Digital Ads should drive Revenue

Many digital marketing teams have lost touch with how their campaigns drive revenue. Because it’s easier to look higher in the funnel to optimize for generalized metrics like cost per click and cost per conversion, marketing teams tend to shy away from determining what campaigns and ads directly contribute to revenue.

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The below story from Chris Walker at Refine Labs has a common thread with many B2B organizations. The vast majority of spend is on campaigns that don’t drive revenue, and it’s typically justified away by revenue influence or first-touch attribution.

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Across our customer base, we see about 20% of spend and 80% of directly attributable revenue driven by branded terms. We also typically see that 80% of spend and 20% of results come from non-branded, competitor, or low-intent keywords. When we go deeper to the campaign level and the ad level, an even smaller percentage drives the bulk of results. Why pay for ads that don’t drive revenue?

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A Better Way

To properly optimize campaigns to drive revenue, we suggest 3 main things:

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1. Measure results at the campaign and ad level against revenue, not just pageviews or form submissions in Google Analytics/Google Ads.
2. Every campaign and ad needs to be scrutinized, and we should regularly assess results (more on that here).
3. We need to have the discipline to turn off campaigns that do not meet ROAS targets and move marketing dollars to channels that do (or test into new ones).

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To go deeper, take a look at How to Decide Which Ads to Keep or Cut.

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