How GA distracts you from truly optimizing your ROAS
Tools such as Google Analytics will show you if you’re filling the funnel with cheap conversions. That’s fine if you’re directly measuring sales, but what about if your “conversions” are actions such as leads, demos or trials?
Well, the ad platforms are leading you astray with their lack of LTV attribution…
Cheap conversions are as meaningless as cheap clicks
If you run ads, you already know that the ad getting the cheapest clicks is rarely bringing in the cheapest leads or trials.
After all, they might be the wrong type of audience for your lead magnet or trial, folk who clicked for the wrong reasons or don’t have a big enough budget.
It’s why marketers should never optimize for CPC, yet we’re encouraged to optimize for cost per conversion
Facebook and Google are only able to measure “goals” such as form submissions, so that’s what we end up using.
The ad platforms don’t really care if your ads are making revenue, they just want to give you numbers you’re happy with. So long as you keep upping your ad spend, they’re happy.
That’s smart business for THEM. But it doesn’t help YOU.
The ad platforms will tell you about javascript events on your site, but won’t tell you what happened after that. They won’t show if the demo calls turned into clients, trials became paying subscribers or if leads went through your nurture sequence.
And that is dangerous, as there’s many reasons why an ad might bring in conversions but not sales, such as:
- Ad content only appealing to freebie hunters
- Lead magnets not building towards a core offer
- Nurture sequences not resonating with the audience type
- Campaign audiences who can’t afford the product
Lead and trials from different sources won’t convert to sales at the same rate
It’s tempting to measure average conversion rates, like how many of your demo requests generally turn into customers. You might do a calculation such as:
Cost per lead ÷ avg. lead conversion rate = Cost per customer
But as Hubspot’s report shows, that’s a dangerous assumption. hey measured a 4x variation in the close rate between social media and SEO/Direct traffic.
SegMetrics users find a similar variation between ad campaigns, with lead-to-close rates typically varying by 2x to 5x.
If you’re calculating the ROI of your ad campaigns using your average close rate, then the ad platforms are probably encouraging you to waste your money.
Example: When a winning lead magnet is a secret failure
A new SegMetrics user was heavily promoting their 13 Healthy Veggie Meals lead magnet. Google Analytics showed that it was bringing in leads at under half the cost per lead of their next most successful lead magnet.
But, SegMetrics revealed that these leads rarely became customers.
The people downloading their recipes were very rarely buying their intensive fitness course. In fact, the recipe book had the worst cost per customer of any of their lead magnets.
They immediately reallocated the budget away to campaigns that had a strong ROI, not just lots of leads.
Attributing lifetime value with 3rd party tools
Of course, you can solve this the manual way. Uncovering each metric requires hours of wrestling with CSVs and pivot tables.
Or, you could use an automated tool such as SegMetrics.
It gives you the power to move away from tracking javascript events and instead to measure how visitors move through your entire customer journey.
Our 7D Tracking gives a consistent history of how each visitor moves from ad click to website conversion, through off-site activities like demo calls and trials, and finally to processed payments.
Put together, you get full lifetime value attribution across all of your platforms.
We even send this sales data back to the ad platforms using our Conversion Feeder. That gives the ad AIs the data needed to send you more of your ideal customers.
Take your optimization a step further with humanized segments
Your current tools might show you bulk average stats, like how many leads become customers. But it’s only with SegMetrics that you will be able to dive into how each group is responding.
It would show you a breakdown such as that 70% of designers become customers, but only 25% of copywriters.
With that insight you would know that a new funnel strategy is needed for those copywriters as the current approach isn’t working.
SegMetrics has helped thousands of businesses dig into their funnel. They have brought in the best possible leads and boosted LTV at each funnel step.
How to get the most from your funnel with SegMetrics
With SegMetrics you can optimize the whole funnel, not just the first step such as form submissions. Even if you take a gentle sales approach with multiple steps, SegMetrics will link it together into a single journey.
So, here’s a quick overview of leveling up your marketing with SegMetrics.
Step 1, optimize your traffic
SegMetrics records the traffic source and ad ID of your traffic, matching them up against the contact details in your CRM or email platform.
That let’s you attribute all revenue back to the traffic source that brought them in. You can finally optimize your ads or other marketing efforts for money in the bank, not just website actions
Step 2, personalize your upsells
You will be able to see exactly how each product combination works for each customer segment.
Maybe you have particular upsells that perform especially well with a certain type of prospect? SegMetrics will show you the nuisances so you can offer the most appealing combinations.
Step 3, build new nurture paths
Our humanized segmentation will show you which prospects aren’t resonating with your current sales funnel.
Use those insights to test new, targeted content. You can even split test the new sequences using contact tags, to truly optimize your funnels.
Start attributing lifetime value today
Go ahead and grab a free 14-day trial of SegMetrics to start measuring your true marketing performance.
All trials with a complimentary pair of introductory calls. The first helps you with any setup details, then the second will go through the data with you to help you get instant value.
