ensure that every potential customer has the best opportunity to maximize their total revenue for your organization. It’s about empowering leads and turning them into won customers, stuck deals into revenue, and brand loyalists into referral machines (and so much more!). Getting someone to convert and become a lead is one thing, but we have to make sure we’re getting revenue out of them as well. 

Lifecycle marketing has a direct impact on CAC. In some instances, we’ve seen customer win-back campaigns help turn cold prospects into paying customers at a 27% rate. The great part about this? It’s not just about providing an offer to incentivize an action. Sometimes even discussing your brand vision, value propositions, and how it all works is educational enough to move the needle to the conversion point. 

If you’re not utilizing automation in lifecycle marketing to tailor userflows specific to different customer segments, you’re missing a major revenue opportunity. And you probably aren’t maximizing your paid resources. 

Unsure of where to start? 

It takes a village to make the integrated parts of paid media, creative strategy, CRO, and lifecycle marketing hum. Sometimes, it may be more cost-efficient to utilize an experienced team than to increase head count. Our team of seasoned growth experts combines the vision of growth strategy with robust channel and tactical knowledge. 

If you’re looking for a partner to help you make the most of every ad dollar, let’s talk.

Richard Meyer

Richard has spent the last five years working at digital agencies, exploring various industries and company lifecycles. I’ve created and implemented growth campaigns on just about every platform for startups, $20,000,000 a year companies, and everything in-between. When not at work, I can be found cheering on the Penguins or Steelers, spending time with my wife and son, playing disc golf, baking, or walking my dogs.

The post A New Way to Scale Results Without Increasing Ad Spend appeared first on Tuff.

While we all love the powerful returns that we get from retention and bottom-funnel initiatives, best-in-class brands are well aware that attracting new customers is crucial to a business’ long-term growth and success. To do that, you need effective top of funnel paid media campaigns. But how do you properly gauge the success of these campaigns? How do you stomach allocating budget to these lower ROAS campaigns when others are printing money for you? In this blog post, we’ll explore how as a growth marketing agency we approach effectively measuring top of funnel campaigns for our partners, giving you the insights you need to optimize your marketing efforts and drive growth for your business. 

The Role Of Top of Funnel Campaigns

First, let’s talk about what we can and cannot expect from top-of-funnel (TOFU) campaigns. 

We CAN expect:

• Reach
• Users’ first touchpoints with your brand
• Brand lift
• Low engagement, low CTR

We CANNOT expect:

• High ROAS
• High CTR
• Low cost-per-conversion

While we can’t expect a great return from TOFU campaigns, the fact is, your more profitable campaigns (branded, retargeting, etc.) are never going to grow if you’re not nurturing a larger audience for them. 

Typically bottom-funnel campaigns are meant to capture demand, instead of generating it. 

That’s where TOFU campaigns come in, but they come at a price. That price is a shift in thinking. Where you ditch the channel-specific attribution methodologies we all know and (sometimes) love, and commit to leaning on channel agnostic marketing metrics like total revenue, total lead volume, and blended CPL and blended CAC. If you measure the success of brand awareness campaigns based on ROI, the results will say the campaigns are tanking. But in reality, you’re building newly generated demand so you can scale your most profitable campaigns. 

All this is to say, measuring your ROAS for TOFU campaigns isn’t gauging the success of what those campaigns are really designed to do. Your TOFU campaigns are there to give your more profitable campaigns a larger user base to work with. Let’s talk about how we can successfully measure your top of funnel campaigns next. 

Three Methods Of Measuring TOFU Success

Brand Lift

We’re marketers, which means we have approximately 1,846 ways to say the same thing. TOFU is often synonymous with “brand awareness” and reach campaigns when you’re actually building them out in ad channels. While ROAS shouldn’t be your top concern with an awareness campaign, there are important campaign metrics to monitor to prevent wasting ad spend on meaningless impressions. 

There are two ways to measure brand lift: conducting a brand lift study or analyzing trends in branded search and direct traffic that correlate with when you ran a brand awareness campaign. We’re going to dig into the latter.

To monitor your brand lift, take note of when your TOFU campaign launched, and look at how branded search traffic (both paid and organic) fluctuated in the time your TOFU campaign has been running compared to the previous time period. 

It should be noted that in order to attribute brand lift to your TOFU campaign, there needs to be minimal other variables that might be influencing your brand traffic. Try to maintain your TOFU campaign as an independent variable when using this tactic. 

Geo-Testing

While brand awareness is great, the real reason you run a TOFU campaign is for those new impressions to actually turn into customers. However, the amount of touchpoints involved in a transaction or even lead submission make it difficult to discern just how much of an impact your TOFU campaign is having on your bottom line. 

To truly identify the potency of your campaign in a vacuum, consider running a geo-test. This method involves only running your TOFU campaign in a select market over a given period of time. Ideally all other elements of your marketing are equal, and your TOFU campaign is the one independent variable that is different about this particular market. From there, simply look at sales and lead fluctuations in that one market versus everywhere else. 

Let’s say you typically market to all of North America. But you’re eager to see how your TOFU Meta Ads campaign is doing, so you run a geo-test in Arizona for one month. It’s business as usual everywhere, except in Arizona, where you’re flooding Facebook & Instagram with prospecting ads to users who have never heard of your brand. At the end of that month, let’s say revenue is pretty flat month-over-month across all of North America, but in Arizona you saw a 20% increase in revenue month-over-month. If you’ve truly isolated your TOFU campaign as your independent variable, you can feel pretty confident that your TOFU campaigns are able to push revenue by around 20%. 

This method isn’t perfect, as you may see swings in conversion rates across different markets. Even so, it gives you a great sense of top-to-bottom just how effective your TOFU campaign is at generating new customers.

Attribution Models/Conversion Paths in GA4

Don’t be afraid to leverage GA4 in your efforts to understand your TOFU campaign. Within the “Advertising” section, you’ll find the “Attribution” drop down which produces two very valuable reports for making sense of your TOFU efforts: the “model comparison” and “conversion paths” reports.

Let’s start with “model comparison” and chat quickly about conversion attribution models. “Last click” used to rule the reporting world, but with more and more touch points showing up in customer journeys, it’s vital that marketers adapt how campaigns are analyzed. Within GA4, there are many more options than just “last click”. You now can easily toggle between first click, linear, position-based, and time decay. 

Your TOFU campaigns are most likely going to be the first touchpoint a user has with your brand. If you want to cut through the clutter and just see how many sales/leads derived from your TOFU campaign acting as the first touchpoint, simply reference this report and toggle your attribution model to “first click” and look for your campaign.

While you’re at it, you might as well look at the other attribution models too and get a sense of how the metrics change between models. 

The other valuable report here is the “top conversion paths” report which shows you the precise touchpoints of a given user’s customer journey:

Not only can you get a sense of the numerical value of your TOFU campaigns, but you also get a real look at what sequences are the most successful with all your given touchpoints. “Top conversion paths” is a vital tool to understand where users are going after they interact with your TOFU campaign. It allows you to calibrate your messaging and prime them for future engagement with other ads, pieces of content, emails, etc. 

GA4 has a lot to offer in terms of putting your TOFU campaigns under a microscope. However, you need to make sure you’ve set up your account properly in order to get these reports to work. 

Get Started Measuring Top of Funnel Campaigns

You now have three methods to give you a better understanding of how well your TOFU campaigns are supporting your business. While these campaigns aren’t meant to produce a clean ROAS directly, they still need to be supporting your bottom line. Don’t let the extra steps stop you from getting to the bottom of your performance. Knowing how to harness your top-of-funnel campaigns is what separates the best-in-class brands from the rest of the pack!

The post Proven Methods for Measuring the Success of Top of Funnel Campaigns appeared first on Tuff.

For so many businesses, Paid Search Ads are one of the most profitable and reliable marketing channels to activate. This makes sense. Users tend to be high intent and ready to make a decision. You’re looking to buy a new pair of shoes? Google is one of your first stops. We are limited however, in how much search volume is out there. Ads can only serve as much as users are searching. Of course there is seemingly unlimited volume for our shoes example, but that isn’t the case for most products or services. As a growth marketing agency, we’re constantly evaluating how to use conversion rate optimization to grow the right channel mix. 

To make the most out of the search terms that are relevant to your business, there are a few things to keep an eye on. For starters, budget plays a big role. Scaling can be as simple as allocating more spend. How about additional Keyword Research? That will certainly help when you are looking to scale and create efficiencies with your ads. What Tuff has found is that the main driver of success on Google Search Ads is leaning heavily on CRO. 

When we talk about CRO, it means much more than just Conversion Rate Optimization. A/B landing page testing? Check. Ad Copy development? Definitely. Expert web design? Of course! If budgets are appropriate and keyword research is robust, CRO is your next step to success as a Google Ads agency. Let’s dive head first into what this looks like.

What is CRO? 

CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) is taking action to directly impact the amount of users converting on your website or within your applications. The intent is to increase the amount of users taking desired actions. 

What usually comes to mind when thinking about CRO are forms and CTA buttons but when put into practice, CRO goes well beyond this. When you’re going to launch CRO efforts, you need to start with your audience. Understanding what your audience needs and what you have to uniquely offer helps to determine the journey your website should offer and what the ultimate goal is. 

Understanding your audience and their needs

To better understand your audience, CROs leverage 4 key data points: behavior metrics, path exploration/user flow, heatmaps, and surveys. 

Behavior metrics

• Bounce rate: This number tracks the percentage of users that enter the site and don’t go beyond that one page. High bounce rate can be a key indicator of whether your site offers the right information at the right time to keep the user on your site. If you’re visible for the wrong searches or possibly serving content that doesn’t align with the answers the user needs, you will see a high bounce rate.
  *Note: Some pages may be built for higher bounce rates like a Contact Us page. Consider the intent of the page itself before determining if optimizations are needed.
• Exit rate: This is the percentage that defines how often a page is the last page in a user’s visit. Again, depending on the intent of the page, you’ll want to make a hypothesis around why a user might exit (slow loading, navigation/linking faux pas, etc.). From there you can create informed tests to keep the user there and ultimately push them to convert. 
• Time on site: The length of time a user spends on your site. This can inform you of the quality of the users coming to your site.
  *Note: Account for how much of your audience is mobile. Mobile users tend to have quicker sessions but it can also indicate mobile speed or usability issues.
• Pages per session: The amount of pages users visit per session. The more pages, the more we find a user is getting what they need and is being served an optimized user journey on your site.
• Conversions (obviously 😏): We often like to review conversion patterns, pages with high or low conversions, and what (if any) micro-goals are excelling (micro-goals = Newsletter sign-ups, webinar attendance, etc.). These things can help us determine the time a user spends in the funnel and underperforming pages to find where we should focus on a site first.

Path exploration

Above we discussed more of a birds-eye-view of your overall site data. The metrics above will lead us to individual pages that will require a more granular analysis. At page-level for data, we look at things like where the user usually enters the site and where they go next.

Looking into where the user often lands can tell us what pages have the best visibility and make the first impression with the user. 

The next pages a user visits can help us determine where a journey might be broken and give us insight into what the user really needs during their time on your site. 

Heatmapping

Leveraging a tool like Hotjar, we can get a better look into user behaviors page by page. Heatmaps can show us where users are clicking, how much of your page is actually seen, and we can even watch live recordings of a user’s journey and how they engage throughout your site. 

These 3 heatmap features allow us to determine things like page layout when we see most users drop from a page after viewing only a third of its offerings. Or, we can see points of friction during user recordings to truly pinpoint why someone may have dropped from your site without converting. 

Heatmaps are the real crystal ball. 🔮

Surveys

Surveys are given to both new, potential customers or current customers. This is something we usually recommend for brands that see a good amount of traffic and/or have a stable customer base. 

Within CRO, surveys lean more qualitative and serve open ended questions to receive honest feedback we can’t get from the data. They can be leveraged post-purchase/sign-up or when a user shows intent to exit so we can better understand the ‘why’ behind winning or losing conversions. We can even serve them according to time on site or pages per session depending on what the goal is. 

How to do CRO on low-traffic sites

Thinking about how to test on a low traffic site is tough. How can we get impactful results when there’s not a lot of traffic going to a site? Without traffic, we won’t have enough folks to split to gain true insight in an efficient timeline. But, as you now know, CRO isn’t just CTA buttons and form fills. 

Here are some strategies we recommend for low traffic sites:

• Improve the customer journey. A major part of conversion rate optimization is user research. This is the area of CRO where surveys can be introduced to a site to better understand the audience. These surveys can inspire big changes to navigation, user flow, and even language on the site. It may not be traditional testing, but it can be a big win for younger companies who haven’t had the time or resources to define their brand and its relationship to their audience.
• Include “micro-conversions” into the testing process. Define other ways your company names success in the funnel beyond form fills to chat with a sales team. Can we improve newsletter sign-ups? Can we get more engagement on a webinar? Some companies have excruciatingly long sales processes. So, highlight the success of getting folks into the funnel even if they’re not ready for the hard sell just yet!
• Create tests that make a big splash! If you don’t have a ton of traffic, a small CTA button test might not be the most lucrative. Go for a big layout change. Make sure there’s a stark difference in the control and the variant that has a major impact on the experience. 
• Focus on a match made in heaven ♥️ Paid & CRO. When Paid Media is being leveraged, it can be a big traffic booster. Focus on creating a landing page that will win big with the audience. Go into testing your CTA copy or keywords! There’s a lot you can do to improve how you serve your ads to your audience.

Leveraging conversion rate optimization efforts on Paid Search

Tuff audits accounts for incoming clients. It’s one of our first steps when working with a new business. During this process, we take a look at every level of a Google Ads account. Keyword targeting, ad copy, bid strategies, etc. Here are some findings we discovered for a prospect recently that are VERY common to come across during our Audit process: 

• 71% of ALL ads Ad Strength can be improved with additional Ad Copy.
• In the last 30 days, $43,000 was spent on keywords with 0 conversions. This is over 20% of the total budget spent during this time period.
• 30% of all active keywords have a below average Landing Page Experience

We see numbers like this all of the time, across all sorts of industries. Thousands of dollars of wasted spend for low quality ads, keywords, or landing pages. All of these things, with the right intentional effort, are fixable and will have long lasting effects on performance. Utilizing conversion rate optimization to focus on Quality Score, Ad Strength, and Landing Page Experience, will yield cheaper clicks, higher conversion rates, and many other long term benefits. Let’s dive in!

Quality Score

The ever mysterious Quality Score is first up in our assessment. This is one of the main tools Google uses to compare your ads to your competitors. Influencing everything from CPC to where you show up in search results. Here’s how it’s calculated, according to Google:

• Expected clickthrough rate (CTR): The likelihood that your ad will be clicked when shown.
• Ad relevance + Ad Strength: How closely your ad matches the intent behind a user’s search.
• Landing page experience: How relevant and useful your landing page is to people who click your ad.

Even though it seems fairly straightforward, improving your Quality Score is harder than it looks. There are lots of factors to consider when testing. All of which are important to focus on. 

Ad Strength

This is a metric that has become paramount in the last year where Google Ads removed extended text ads and replaced them with Responsive Search Ads. Now, all ads have the ability to include 15 headlines and 4 descriptions for Google to optimize towards. Combinations will be created based on what works best for the users. This allows for the algorithm to assign a “strength” based on the perceived quality of the ad. 

Google uses 4 areas to determine the Ad Strength:

1. 1. Add more headlines – Make sure you utilize all the options available to you. This helps with the ability for Google to test and experiment with what copy works best for your audience. 
   2. Include popular keywords in your headlines – This is the most important of the 4 variables. It is important to match your ad copy to the keywords being targeted. For example, if you are targeting the keyword, “financial advisors near me,” this phrase should be directly in one of your headlines. This gives a signal to Google that your ad is highly relevant to the user searching for that phrase. Tip: Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion to automatically insert users’ search terms into your ads. 
   3. Make your headlines more unique – Unique headlines that are varied throughout will drastically improve your Ad Strength as well as the ability to test and learn what language has the best performance. Tip: Give your users value props, competitive differentiators, and all relevant information about your product or service. 
   4. Make your descriptions more unique – Similar to the above with headlines. Descriptions have a 90 character limit so you will be able to tell a more detailed story here. Tip: Utilize all 90 characters and include a CTA in this section. 

Ad Strength has 4 tiers: Poor, Average, Good, and Excellent. The aim is to have ALL ads achieve a Good or Excellent rating by implementing all of the best practices above. 

Landing Page Experience

Landing Page Experience may be the most impactful metric to look at through the lens of conversion rate optimization. As the name of the metric suggests, this is a measure of how a user experiences your webpage once landing on it through a Paid Search ad. We can see a score for this on a keyword level, which means each keyword will have a specific landing page experience. There are three scores here:

• Below Average
• Average
• Above Average

We aim to have every keyword in an account reach an Average or Above Average score here. It is one of the first things we focus on when onboarding a client. It’s easy to forget sometimes, but Paid Traffic is PAID. It is paramount to be as efficient as possible when targeting these users. You can truly affect a business’s bottom line with the right conversion rate optimization.  

Simple enough right? Well, it may seem simple on its face, but there are so many variables to keep in mind when looking at landing page experience. Here’s how Tuff utilizes our CRO team for creating highly converting landing pages for paid media traffic. 

Building landing pages for high quality keywords

When we think about scoping CRO to build new landing pages, we do this by narrowing down which keywords we want to focus on. Landing pages are resource heavy. Of course we cannot build a landing page targeting every single keyword relating to the business. So we have to prioritize. We categorize the keywords we want to focus on in two main buckets:

1. High value keywords that are converting, but have room for improvement
2. High volume keywords that historically have converted poorly, but have room to scale

Let’s start with keywords that have been converting, but have room to improve. It’s incredibly important to maximize the performance of these terms. If they work for you now, there is typically a way to supercharge them. Improvement can come through all of the quality metrics mentioned above by implementing a proper landing page. 

Since these keywords are already converting somewhat frequently, we focus on adding additional CTAs and including more copy that matches the targets. When Google deems the landing page is more relevant than your competitors, in turn impression share, CTR, and all other metrics can see a lift. 

The other keyword bucket is what we like to refer to as “tier two” keywords. These have volume, but historically have high CPAs. These may be broader in nature and tempting to go after because of the volume potential. Lots of partners run into high costs here though. This is where a CRO landing page comes into play. It is a perfect opportunity to lower costs and ultimately scale. With these keywords we focus on website copy, path exploration, and exit rates to see what may be driving traffic to leave before converting. 

Here are some general tips we recommend when aiming to improve Landing Page Experience with your CRO team:

1. Use a CRO tool like Hotjar to heatmap paid traffic → As mentioned above, this tool can help you understand the behavior of your users. Specifically for Paid traffic, use this technique to gain insight into the most compelling areas of your landing page. Paid traffic tends to behave differently than organic or direct traffic, so keep in mind the stage of funnel your paid users are coming from. For example, lower funnel traffic may be more inclined to read competitor comparison sections or value props. 
2. Conduct an in-depth path exploration → Paid traffic by nature will behave differently than other sources. A deep path exploration to follow Paid users across your site gives you valuable insight into where you can improve. For example, if paid users tend to navigate to blog content after landing on the site, this can indicate that it’s worth testing additional content links on your paid landing pages. 
3. Lean on a/b testing to properly test Landing Page Optimizations → We can use tools such as Google Optimize to 50/50 split test all sorts of variables on a new landing page. Maybe this is as simple as the color of the CTA button. It could be something more drastic like a hero section change. Regardless of the variable, a/b tests are invaluable when combining the power of CRO with Paid Traffic. Google Ads has the ability to a/b test landing pages right in the platform with their experiment function. Tuff uses this function on a weekly basis to continually optimize our paid search campaigns. 

How to measure the effectiveness of CRO efforts on Paid Media

There are multiple metrics, not just conversion rate, that are indicators of success between PPC and CRO collaboration. Of course conversion volume and conversion rate are large components of all testing, but we can go further with our evaluation. Here are some additional KPIs we track when we are making changes to landing pages, testing ad copy variations, or anything else CRO related for Paid Search. 

• Cost per Click – Seeing a decrease in CPC can be a sign that your Quality Score has improved. Google favors the most relevant ads and landing pages, so if there were changes to a landing page that made it more relevant to your users, CPC can decrease.

• Average Session Duration – This metric is one of the strongest indicators of Quality we have at our disposal. The longer a user spends on your site, the higher quality they are to your business. All CRO efforts look to improve this metric if possible, especially when looking at Paid Media. 

• Pages/Session – Similarly to Average Session Duration, this metric indicates a highly engaged audience. More relevant landing pages, optimized for conversions and SEO, will have a high likelihood of improving pages/sessions for each user. CRO testing that includes additional internal sitelinks is one way to improve this KPI.

• Bounce Rate – Another site metric that we use to measure the success of landing page content. This is calculated by looking at the people who land on your website, take no action, then leave. The lower the Bounce Rate the better. CRO efforts based on optimizing landing page copy and function help lower Bounce Rate by engaging users with more CTAs, additional content to read, and helpful internal links. 

• Click Thru Rate – Any improvement in CTR can be an indicator of a successful conversion rate optimization test test. Ads that are most relevant to your audience receive a higher expected CTR, improving Google’s Quality Score. 

1. Impression Share – This KPI is one that many marketers might not directly associate with conversion rate optimization testing, but it is very helpful at defining success for Google Ads. Conversion Rate improvements made on a website can indicate to Google’s algorithm that your business is higher quality than other competitors, therefore allocating more impression share to you when users are searching. 

When you can match the intent of the search with the right destination, not only will your CPC go down and CTR go up, but you will see engagement metrics improve along with conversion metrics. Measuring success is never linear though. That’s why Tuff looks at data using multiple forms of attribution. This gives us a holistic view of all Digital channels. Social, Organic Traffic, or direct traffic, all can see lifts from improving the quality of your paid ads. 

Supercharge Paid Media with CRO opportunities

Remember, Google, and most other advertising channels, want to serve their users the most relevant and high quality ads possible when they are searching for something or browsing the internet. Paid traffic is paid. Nowhere in your marketing mix is it more important to be as efficient as possible. This is why we keep conversion rate optimization top of mind when creating a Paid Media Strategy. Improvements in website navigation, relevant content, and calls to action have long lasting effects. Ready to accelerate your paid media budgets with CRO? Let’s talk. 

Chris Alarcon

Chris is a PPC Strategist based in Nashville, Tennessee. When he’s not scaling Google Ads & YouTube campaigns, he enjoys longboarding, tinkering with automation tools, and a little bit of gaming.

The post Using Conversion Rate Optimization to Maximize Your Paid Media Dollars appeared first on Tuff.

When we first started working with Pathstream – a Series A startup that offers online certification programs that help people level up their careers, they were spending nearly $1m each quarter in ad spend to hit their lead volume goals, but with a ROAS right around 1.10. They were hitting their application targets, but they were breaking even doing it. 

By restructuring ad accounts, testing creative, audience targeting, and different conversion events, we were able to help decrease Pathstream’s CAC by 59%, leading to their most efficient quarter ever and hitting their ideal LTV to CAC ratio for the first time. 

For 80% of our partners, we take a blended approach to reducing CAC – we focus on decreasing costs on ad channels to send more traffic to the site with the same amount of money, and we create a CRO strategy to improve website conversion rates. 

The exception? When development capabilities are limited or a partner has a custom CMS. That was the case for Pathstream. We weren’t able to implement robust CRO tests in order to improve CAC – we had to get creative when it came to optimizing Facebook and paid search campaigns on Google to hit those CAC targets.

Facebook

When we first partnered with Pathstream, a majority of their ad spend was dedicated to Facebook ads, but the cost per lead, cost per application and cost per enrollment were extremely high and they knew they needed to drive these costs down in order to keep investing a large majority of their paid spend into Facebook. 

With this goal in mind, our social ads team immediately started diving into the Pathstream ad accounts and analyzing the existing data to identify opportunities or “quick wins” as we call them, while also simultaneously working on a longer term strategy for driving down Facebook costs. 

Here’s a sneak peak of how we drove down their Facebook CPL by 63% year over year. 

Testing new audiences 

We tested a handful of new audiences over the past year for Pathstream from job titles, to interests, demographics and lookalikes. We found that our most successful audiences were based on interests for specific Pathstream programs (Asana, Salesforce, Digital Marketing, Data Analytics) and a lookalike of 5% based off of previous Pathstream students who have enrolled in one of their certification programs. 

Since some of the program interests we were targeting could possibly have overlap (Example: Digital Marketing and Data Analytics), we used the audience overlap tool to ensure that the overlap wasn’t greater than 40% so that our program specific audiences wouldn’t be bidding against each other.

After we discovered that these were our top performing audiences, we tested a combination audience that targeted both the interest audience and the lookalike in one ad set. This ultimately did not perform as well as the two audiences segmented out into their own ad set. Based on this learning, we segmented each audience back into its own ad set and set the budget at the campaign level which allowed Facebook to allocate the daily budget to the audience with the lower cost. 

Optimizing for Higher Funnel Conversion Events

When we first launched campaigns, we were extremely focused on driving down the cost per enrollment, so all of our campaigns were optimized toward the “purchase” conversion event. We soon realized that most Pathstream students don’t immediately enroll in a program when they first find out about Pathstream. In fact, it could take weeks or even a month for someone to enroll in a Pathstream program after first expressing interest. 

This led us to switch up our optimization strategy and test out a higher funnel conversion event (submit application), which fires once someone enters their information, becomes a lead and also completes a quick application. 

By switching to a higher funnel conversion event, we were not only able to increase the total number of applicants, but we were able to drive down the cost per impression, cost per click, cost per lead and cost per enrollment by bidding on a higher funnel action –– which is less expensive and in return gives the Facebook algorithm more data to target users likely to submit an application. 

Developing new conversion-driven creative

A large part of our Facebook strategy we put together in our initial research for Pathstream included new create asset ideas based on a creative analysis we pulled together with what’s working well and what’s not resonating as well with the Pathsream audience. 

💡We create data-driven ad creative at Tuff, and have an entire blog post about how we approach that for our partners. Check it out here!

We wanted to test a mix of image and video assets that showcased Pathstream’s value props in an engaging way that would get our audience to click on the ad. We tested a combination of school-branded assets and pathstream branded assets and found that all of the assets that mentioned “100% online” and “get a project management/digital marketing/salesforce certificate” in 6 months were our top performing static ads. 

We also tested UGC style videos (like this one) and saw a 56% increase in CTR and decreased the cost per lead by 37% once we rotated those into our campaigns. 

Paid Search

With an ad account this large, we ended up restructuring campaigns twice since we started partnering with Pathstream.

Phase 1 Account Restructure

Initially, Pathstream had over 30 different Google Ad accounts they were running campaigns from. Pathstream partners with different universities to offer their certification programs covering curriculum on Facebook Digital Marketing, Salesforce, Tableau Data Analytics, and Asana Project Management. They had a separate ad account for almost every university + certification program combination. 

Our first step was combining the campaigns across 30 ad accounts into one to increase the amount of lead data in one ad account to make the Google algorithm work smarter for us.

Even though we culled down campaign structure significantly in phase 1 of our account restructure, we still had over 40 different search campaigns, each with minor differences. 

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach. Many partners have similar account structures and are certainly successful, and Pathstream was finding success early on with this approach as well. With the goal of getting CAC even lower though, we set out to restructure things again after a few months. 

Phase 2 Account Restructure

At this point, we were utilizing many automated, conversion focused aspects of Google Ads. Max Conversions bidding strategy, Data Driven Attribution, Dynamic Search Ads. With these campaign features, Google works best when there is an abundance of data, specifically conversion data flowing into each campaign. 

If campaigns are too spread out, only receiving a few conversions per month, you may be underutilizing the true power of automation. This was partially the case for Pathstream.

By condensing campaigns from 40+ to 15, we allowed more conversion data to feed into fewer campaigns, in turn making our ads more efficient. We did not limit targeting. This was not designed to decrease our volume or impression share at all. We were not looking to lighten our workload either. Instead, limiting the number of campaigns gave Google more conversion signals, gave Tuff more opportunity to experiment and learn quickly,  and also allowed for better informed expansion across channels in the future.

For starters we left our highest performing campaigns alone. The ones bringing in the most conversion volume and most search volume remained mainly untouched. The big changes were with the campaigns that had the least amount of monthly search volume. Many of them we grouped together into a catch all campaign. What was 10 separate campaigns all converting only a few times a month became one larger structure that converted much more often as a whole. 

Only 3 weeks after our account restructure we saw these results:

• Conversion Rate increased 26%
• Cost Per Lead decreased 38%
• CPC dropped 21%
• CTR increased 8%

This was only the beginning. Performance continues to improve week over week while we gather more data in a much less congested structure. From here, we can start to expand our reach by efficiently pivoting what is working best for us in the short term and beyond. 

Have a complicated Google ad account structure you could use a second set of eyes on? Or need help reducing your costs on Facebook? We’d love to help!

Kristin Dick

Kristin is a senior growth marketer and COO at Tuff. After working in a variety of agency landscapes, Kristin found her way to Tuff to work with teams who make make marketing decisions rooted in data and tied to revenue growth. When she’s not building growth strategies or working with the Tuff team to improve our processes, you’ll find her chasing her two kiddos around the house or playing fetch with her dogs.

The post How We Decreased Pathstream’s CAC by 59% YoY appeared first on Tuff.