Author: Zach Goldie

Increasing traffic is no longer enough

It’s the core challenge of every digital marketer; more sales for less money.

There are now armies of AIs dedicated to this goal. Their sole mission is to bring in ideal traffic for ad buyers, the people who best match an advertiser’s specifications.

But, more isn’t always better.

According to eMarketer, improving the quality of leads is a priority for 58% of businesses. It is no longer enough to bring in leads that seem interested in your product or service. What’s needed is traffic that will go beyond downloading a PDF and actually make a purchase.

Do you ever envy ecommerce marketers?

In theory, ecommerce folk have it nice and simple. They show someone some ads, they visit the website and maybe make a purchase.

It is a nice simple journey to track, where the Facebook and Google bots get a clear view of the sales steps. That means the ad traffic can be automatically optimized to bring in more people like those buyers.

But, what about when your sales flow isn’t that simple?

If your sales flow is even slightly complex or the sale doesn’t happen immediately, then you end up having to make compromises. Instead you will optimize for rough indicators of success, such as:

• Lead magnet downloads
• Enquiry submissions
• Demos booked
• Trial signups
• Webinar registrations

Optimizing for these funnel steps is straightforward and easy…but is still a big step off from actually optimizing for sales. There’s nothing to say that leads from a campaign are turning into sales.

It is a shame, as sending higher quality data back to the ad AIs can help drop the CPA by around 24% on average. Want to hear how? Well keep on reading.

Stop blowing budget on attracting time wasters

By using the Ad Conversion events, you tell the bots “I want more traffic like these folk”, and that’s what they send you. That’s great so long as you’re training them with good data.

But sometimes what we think is good data isn’t so good after all.

In the world of AI, there’s a concept of “garbage in, garbage out”. It means if you feed bad data into an AI then you’re going to get bad results on the other end.

(For a mad example, check out when Microsoft’s AI accidentally became racist.)

You might tell the bots to send you more traffic like the people who are downloading your lead magnet. But, the bots can’t tell if those leads are good or not. It might be that they start optimizing for freebie hunters who don’t have the budget for your product. Or worse, they might optimize for fraudulent traffic and card scammers (scroll down to read about this happening to us).

You’re then left hoping the leads you’ve paid for are turning into sales without any way to check.

It can be easy to assume that leads all close at the same rate, but as this Hubspot report showed, that’s not the case. Paid Search channels close at about half the rate of organic traffic on average and that’s ignoring the variation between campaigns.

Tracking these longer sales cycles is impossible with the normal pixel and snippets, but thankfully Facebook and Google both offer an underappreciated feature.

Adapting the Offline Conversion tool

You might have heard of offline conversions. Facebook and Google both created versions so that big brick and mortar stores could link online ads to in-store purchases.

The feature is designed to use data from a store’s PoS or CRM database. Once manually edited and uploaded, the bots would try their best to match purchases to ad clicks using identifiers such as the name and email address.

Even though it’s called offline conversions, it can still be used to track online transactions — especially those after the (incredibly short) click attribution window.

Savvy marketers have started using it to improve attribution and train the bots in a range of scenarios, such as:

• When sales happen after a long email funnel
• Deals closed on a sales or demo call 
• Measuring subscription payments, not trials
• Payments that are collected on a separate website
• Sales outside of the 7-day attribution window

Here’s our own nightmare use case to give you an example…

Case Study: Spam trial signups

25% is considered a good conversion rate from trial to paying user. That means if you’re teaching the bots to get more trial signups you’re teaching them to find the 75% who never spend a dollar.

Tracking scenario

• Old optimization goal: Trial signup
• New optimization goal: Complete account setup
• Tracking challenges: 
  1. setup doesn’t always happen same day, 
  2. setup can’t be seen by the FB pixel

It also means that ad AIs can start optimizing for folk who are intentionally wasting your time.

In early 2021, we had a rollercoaster ride with our own ads. We had trial signups as our goal, running ads on both Google and Facebook.

After steadily ticking along for months, the CPA suddenly dropped by around 30%. We were pleased with ourselves, congratulating our PPC manager for doing a great job.

But… our paid signup rate then tanked. 

We looked at the new signups and realized they all had ridiculous gmail accounts with lots of numbers such as [email protected]. The “signups” was a wave of card scammers, spam bots using SegMetrics’ free trial to test whether stolen credit cards were still working.

Thankfully, we were already developing our new Conversion Feeder to automate offline conversion tracking.

The spam traffic all made an account then left, instead of proceeding to set up SegMetrics. So, we made an offline conversion event for people who completed their set up within SegMetrics, proving they were a real person, and a valuable trial.

It took a few weeks to retrain the ad platforms, but they learned to send us visitors who were likely to go through and set up. Our trial-to-paid conversion rate shot up, while the CPA was still lower than it had become before the whole nightmare.

Reducing cost per lead by an average of 24%

In our initial tests, a small selection of users were invited to implement offline conversions to optimize their ad campaigns.

They were a mixture of infoproduct and ecommerce businesses, all spending between $2,000 to $60,000 per month on ads.

We then compared their CPA for the two weeks before and after they turned on conversion tracking. The cost per lead was reduced by an average of 24% and median of 31% across all of the accounts.

3 options you can use to optimize with Offline Conversions

Hopefully you now understand the power of using offline conversion data. So, let’s look at three ways you can use it for your own advertising.

#1: Manual sorting and upload

The ad platforms expect most folk to manually manipulate and upload their sales data. You can read the full guides from Facebook and Google on how to upload your data to their platforms.

We won’t duplicate the full instructions here, but the general process for both is:

1. Create an offline event set
2. Export the conversion data
3. Remove excess columns and entries
4. Map your data to the platform’s format
5. Upload your CSV to the platform
6. Resolve any errors or warnings

For Google, you will need to add code onto your website to capture the GCLID and then set up your CRM to store this ID when creating a new contact.

Manually processing offline conversions will work, but becomes time consuming to do each day or week, especially since you have to capture the click ids yourself.

#2: Zapier connection

If you use Zapier then you can set up a connection between your CRM and Facebook, such as this Offline Conversions for ActiveCampaign.

It will automatically send through conversion data to Facebook based on the chosen action.

Be warned that you might only get a 2% match rate, the typical rate for matching without a click-ID. CRMs don’t normally track the click ids from your users and are limited in what data they collect about each contact. So, it will still be a hefty loss of attribution.

#3: Use SegMetrics’ Conversion Feeder

You can set up offline conversions with two clicks in SegMetrics.
1. From your Integrations Page, click the Settings button, and choose Setup Ad Tracking

2. Follow the instructions above, choose your conversion pixel, and then click Save

That’s it! Your conversion data will be synced daily to Google and Facebook, improving your ad attribution and targeting automatically, even days, weeks or months after the initial click event!

Unlike importing data through manual uploads or Zapier, the enriched contact info from our Conversion Feeder gives Facebook and Google the best chance of matching a sale to an ad click, as we’re able to track the exact click id that brought the users in.

TL;DR Use SegMetric’s Conversion Feeder to better train your ad AIs

Look, we get it. You have enough on your plate already, like wondering how the iOS changes will affect ads on Google and Facebook.

But, that’s even more reason to stop relying on the inbuilt conversion tracking. 

Using the Conversion Feeder, whether manually or via SegMetrics, can drop the CPA and improve your attribution.

So stop measuring ad success in terms of PDF downloads or form submissions, and get the data you need to focus on boosting your revenue.

If you want to try out the Conversion Feeder then grab a free 14-day trial of SegMetrics. 

Ad platform automations are great…so long as they’re receiving good data.

Facebook and Google can currently measure basic goals in a short time frame. But with privacy protection measures like GDPR and Apple’s iOS changes, even that is getting harder.

So without event-based conversion tracking, how are you meant to optimize your campaigns?

Well, SegMetric’s conversion tracking gives you a robust way to report sales back to the ad platforms, while respecting the privacy of your visitors. Even better, you can attribute purchases that happen day, weeks or months later.

This means that with a few clicks you can give the AIs the information they need to keep your ads profitable.

Introducing Conversion Feeder

The Conversion Feeder reports back on conversions that the Facebook & Google pixels aren’t able to detect. It can attribute immediate sales as well as more complex situations such as:

• Payment transactions that happen on a separate site
• Deals that are closed via sales calls and paid directly
• Trial completion payments that are taken automatically
• Purchases made beyond Facebook’s 7-day attribution window

With changes such as iOS 14, it is now also ideal for feeding the AIs with conversion data they would otherwise be blocked from seeing.

How does Conversion Feeder work?

Conversion Feeder builds on a feature built into both ad platforms called the Offline Conversions. You can manually upload offline conversion data using CSVs, or you can let SegMetrics process it automatically and improve the results.

SegMetrics integrates with your ad platforms, email system and payment process, then joins up the data for each customer. It doesn’t matter if there was an email funnel or demo call between the ad click and the sale, SegMetrics will connect the two together. It is this sales data that SegMetrics feeds back to the ad platform.

That way your attributions don’t rely on fragile cookies or website events, while Facebook doesn’t get to spy on every visitor.

For more information on how it works check out our documentation:
Facebook Conversion Feeder
Google Conversion Feeder

What about iOS 14 and Apple’s ATT?

Conversion Feeder is fully compliant with the various privacy protection measures introduced in iOS 14 and iOS 14.5.

SegMetrics save the ad ID for each contact entry, such as when someone makes a purchase or downloads a lead magnet. We then use this ad ID to feed attribution data to the ad platforms.

There is no cross-app tracking or reporting on bounced visitors. Add to that the 1st class cookies and server-side tracking and you’ve got a completely Apple-proof attribution system.

Even better, Conversion Feeder will send back attribution data on actual sales, even if there was a long funnel before they converted. Optimizing for actual sales means that advertisers decrease their CPA by an average of 24%.

Start Optimizing Your Ads Today!

Get started with two easy steps:

1. From your Integrations Page, click the Settings button, and choose Setup Ad Tracking

1. Follow the instructions above, choose your conversion pixel, and then click Save

That’s it! Your conversion data will be fed daily to Google and Facebook, improving your ad attribution and targeting automatically!

Weak marketing funnels can drag down a business. 

So of course, there are countless articles about elements such as improving open rates.

But we have found very few reliable guides that give a complete overview, that go from considering the reader’s stage of mind to putting the pieces together in the best possible way.

That’s why we wrote one ourselves.

It is a 110 page guide on building automated funnels, based on our experience working on hundreds of campaigns with everyone from Fortune 500s to SMEs to famous entrepreneurs. These are evergreen funnels designed to run continuously, without the need for slogging through one-off product launches.

In it you will learn:

• Why automated funnels can be the cornerstone of your business (can you say “goodbye, launch model”?!)
• How small improvements to your funnel can lead to a huge boost in earnings
• Moving from vanity metrics to actionable data, numbers that enable great decisions
• The “classic” 6-step marketing funnel and how to apply it to your business
• How the “Hero’s Journey” is used as an essential format for email sequences

This isn’t some “lite” or watered down guide. It is the distillation of a decade’s knowledge from working in the trenches.

Even better, it’s under $10.

We want this knowledge to be easily affordable, not as a three-figure video course. That’s why it’s available as either a paperback or kindle book on Amazon.

The 90-Minute Guide to Building Marketing Funnels That Convert – Paperback edition

The 90-Minute Guide to Building Marketing Funnels That Convert – Kindle edition

If you’ve ever hit a hurdle with your funnel then go give it a read.

Marketers have become rather obsessed with goals and conversions. (And with good reason!) We take them as the benchmark of success, building whole strategies about those precious metrics.

But, they usually show a limited view into what is actually bringing in the big bucks.

We often measure trial signups or a one-off purchase. It’s a great start but leaves the vast majority of revenue as simply appearing out of nowhere. 

Data-focused marketing has one huge blindspot

A big issue that marketers face is the disconnect between measuring attraction and retention.

Reporting from ad platforms or google analytics can show you whether a visitor achieved the goals you’ve set up, but these must be kept limited. Goals typically have to:

1. Happen online, such as detect if an enquiry happened, not whether the call lead to a sale
2. Occur within a couple of visits, ideally happening on the same device within a few weeks
3. Be a one-off action, such as looking at if they signed up but not how long they kept the subscription

We have become used to these short term indicators that our traffic is probably correct.

Which is fine if a company is aiming for a single interaction such as a one-off purchase. But if you’re aiming to attract repeat buyers or longterm subscribers then it’s just not up to task. It can tell you how many trial signups each campaign attracted, but after that all the sources get mixed into a single clump.

Most SMEs report that over half of their annual revenue comes from repeat customers

BIAKelsey

It becomes difficult to see where your biggest spenders came from, which means we can’t see where most of our revenue is coming from

Session based analytics can’t handle multi-purchase attribution

Marketing analytics is typically focused on what happens while someone is visiting a website.

This is fine until the cookie expires, the buyer switches devices or a transaction happens off the website. For example, website analytics won’t attribute later purchases to the original  source and won’t receive information from the payment process about subscription payments. So, only first-purchase attribution is possible.

Which is frustrating, because LTV is the best indicator of value in your business.

It’s like counting how many people come into a restaurant and ask for a table, but ignoring how much they actually spent, let alone whether they ever came back again.

A 5% Increase in Customer Retention can mean a 30% increase in company profitability

Bain & Company

So website analytics is good for examining your top of funnel to get that first goal or purchase. But it fails with long funnels or long retention periods, where a customer needs tracking over months or years to attribute multiple purchases back to a single source.

It’s a shame since attracting visitors who are even slightly more likely to become repeat buyers can have a big impact on profitability.

Valuable answers are hiding in your subscriber database

Marketing automation platforms are typically designed around email addresses. 

These are robust for longterm tracking (unlike browser cookies). You can identify purchases as coming from the same individual even if they were years apart, so long as they use the same email address.

Many email platforms such as Mailchimp Drip and Klaviyo will connect directly to your payment processor. That means the revenue can still be associated with the subscriber data, even if it was automated or within an app.

The real magic happens when you enrich that customer data.

You can probably store more data in your email platform than you are currently doing. The UTM of each subscriber’s initial source can usually be recorded, along with tagging them about how they have interacted with different touchpoints and the items they’ve purchased.

It takes a bit of doing, but can build a powerful customer database for your business.

Note: download our Ultimate Tagging Guide if you’re unsure how to tidy yours

6 ways you could use this 80/20 data

Having a database of your top spenders is useful just by itself. You can use it for lookalike campaigns or targeted remarketing. But, there’s a whole bunch of opportunities for using it to boost your revenue:

1) Compare the LTV of customers from each source

With enriched subscriber data you can finally see where your big spenders came from. You can break it down as far as you’d like, comparing general online vs offline or looking at individual ad campaigns.

2) Which emails are being read by the big spenders?

Open and click rates are useful, but it’s hard to measure the impact on revenue unless it’s aiming at a sale. Your database can tell you whether your most important customers are reading your emails or if it’s they only interest the freebie hunters.

3) Do certain products attract repeat buyers?

Just because a product gets the best immediate ROAS, doesn’t make it the most long term profitable. If you record each customer’s first purchase then you can see how the lifetime spend differs depending on what they bought first.

4) What is the most popular second purchase?

So you got a first purchase, great. Now what? Build up your tags to find out what are the most popular second buys and whether there’s a particular effective 1-2 punch to use in your remarketing or post-purchase emails

5) Did that popular blog post attract eventual buyers?

Content marketers rarely get the credit they deserve. Unless visitors make an immediate purchase, the revenue generated will often be attributed to other sources. This adds an extra reason to collect their email, as that way you can attribute the revenue correctly even if the transaction happens months after.

6) Which onboarding method is best at reducing your churn?

You can easily see which email sequence has the most interactions, but it’s hard to tell which one got folk to stick around. It gets even harder if you want to compare touchpoints like emails vs an onboarding video call, but with the right tags you can easily see how the LTV differs between tactics.

The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is just 5-20% – Market Metrics

Two methods to crunch the LTV data

Building up this information around your subscribers is great, but only if you can analyze it the way you want. So, you have two options:

Option 1: Pivot tables

You can assess the data in excel, although it takes some familiarity with pivot tables. Expect it to take an hour or two per metric, often involving some data exporting and combining.

As an example, let’s say you wanted to find an average time to first purchase, the workflow would be:

1. Export your Leads & their creation dates (Or their tags and the tag application dates)
2. Export your Purchases, along with the contact Id and the date the purchase was made
3. Use a filter (or pivot table) to make sure that you’re looking at the first purchase that each contact made
4. Then, use a VLookup to attach the Lead to their purchase, and compare the date the Lead was created to their first purchase date
5. Finally, create a second pivot table that groups leads by the number or days it took them to purchase, and then count each of them

For more details, download our guide to calculating real lead value.

Option 2: SegMetrics

To manipulate the data in a few clicks, try out SegMetrics.

It connects to your email marketing platform, advertising tools and payment providers. That way it can automatically gather the data for each person going through your funnel.

You can then slice and dice the data any way you wish.

You’ll be able to look at the behavior of webinar attendees, the revenue associated with each upsell or the LTV of each source. These can then be saved to revisit as often as you’d like, without any need to redo your work.

“The majority of a band’s revenue comes from 10-20% of their fanbase” – Lucchese, Echo Nest CEO

TL;DR, SegMetrics lets you see how you attracted and retained your best customers

Stop relying on your website analytics to guide your funnel decisions. It is great for optimising your top of funnel, but it won’t help you improve the LTV.

Instead, enrich the data in your email platform. Record the UTM data and tidy up your tags.

You can then use SegMetric’s multi-purchase attribution to reveal the answers. You can see where your best customers came from to allocate budget accordingly, or see which mid-funnel activities actually improved retention.

Grab a 14-day trial to see for yourself.

We know every business owner wants to know the secret to getting conversions out of your marketing funnels. But not everyone has the time to learn all the intricacies of marketing analytics. That’s why Keith has created a fool-proof, 90-minute guide aimed at helping you and your business build a marketing funnel that achieves real results.

In this book, you’ll learn:

• Why automated marketing funnels are the bread-and-butter of your business
• How optimizing your funnels can lead to a massive boost in sales
• The 6-step “classic” marketing funnel and how you can implement it in your business
• The three critical things you must measure to quickly optimize your funnels and get them to convert better
• Why understanding the “Hero’s Journey” can be one of the most profitable things you’ll ever learn when it comes to email marketing

And much more.

Keith has taken over a decade of learned strategies for optimization and condensed it into one easy-to-read guide for his fellow entrepreneurs. You’ll be getting more conversions and in turn making higher profits in no time! He goes deeper into conversions than just email click rates (although still important!) and really helps you define your customer and each of their individual needs, resulting in higher satisfaction from your audience.

“And while feedback from your customers and audience is always valuable, it’s important to understand that people’s actions always speak louder than their words. This is why it’s so important to define and measure every step of your funnel!”

Get your copy and start turning a higher profit today: https://amzn.to/3jQPvgN