Are you leading a growth-focused organization eager to boost your marketing outcomes? Whether you’re a high-growth startup, a mid-market business, or an enterprise managing multiple business units, marketing that drives real, measurable results is non-negotiable.

That’s why the phrase you need to keep an ear out for—whether either hiring an agency or building out an in-house team—is performance marketing. 

Performance-based marketing strategies are driven by tangible business results. The channels and tactics associated with performance marketing strategies are flexible. They span across search engines, social media networks, AI chatbots, websites, and more, but the goal is consistent: Generate direct revenue for the business as a result of marketing efforts.

This article explores how performance marketing applies across company stages—from startups to enterprises—what to consider when adopting a performance mindset, and how to measure success at scale.

Understanding the Basics: Performance-Based Marketing Demystified

Simply put, performance marketing measures all marketing efforts with a dollar and cents contribution to the company’s bottom line. Metrics like revenue, CPA (cost per acquisition) and ROAS (return on ad spend) are taken into account for every decision made within the marketing strategy. While the focus of other marketing varieties might end with higher funnel metrics like impressions or video views, performance marketing follows those interactions all the way to revenue-generating activities. 

For early-stage startups, this mindset is essential for survival. But for enterprise organizations, performance marketing helps ensure marketing budgets are accountable, scalable, and optimized across regions, channels, and teams. Performance marketing means adopting a mindset of optimization toward company revenue across the board. This includes content development, performance ad creative, conversion-optimized websites, and more.

Every effort from your marketing team has the potential to generate revenue for your startup, but not everything is optimized for that specific purpose. A video or blog post without supporting data is often wasted effort. That’s why this kind of content isn’t usually part of a performance-based marketing strategy. 

Kicking Off a Performance Marketing Strategy

While there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all performance marketing plan, there are basic fundamentals to nail before you’re off to the races. We recommend defining your audiences, identifying your unique value props, and refining your messaging strategy. But before diving into your tactic mix, you need to clearly define the goals of your marketing efforts. 

Defining these higher-level goals is something that happens very early in our partnerships, often during our first call. During these initial conversations, we ask questions like:

1. What are your organization’s revenue goals for this month, quarter, and fiscal year?
2. How does your organization currently measure marketing efforts?
3. What tactics has your organization tested in the past?
4. How does your company currently generate revenue? Are there multiple revenue streams we can promote to users?

After integrating this data with our own research and expertise on growth opportunities and market competition, we develop marketing strategies. These strategies revolve around various channels to acquire new users, spanning from search engines to programmatic display networks.

Channel Mix is Key

To be clear, performance marketing is not only allocating efforts toward what drives “last-click” conversions. We typically recommend a channel mix that covers each part of the acquisition funnel, even if certain channels aren’t driving directly attributable last-click revenue. We have measurement strategies in place to ensure that some of these higher funnel tactics, like organic search acquisition or video marketing, are contributing to larger revenue growth. 

Measuring Success: Key Metrics for Performance Evaluation

You can’t call a marketing strategy performance-focused if there’s no strong measurement framework in place. Measurement is the backbone of performance marketing, and it’s how we evaluate the success of our efforts. It’s also the engine that drives all of our decision making and optimizations.

To build an effective measurement framework, you’ll need to start with identifying the main KPIs of your business.

Regardless of your business or industry, identifying main KPIs is the first step to building your measurement framework.

From here, we break down our KPIs by tactic and channel. It’s worth repeating that not all channels merit the same measurement framework. Some high-funnel channels prioritize metrics such as CPM and video watch rate. Lower funnel channels, however, concentrate on actions directly linked to revenue, like purchases and qualified lead submissions.

Using Multi-Touchpoint Attribution

We acknowledge that each partner requires a unique, tailored approach to measurement frameworks. Multi-touch attribution is an invaluable tool for accurate measurement support. It offers options to comprehensively understand the effects of diverse marketing strategies. Leveraging multi-touch attribution enables us to make informed decisions that drive results.

These tools allow leaders to clearly understand which channels contribute to revenue and where to scale or trim budgets.

Adopting a Performance Marketing Mindset

There are countless ways to approach building and executing a performance marketing strategy. Regardless of the size of your organization,  adapting a performance-forward mindset is essential to survive and scale. 

Performance is at the heart of every marketing strategy that we build for every single one of our partners. We integrate closely with our partners to set, achieve, and exceed growth goals. If you run startup or scaleup that’s interested in how the Tuff team can build a performance marketing strategy for your company, don’t hesitate to reach out!

Ethan Broder

Hi there! I’m Ethan, a Growth Marketer based in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I have four years of digital agency experience under my belt creating and executing acquisition strategies for a number of different verticals across multiple channels. When I’m not at my desk, you can find me skiing, mountain biking, or chasing my dog around in the mountains.

The post Fueling Growth: Performance-Based Marketing for Growth-Driven Organizations appeared first on Tuff.

As a growth agency, we have to get a deep understanding of our partner’s revenue models quickly. Once we do, we build a tactical growth model based on what we see. When building growth models, we have to get a few things straight:

• Who is the target audience?
• How do they typically interact with the brand?
• What is the cost to acquire a new user/customer?
• What is the average customer lifetime value (LTV) of that user/customer?

Understanding the answer to that final LTV question is so vitally important, but it’s something that a surprising number of businesses ignore. The only way to really know if your acquisition efforts are profitable is to understand how much revenue your customers generate over the course of the relationship.

Whether you’re an e-commerce brand selling direct to consumer, a SaaS company looking to find more enterprise users, or a mobile app just launching your product, retaining customers and increasing the average lifetime value of those customers is imperative to growing your business.

While Tuff is largely focused on acquisition, we keep a very close eye on customer churn and repeat purchase rates. These often overlooked metrics can help multiply revenue growth if assigned equal importance to acquisition tactics. LTV can be the metric that unlocks the next level of growth for your company.

This blog post will answer the following questions: 

• What is LTV?
• How can a company increase customer retention and LTV?
• What are the long-term benefits of increased LTV?
  

Come along as we explore these strategies and plot out a path of continuous growth. All powered by maximizing lifetime value. 

Customer Lifetime Value Formula

As mentioned earlier, LTV can be the key to unlocking the next level of growth for your company because it provides a framework for multiplying profitability. You may be thinking, “That’s great, but how do you actually calculate it?” Thankfully, this part is fairly straightforward:

Average Order Value * Average Orders per Year * Average Customer Lifespan = LTV

Understanding this metric is the critical first step in knowing how much you should be paying to acquire a new customer, and how profitable your current acquisition efforts are. The implications of your customer LTV are about as simple as the equation. A higher average LTV means more revenue per customer, and you can tolerate a higher CAC while keeping new customers profitable. 

At this point, we can all agree that increasing our average LTV is a huge lever we can pull for growth. It can increase our total revenue at the end of the day and allow us to scale our acquisition efforts more aggressively. That’s all nice in theory, but how do we actually isolate and increase our LTV? 🤔

Retention Strategies for Boosting Lifetime Value

Building customer loyalty is the name of the game. The more you can engage with current customers and keep them satisfied, the more they’ll want to come back and reengage with your business. Here are four effective strategies to keep your customers coming back to increase LTV:

1. Use content to keep your customers engaged

Content marketing is a great tool for introducing new customers to your brand, but using it to engage with existing customers is one of the best ways to build brand loyalty and authority. Regularly distributing high-quality content to your customer base through email and social channels is a great way to reduce churn and increase repeat purchases. Regular, valuable content means engaged, happy customers.

2. Personalize your communication based on customer behavior

Email marketing platforms allow you to create all sorts of segmentations based on user behavior. Do you have two products that complement each other well? Does your software subscription require a renewal every 12 months? You can maximize your email strategy with customized messaging to target users right at the critical junctions of when they’ll either establish their brand loyalty or start reassessing their options. Get in touch with the right message at the right time and you’ll see loyalty jump.

3. Build out a referral program

Referral programs are the ultimate two-birds-with-one-stone tools for marketers looking to boost their retention and new customer acquisition efforts. 

Here’s how they typically work: After a new customer makes a purchase, offer them a discount if they can get a friend to make a (discounted) purchase. Usually, your customer acquisition cost is higher than the combined value of the discounts, and you’re getting your users to spread the word of your brand for you. Increased LTV and new customers from one tactic, what more can you ask for? 🔥

4. Provide best-in-class customer service

While positive experiences can keep customers engaged, negative experiences can destroy that loyalty just as fast. One mistake early-stage brands make is not properly investing in a customer service infrastructure to support their customer base. Before scaling up your business, make sure that you’ve properly invested in your customer service. It could be the difference between creating a user base of one-time customers and creating customers who you’ll retain for years.

Sustained Growth through Lifetime Value Optimization

If implementing tactics to improve your LTV isn’t part of your current growth strategy, it’s probably time to rethink that roadmap. Increasing your LTV is such a powerful multiplier that can unlock new revenue and the next level of growth for your business. Let’s look at an example:

Imagine you run a company that sells high-end bagels through an online store. These are the best bagels out there and people can’t stop submitting orders. You’re generating 250 new customers each month and they’re buying a one-year subscription to your bagel service. Here’s what your numbers look like at the moment:

An AOV of $45 * 6 orders per year * an average customer lifespan of 1.49 years gives us an average LTV of $402.3. At your current rate, each one-month cohort will generate $100,305 in revenue

Not bad! That means that if you can acquire customers for less than $402.30, you’re making a profit. (We’re ignoring ALL overhead in this example.) You’ve got some room for improvement here though. Of those 250 new customers each month, only 25% of them are renewing their subscriptions, with a whopping 95% of those customers renewing for year three.

Based on that data, you know that retaining past year one is a great opportunity to generate additional revenue through increased average LTV. You work with your team on ideas to get more users to re-up their subscription after that first year and decide to send out a 10% off coupon to customers prompting them to renew 2 weeks out from their subscription expiration. 

You see that renewal number jump from 25% all the way up to 40%! Let’s rerun those numbers for a one-month cohort: 

With that 10% off offer in place, you’re getting an average additional 37.5 subscription renewals in month two. This leads to an additional 36 customers renewing for year three. This leaves you with a total of $114,885 in lifetime revenue from that cohort. 

That’s a difference of $14,580. Apply that to a year’s worth of sales, and you can expect an additional $174,960 in lifetime revenue.   This is just an example and you don’t always see these types of results, but putting efforts into place around increasing LTV can yield the kind of revenue increases that we see above. 

LTV Efforts Go a Long Way 🚀

Just like customer acquisition, maximizing lifetime value is a matter of testing and learning. It’s all about trying things out and seeing what works.

Here’s the thing: Every company, no matter what you do, should be focusing on LTV right now. If you’re not holding onto your current customers and making them happy, you’re essentially sending them to your competitors. And who wants that?!

At Tuff, we’re a growth marketing culture that’s all about finding the correct levers to pull. It’s like discovering secret ingredients that make your favorite dish taste even better. Curious about how Tuff can combine your growth and customer retention efforts into one seamless system? Give us a holler!

Ethan Broder

Hi there! I’m Ethan, a Growth Marketer based in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I have four years of digital agency experience under my belt creating and executing acquisition strategies for a number of different verticals across multiple channels. When I’m not at my desk, you can find me skiing, mountain biking, or chasing my dog around in the mountains.

The post Maximizing Customer Lifetime Value: Retention Strategies for Sustained Growth appeared first on Tuff.

As a growth agency, we run a lot of lead generation campaigns for our partners. Whether it’s B2B businesses looking to fill their pipeline or D2C brands building hype for a product launch, we’ve run lead gen every which way on every channel you can think of.

When we’re creating a growth marketing framework for these campaigns and thinking of what tactics to use, the question inevitably gets asked “Are we looking for quality or quantity with this strategy?”

Both.

The answer is both.

Of course, everyone wants a full pipeline of highly qualified leads for their sales team to feast on. Strong leads accompany more sales which leads to higher revenue. The issue is it’s never that simple. The typical tactics we look to employ here to generate leads usually sacrifice one of these areas. It is so difficult to generate leads at a high volume that are high quality at the same time. This is an issue we were having earlier this year with one of our partners, Thnks. 

Thnks and Tuff

Thnks’ mission is to help establish and build stronger relationships through efficient, personalized, and thoughtful gestures of appreciation. Does that sound vague? That’s kind of the idea. Their platform allows you to send cups of coffee, a grab-and-go lunch, or an end-of-the-day cocktail to anyone’s email or phone with just a few clicks. The platform is very business-focused, seeing most of their traction coming from sales and HR professionals.

Thnks brought us on to help them bolster their lead pipeline and unlock a new avenue for growth through paid acquisition. They had seen some success in the past but wanted a team to bring some stability to their advertising channels as well as a strategy that helped these channels work together. When it came to lead generation efforts, we really only focused on two main social platforms:

• Facebook/Instagram
• Linkedin

When it came to generating marketing qualified leads, we were only looking for companies of a certain size who we could expect to send a high volume of Thnks if converted to a customer. Thnks supports smaller businesses and individuals, but those customers don’t generate the same kind of LTV, so we decided against allocating budget to acquire these users at smaller companies.

Linkedin ads aren’t for every business, but they can be a really great place to generate leads depending on your product or service. With Thnks in mind, we saw a great opportunity to leverage their targeting options to isolate users who work in roles that are more likely to use Thnks and work at companies large enough for us to consider the lead“qualified.” Like I hinted at above, we were really looking for users who worked in sales or HR roles at worked at companies of a certain size.

Taking advantage of these targeting options has resulted in really efficient lead to MQL rates on Linkedin. Year to date at the time of writing our lead>MQL rate is sitting at 83%, which has been a huge factor in keeping our cost/MQL down on that platform. Unfortunately, we can’t say the same about our efforts on Facebook/Instagram.

Running ads on Facebook is an attractive option for B2B lead generation since the cost to deliver impressions and generate clicks on Linkedin is typically much more expensive. While clicks and impressions are generally cheaper on Facebook, you don’t get the same robust B2B targeting options that are accessible on Linkedin. Facebook offers some job title and industry targeting, but it’s nowhere near as accurate or reliable as what you can do on Linkedin.

Year to date at the time of writing, our lead>MQL rate is 48% for Facebook generated leads. When you put that number next to the 83% that we’ve seen on Linkedin, it immediately shows a gaping whole and huge opportunity for improvement on the Facebook front. 

Now we just needed to figure out what can be done to improve our lead quality on Facebook. This number has such a huge impact on our overall cost per qualified lead, so any improvement we can find will go a long way in letting us hit our MQL goals. 

How Clearbit was able to help

Working in digital advertising doesn’t mean I’m immune to ads. If anything I might be more susceptible to them since I can appreciate it when I get targeted with a good one. A few months ago I got hit with an ad from Clearbit offering to solve the exact problem that I was having with Thnks. I give their platform a ton of credit for being able to target me so well, but the creative (and yes, this is the exact ad I clicked on) was too relevant and enticing for me to ignore. I clicked through, did a little bit of research on the Clearbit website, and submitted a lead form requesting a time to chat with one of their sales reps. 

What I learned on that call is that Clearbit was able to offer us the best of both Facebook and Linkedin advertising wrapped into one. By plugging their product into our Facebook ad account, we’ve been able to access “Linkedin level targeting” with our Facebook campaigns. This has allowed us to take advantage of the lower cost of delivery and clicks on Facebook while also isolating our highest qualified audience by industry, job title and company size.

This was exactly the solution we needed for our low lead>MQL rates from Facebook ads. That issue was directly caused by a lack of targeting options on Facebook, and Clearbit plugged that exact hole.

Results

As I mentioned above, we introduced Clearbit to our Facebook efforts in an attempt to increase our lead>MQL rates. We were happy with our cost per lead as reported in Facebook, but not enough of those leads were actually qualified. Thnks didn’t bring us on to generate a high number of bad leads, so paying close attention to the qualification rate has been super important to our partnership.

It took a couple weeks for Clearbit to really hit stride, but since then the numbers really speak for themselves. We’ve seen a huge improvement in our lead qualification rate when looking at Clearbit campaigns vs. non-Clearbit campaigns.

This is the exact result we were hoping to see when introducing Clearbit. We’ve seen a monumental improvement in our qualified lead rate with these new campaigns, which has helped us drop our cost/qualified lead while getting more high quality leads in the door. The results so far have been incredibly promising and we’re excited to continue using this tool with Thnks and other B2B partners we work with.  

“I view our partnership with Tuff as more like an extension of my team. We strategize together, ask tough questions, examine the results, optimize – and it just keeps getting better. Exactly what I was looking for.” – Brad Veach, VP of Marketing at Thnks (see all Google Reviews for Tuff) 

Conclusion

Getting Clearbit onboard was not the most straightforward test I’ve ever run for a partner. It required multiple calls with our point of contact at Thnks, calls with the reps at Clearbit, negotiations back and forth, and some onboarding for the platform itself. It was complicated, but the end results were more than worth it.

Despite the complexity, the thinking that went behind it is pretty standard for how we tackle testing and optimizations for our partners. We followed the steps Growth Marketers always take when introducing a new tactic:

• Isolate a problem metric you’re looking to improve (Our lead to MQL rate is holding us back)
• Find the root cause of the problem (Facebook targeting options are not as robust and accurate as we need)
• Put a plan in place to address the problem (Clearbit gives us the targeting options needed to drive more qualified leads)
• Execute and analyze results (Our lead qualification rate for Clearbit campaigns is 61% higher than non-Clearbit campaigns)

If you’re interested in exploring this type of testing framework and talking through some solutions we can offer to help your user acquisition, give us a holler! We’d love to talk.

Ethan Broder

Hi there! I’m Ethan, a Growth Marketer based in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I have four years of digital agency experience under my belt creating and executing acquisition strategies for a number of different verticals across multiple channels. When I’m not at my desk, you can find me skiing, mountain biking, or chasing my dog around in the mountains.

The post How We Used Clearbit to Generate More Quality Leads for Thnks appeared first on Tuff.

When it comes to growth through paid acquisition, diversity is the name of the game. Diversity in messaging, diversity in tactics and diversity in channels. In this case study, we’re going to be talking about the last one: Channel Diversification. 

There are so many different channel options out there, it can be difficult to choose what’s best for your company. As part of being an ecommerce growth marketing agency, we’re always on the lookout for new channel options to help our partners hit their revenue targets. It’s important to have a healthy mix of channels to hit users on different platforms at various stages of their buying journey.

Looking to generate very, very high level awareness? Maybe try ads through a programmatic connected TV platform.

Picking up users who have an interest in the types of products you sell? Facebook and Instagram would be a good fit.

Want users who are searching directly for a solution your product provides? Google ads will do the trick there. 

Building a comprehensive growth marketing strategy typically includes a combination of all of the above, with some more channels sprinkled in. This is exactly what Tea Drops, one of our partners, asked us to do for them when they teamed up with Tuff towards the end of Q3 2021. 

Tea Drops and Tuff

Tea Drops is a CPG brand that figured out a new, unique take on one of morning’s most simple pleasures, the cup of tea. Their compressed drops dissolve in hot water, giving you the perfect cup of tea without dealing with the bag. 

Tea Drops came to us in September looking for help growing their brand and sales online through paid acquisition. They had seen some success in the past but needed a team to bring some stability to their network of acquisition channels, as well as a strategy to make these channels work together. At the time of the partnership starting, we had identified 5 channels we wanted to run ads on for them:

• Facebook/Instagram
• Pinterest
• Tik Tok
• Google
• Bing

This combination of channels would give us full coverage of the funnel and allow us to hit users at any point of their buying journey. 

As we moved closer to Black Friday/Cyber Monday we saw success across channels but were running into an interesting problem on paid social: We were having trouble converting retargeting traffic. We saw strong results coming in from cold traffic, but when going after users who had already been to the site we didn’t see the same efficiencies. Retargeting is typically an area where you see higher efficiency, so this was clearly a problem that needed addressing. 

At this point we knew that we needed a different solution to convert retargeting traffic that our existing channel mix couldn’t provide, so we turned to Mountain.

How we used Mountain for Tea Drops.

As I mentioned earlier, the team at Tuff is always trying to expand our channel expertise. As we take on different types of partners, programmatic ads have been showing up in our channel mixes more and more. There are a ton of different programmatic channels out there for advertisers, but Tea Drops had an account set up with Mountain already with historical spend, so we started there. 

There are two main offerings from Mountain, connected TV ads and display network ads. Since we’re focused on driving last click conversion for Tea Drops, we stayed away from the connected TV offering and decided to introduce ads on the display network (for more info on how to decide which attribution model is right for you, check out this post.)

We needed a solution for the very bottom of the funnel, so we set up our campaigns to only target users who I’ve added items to their cart, but have not completed a purchase. On the creative side, we used one of Mountain’s dynamic options to set our ad creative to populate with products that that user had either added to their cart or had browsed on the website. This was accomplished by making sure that the link between Shopify and Mountain was populating the product catalog correctly on the ad platform side, and that our Mountain pixel tracking was set up properly.

The dynamic aspects of the ad creative alongside a 15% off offer yielded really strong results f

or us almost immediately after activating this campaign. As we moved past Black Friday and Cyber Monday and into the month 

of December, which can always be a tricky month for e-commerce advertisers, we were able to rely on Mountain to deliver low cost, bottom of funnel purchases where our other paid social channels fell short.

This channel was treated as very much a supplementary channel to our overall mix. Given that we were only targeting users who have added to cart without purchasing, we didn’t need to dedicate a large amount of budget to Mountain. For the month of December, we decided that this channel would take 1.5% of our overall ad budget. We have the benefit of testing it for a couple weeks before moving into this crucial holiday to find where the optimal spend would be for our audience.

Results

Tea Drops did very well advertising on the channels that we outlined earlier during Black Friday and Cyber Monday but there was a big question mark around how we would perform early in the month of December. This is a time of year that people typically associate with increased purchasing but it can be hard to forecast revenue numbers and purchase intent coming off the back of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which is typically a more lucrative time for e-commerce businesses. 

As we moved into early December, Mountain really started to pick up in terms of purchase volume and efficiency where some of our other channels took a step back coming off Black Friday deals that we were advertising. 

For Tea Drops, we have very clear CPA goals for each of our channels we’re running ads on. During the first two weeks of December, Mountain was able to deliver purchases at a cost of $14.14 each, which was more than 50% lower than our target CPA across paid social channels. This is a huge boost for us, especially considering that we were not seeing efficient purchases coming at the bottom of the funnel with our Facebook and Instagram ads, which were taking up the majority of our budget. 

By placing only 1.5% of our ad budget to Mountain, it generated 3.5% of our total attributed purchases for the month of December. This might sound like a small number, but when you’re dealing with larger budgets, this can make a big difference to the bottom line.

Conclusion

If you’ve gotten this far in the post you might be asking yourself “Why is there an entire post dedicated to a tactic that took 1.5% of a partner’s budget?” 

This is really the core of what Growth Marketers and Channel Experts do here at Tuff. If there’s any opportunity to find more efficient results by using different tactics or different channels, it’s pretty much a guarantee that we are going to explore it. This might sound corny, but driving great results for our partners is what gets us out of bed in the morning. It helped us bring great results Tea Drops during a crucial time of year for them and it’s an approach that we take all of our partners.

If you’re interested in seeing what sort of Channel mix our team would recommend for your eCommerce business reach out and set up a call with our team. We’d love to chat.

Ethan Broder

Hi there! I’m Ethan, a Growth Marketer based in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I have four years of digital agency experience under my belt creating and executing acquisition strategies for a number of different verticals across multiple channels. When I’m not at my desk, you can find me skiing, mountain biking, or chasing my dog around in the mountains.

The post How We Used Mountain for Tea Drops to Boost Their Holiday eCommerce Sales appeared first on Tuff.

At Tuff, our team is well-versed at a variety of growth marketing tactics. On a daily basis, we partner with clients to set the roadmap and then get to work experimenting with a variety of different tactics based on their goals. 

More recently, when we identify our channel mix and consider how we’re going to diversify across the entire user journey, programmatic has continued to make its way into the conversation. 

In this post, I’m going to break down what this means and how it could impact your acquisition channel mix. 

What are programmatic ads?

Programmatic advertising is the leveraging of automation tech for media buying. It leans on data insights and algorithms to deliver ads to users at the optimal time to drive them to a specific action (buying a product, filling out a lead form, etc.)

Programmatic offerings take control of where and when your ad gets placed on the web. Some campaigns even go as far as generating ad creative for you as well. These campaigns use automation to help you hit your marketing goals. Chances are, if you’ve done any sort of digital advertising in the last few years, you’ve used programmatic ads in one form or another.

What are some examples?

Almost all modern digital ad platforms have some aspect of programmatic ad buying baked in. There’s automated app ads on PPC platforms, dynamic product ads on paid social platforms, and countless other examples within the channels most digital markets are familiar with. 

A great example of the shift towards programmatic is Google’s newest campaign type, performance max. This offer allows users to upload a number of images, videos, logos and headlines to a campaign. From there, the Google algorithm combines these and places them across the web. This campaign can show up as a youtube ad, display ad, or an ad in someone’s gmail inbox. 

On the paid social ads side of things, Facebook’s dynamic product ads have some programmatic elements to them. They still allow the user to dictate the audience, but ad creative is pulled from a product catalog uploaded to Facebook. The Facebook algorithm will then select product images based on the users interests or their activity on your website, and deliver ads across Facebook, Instagram and their audience network.

How did we use programmatic channels at Tuff?

As a growth marketing agency, we are always looking for new avenues and channels to help our partners grow their businesses. This typically manifests itself through a variety of paid and organic acquisition, with conversion rate optimization and creative strategy layered in.

Programmatic solutions offer us a great way to complement these strategies and bring in new customers that wouldn’t be found through more traditional methods. That being said, we’ve learned that these more automated strategies can’t really carry the full weight of growth marketing strategy. While they are great at finding users to convert who you wouldn’t find with more traditional methods, they often struggle to achieve results at scale. This makes programmatic campaigns the perfect tools to complement strategies that can achieve results at a higher spend.

Where does programmatic fit into a paid acquisition strategy?

Let’s look at this through a real breakdown of one of our partners. They are an ecommerce brand that brought us in to use paid acquisition to drive new customers to purchase online through their site. 

We were having a unique problem here that was tough to solve with our existing channel mix. Cold traffic was converting at a great rate with really strong results, but the price of getting users who have already interacted with the site was too high to be sustainable. This led us to explore alternate channels to re-engage these users, ultimately ending with us launching programmatic ads on Mountain.

Mountain has a few different campaign types, but we take advantage of their display network in the context of this partnership. Our strategy with this channel is very focused, using their display network and dynamic, programmatic ads to target users who have added items to their cart, but not completed a purchase. 

Like I mentioned earlier, these strategies can struggle to work at scale, so it made sense for us to use it on a smaller, highly interested audience. We also leaned on Mountain’s programmatic tools to help build ad creative for this campaign. Mountain allows us to build a template where they’ll pull in relevant product images through an uploaded Shopify catalog. This means that the user is seeing ads with images of products they added to their cart on the website.

After extensive testing on this channel, we found that spending any more than $5k/month here would result in a higher than acceptable cost per purchase. Keeping the budget on Mountain at $5k/mo (which is about 5% of our total ad spend across channels) resulted in CPAs that were half of what we were seeing on our next top performing paid social channel, Facebook. 

This campaign was a huge success for us in an area where other channels struggled. After introducing this as a technique to target users who have added to cart, we’ve kept it running as an incredibly efficient tool for bottom of funnel spending.

There are definitely programmatic channels out there that can handle a larger spend (Google performance max comes to mind) but for our needs bringing in Mountain to pick up high intent users did the job incredibly well at a low budget. 

Conclusion

For this partner, programmatic is only a piece of the puzzle. Without support from our social ads channels (Facebook, Pinterest, Tik Tok) as well as PPC channels (Google search and Youtube,) it would fall flat. This is a specific example of how to work programmatic ads into your channel mix, but it’s representative of how we treat this advertising technique here at Tuff. It can be a very effective tool, but it’s not a silver bullet. Mixing programmatic ads into your larger acquisition strategy is the best way to achieve results. 

The partners we work with often require a complex channel mix to achieve their goals. The digital advertising landscape is always changing, and the growth marketers and channel experts here at Tuff love testing new campaign types and channels. 

If you’re looking for a team to put together an acquisition plan and execute on it, drop us a note!

Ethan Broder

Hi there! I’m Ethan, a Growth Marketer based in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I have four years of digital agency experience under my belt creating and executing acquisition strategies for a number of different verticals across multiple channels. When I’m not at my desk, you can find me skiing, mountain biking, or chasing my dog around in the mountains.

The post Using Programmatic to Assist Your Growth Marketing Channel Mix appeared first on Tuff.

Scaling effectively is one of the hardest things to do with your Facebook ads. As a growth marketing agency, one of the problems potential partners come to us most often with is that they’ve gained some sort of traction with their Facebook ads, but don’t know how to efficiently ramp up spend. 

To someone not well versed in Facebook advertising, this seems like an easy solution. You’ve got campaigns that are working, so just jack up your daily budgets and start counting your profits! Makes sense right?

If only it were that easy….

Anyone who has experience running Facebook ads knows just how fragile account performance can be. A number of different factors can take your performance for a roller coaster ride, and changing ad spend is one of the largest ones. Growth Marketers are on a seemingly endless quest for stability and predictable results. While that quest will likely never be completed, being mindful of how we adjust our spending on Facebook and our other ad channels will get us one step closer to the promised land of steady results.

Before you can begin increasing your spend on Facebook you need to answer an important question.

Is my ad account ready to start scaling?

One thing we really stress here at Tuff when looking at budgets for our social ads channels is that adding additional budget at an underperforming channel or campaign won’t help your results. There are many problems in life that can be solved by throwing money at them, but poor advertising results isn’t one of them. 

There are three stages to running campaigns on Facebook when you’re looking to achieve success at scale:

1. Traction 
2. Scale
3. Profit

To sum these steps up, traction is where you put in the work to achieve consistent profitable results, scale is where you increase budgets steadily while still maintaining profitability, and profit is where you swim in your money Scrooge McDuck style.

You’ve got to walk before you can run. The traction phase is where you define what profitability looks like from an account results standpoint. This benchmark will vary greatly depending on your business model. It could be a specific cost per lead, ROAS number or cost per new customer. Whatever it is, you need to understand this tipping point before considering scaling up your budget. This should really be figured out before running ads at all, but that’s for another blog post.

Once you’ve defined your profitability metrics, you’ve got to go out and hit them. Go test audiences, ad creative, and copy combinations until you’ve determined the targeting and messaging needed to hit your profitability metrics.

Before you start scaling, you’ll want to be sure you’re hitting these numbers with some consistency. With how volatile Facebook advertising can be, it’s very likely that you can hit these goals one day, and not even come close the next. You’ll want to see results above your profitability threshold for a significant amount of time before you begin scaling. The amount of time will be different depending on what budget level you start at, but a good rule of thumb is 2-3 weeks of hitting KPIs before increasing your budget.

So now that we’ve got traction, it’s time to look at increasing our budgets, which is the whole reason you’re reading this article. As I mentioned earlier, scaling up too quickly can shock the Facebook algorithm and tank your results, so we always look to scale methodically to avoid that. There are two methods of scaling that we use, which we refer to as vertical scaling and horizontal scaling. We use a combination of these to increase overall budget. Let’s get into what they are. 

Scaling vertically

Vertical scaling is the easiest way to increase your ad spend on Facebook. When you scale vertically you’re taking your existing campaign structure and increasing the daily budgets for those campaigns or ad sets. In reality, this is just fancy marketing speak for taking your budget and making it larger, but there is some nuance involved.

It is possible to kick your ad sets back into the “Learning Phase” if you increase your budgets too quickly. An ad set being in the learning phase is an indicator that the algorithm is still working to stabilize your results. While in this state you can expect more volatility and higher than normal costs per action. An ad set leaves the learning phase after about 50 conversion events, at which point performance stabilizes a bit.

Needless to say we want to get out of the learning phase as quickly as possible and stay out of it.

“Large edits” to a campaign or ad sets will move ad sets back into the learning phase, with large increases to budget being one of those possible edits. Specifically, more than a 20% increase in spend to a campaign or ad set will be enough to get sent back to learning phase time out. 

All of this is to say keep your daily spend increases to 19% or less of your budget if your ad sets are out of the learning phase. If your ad sets aren’t out of learning just yet, it’s probably a good idea to wait for that to happen before increasing spend.

Scaling horizontally 

There is always going to be a point when scaling your existing structure starts to yield diminishing returns. As much as we’d like to scale effective campaigns and ad sets to infinity, there comes a point where you’ve maxed out the amount of spend you can pump into a campaign structure before you have to expand outward to find new efficiencies.

Horizontal scaling is where you look for opportunities outside of your existing structure, usually in the form of new audiences, to spend budget. Audience testing is a huge part of being successful with Facebook advertising and chances are if you’ve made it to the point where you are scaling up your budget, you’ve done your fair share of audience testing already (remember finding traction?)

You’re definitely going to want to find these avenues of potential scale before you need to, so as you’re scaling vertically, it’s always a good idea to test new audiences to see if you can gain traction outside of your existing structure. 

When introducing new ad sets, it’s generally best to set the daily budget equal or lower than what your other campaigns/ad sets are at. The last thing you want to do is introduce a new audience at a really high daily budget only to see no traction and burn through a significant amount of ad spend without much return.

Once you see traction from a new audience, you can apply the vertical scaling principals I outlined earlier in the article, rinse and repeat.

Conclusion

Facebook loves consistency when it comes to running an ad account. Want to make a big change to an existing campaign? You’re usually going to get punished in the form of higher costs for a period of time. When scaling up your spend, make sure to stay below that 20% per day threshold to avoid having your ad sets get kicked back into the Learning Phase. Seeing rising costs as you’re scaling your existing structure? It’s probably time to look to scale horizontally with some new audiences.

Want to learn more about how we help our partners achieve results at scale? Set up a call with our team to discuss how we can apply our growth marketing expertise to your business! We’d love to hear from you! 

Ethan Broder

Hi there! I’m Ethan, a Growth Marketer based in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I have four years of digital agency experience under my belt creating and executing acquisition strategies for a number of different verticals across multiple channels. When I’m not at my desk, you can find me skiing, mountain biking, or chasing my dog around in the mountains.

The post How To Scale Ad Spend Quickly (Without Spiking Costs) appeared first on Tuff.

No matter what you’re promoting online, whether it’s products, services or platforms, conversion rate is one of the most important metrics you need to be watching. You can have the most engaging ad experiences in the world, but if your website experience is lacking, don’t expect to gain any new customers.

At Tuff, website conversion rate is always top of mind. It is an incredibly important part of the equation that determines if our efforts are profitable or not. It is a metric we’re always looking to improve through a tactic called Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO.  There are a couple of different ways to do CRO, with our favorite being landing page split testing. 

There are a number of different tools out there that can help you get split tests set up and begin your CRO work, but our favorite is Google Optimize. It integrates well with Google Analytics, is easy to set up, and it’s free. 

Why should you be split testing?

Before we jump into how you get set up with Google Optimize, let’s take a step back and ask ourselves why we should be split testing. Why is conversion rate so important? Let’s look at this hypothetical example:

Say you own an eCommerce business that sells running shoes. You’re using paid channels (Facebook ads, Google ads, etc.) to drive traffic to your site. These are the average metrics you see on a monthly basis:

Congrats! You made $95,000 in revenue! On the flip side you’re making less than $1 per visitor on your site, which is not a great position to be in considering the average cost to get someone to click on an ad through paid channels. Now, for the sake of the example, let’s say that through CRO you’re able to increase your conversion rate to 1.8%. These are what your site numbers are going to look like.

You just increased your revenue by $76,000 without increasing your site traffic at all. That’s the magic of CRO. So much focus gets put on cost per click, but we also need to be paying attention to what those clicks are doing once they get to your site. 

While this article won’t detail out how to identify which tests to run, we do have some great CRO test examples you can start with in our article on Increasing Ecommerce Conversion Rate. 

What you need to set up split testing with Google Optimize

The first thing you’ll need to start split testing on with Google Optimize is an account. Once that is done, you’ll need to take the following steps:

1. Link your Analytics account
2. Download the Optimize Chrome extension
3. Install the Optimize code snippet on your site
4. Set up your test in Google optimize

Install the Optimize Code snippet on your site and download the Chrome extension

There are a few different ways to do this, but the easiest way is to use Google Tag Manager since there is a baked-in integration between Tag Manager and Optimize.

Click on settings inside your tag manager account and copy your Optimize container ID.

You’ll also see links here to link your Analytics account and download the Chrome extension. These will each only take a second, so knock them out before getting the code snippet installed on your site.

Copy your container ID, jump into your Tag Manager account and create a new Tag. From the options on the right, select Google Optimize as your tag type. Paste in your container ID and set the tag to trigger on all pages. 

OK! We have the infrastructure in place to set up our test within Google Optimize. Now it’s time to decide what will be the “B” part of our A/B test. This will be which aspect of our page we are going to change. That can be anything from changing a headline, swapping out a graphic or reordering content on your site.

Whatever you decide on, try not to make too many changes at once. The best way to split test is incrementally so we really get a good idea of which changes are impacting the difference in performance we expect to see. 

Setting up your split test 

Ore we start setting up our test in Google Optimize,  let’s review what we’ve done so far:

• Built our Google Optimize account
• Linked to our Optimize account to our analytics account
• Downloaded the Optimize Chrome extension and installed our Optimize code snippet on our website
• Identified our variable for testing

Once we have done all of these things, we are ready to configure our test within Google Optimize. Luckily for us, Google Optimize makes setting these tests up very straightforward.

From inside your Google optimize container, you’ll click “Let’s go” to create your first experience.

There are a few different types of tests you can run here, but for the sake of this example, we’re going to select an A/B test. Give your test a name that easily calls out what is being tested. For our test, we’ll be changing the headline on our form submit page.

From here, click add a variant to begin setting up your first test. Select a name that lets you easily identify which changes are going to be made. We’re going to name our experience “Lead Magnet Page – Headline Test”. Any guesses what is going to be changed on our test page?

Now that we have our experience built, it’s time to add a variant. When naming this, give it a name that tells you what the change actually is. We’re going to name our variant “Headline – Quick wins and long term growth” so we don’t have to dig around to see what the change we made actually was. 

You will now see your original page and the variant you just created listed on top of each other. Since we installed the Chrome extension, we can easily edit our new variant and make changes to the page without using any code.

Once you Click edit, your original page will open with an editing tool where you can drag, drop, and edit different elements on your site. You’ll make your changes and then click save in the upper right-hand corner. 

By default, your traffic will be split 50/50 between the original page and your new variant. You can shift more traffic to your new variant if you’d like quicker results, but we recommend keeping that split even. You can now select an objective which is a list of goals that gets automatically pulled in from Google Analytics. We’re going to select our form completed goal that we have already in Analytics. You’ll want to select whichever goal you’re looking for the user to complete on your site, whether that be a form fill, a purchase, or a different action. 

And that’s that! We’re ready to begin our test. The last thing left to do is click the start button in the upper right hand corner!

Analyzing results

Google Optimize makes it incredibly easy to measure the results from your test. Once it’s launched, you’ll start to see data come in on session, conversion and conversion rate for your original page and your variant. Once significant data comes in, Google Optimize will give a prediction on which variant it thinks will win this test. We recommend waiting until that number is 95% before making any changes permanent and ending the experiment. 

A/B testing is a crucial part of improving the performance of your acquisition channels. It can help make your organic traffic much more profitable and enhance the performance of your paid advertising without any additional ad spend. There are a number of different tools out there to help you get set up, but in our eyes Google Optimize is tough to beat. It lets you get tests set up quickly, integrates well with Analytics and Tag Manager and it has a very attractive price tag at $0.

Interested in learning more about how CRO can impact your bottom line? Get in touch!

Ethan Broder

Hi there! I’m Ethan, a Growth Marketer based in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I have four years of digital agency experience under my belt creating and executing acquisition strategies for a number of different verticals across multiple channels. When I’m not at my desk, you can find me skiing, mountain biking, or chasing my dog around in the mountains.

The post How to Create a Split Test (and Why) with Google Optimize appeared first on Tuff.