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How Ark Advance Added Ruler to Their Stack to Attribute Revenue
Data analytics is vital when it comes to agencies trying to prove their impact on clients. We walk you through the steps it takes to better connect your closed sales back to your marketing activity.
Agencies are under a lot of pressure to prove that they’re having a significant impact on their ROI.
But this can be hard to achieve.
When you’re driving leads, as opposed to closing direct on-site, marketers struggle to link new inbound leads to sales that are managed by a different team.
In this blog, we’ll show you how Ark Advance critically assessed how they were tracking their inbound leads and used call tracking and attribution tools to connect sales back to their marketing efforts.
Ark Advance is a New Zealand-based company that supports home renovation companies with digital advertising.
We spoke to Chris Price, founder and manager of Ark Advance to see how and why he plugged Ruler Analytics into his marketing stack.
Let’s get started.
Leads can be created on-site in a number of ways. Whether you use forms, calls, or live chat conversations to drive new leads, you need to be sure you’re tracking where they come from.
Related: How to track lead source
Different industries tend to see different levels of inbound calls compared to forms.
For example, legal company services that require bespoke information may tend to field more calls than a SaaS company that offers a demo.
Understanding how your company or client field leads is the first step.
In the home-based renovation industry, calls make a large percentage of inbound conversions.
Call tracking is a vital service for any business that generates any level of inbound conversions via phone call.
Related: How to track phone calls in Google Analytics
There’s no better way to effectively track where those phone calls are coming from, so you can definitively link them back to your marketing efforts.
For one particular client, Ark Advance found that calls made up to 75% of the total inbound conversions in comparison to 25% via form submissions.
So, for Chris, it was important to find a suitable call tracking solution.
Related: Average conversion rate by industry and marketing source
To solve this, they opted for Delacon, a US-based call tracking and analytics service.
With Delacon in place, they could now reliably track the inbound source of 100% of their call leads.
Call tracking works like this.
Two users visit your site at the same time.
With call tracking using Delacon you would be able to in place, you have dynamic numbers inserted onto your site.
So User A would see a number that ends in 5078
Meanwhile, User B lands on your site at a similar time, also via an organic search. But she sees a number that ends in 7675.
By having different numbers presented to each visitor, the call tracking solution can link users, via their IP address and the code inserted into your site, to website activity across different channels and sessions.
And that’s exactly what Ark Advance use Delacon for.
But they found more data was missing.
While Ark Advance could now effectively link their inbound conversions to lead source, that wasn’t enough.
When investing in marketing, particularly on paid channels, agencies need to be able to prove their return on ad spend.
And that’s exactly the challenge Ark Advance had.
Although they could now link marketing activity to inbound leads, they wanted to further the data integration by connecting revenue to their data.
And that’s where Ruler came in.
Ruler Analytics is a marketing attribution tool that connects marketing touchpoints to closed sales.
Chris reached out to Ruler to understand how they could get revenue and opportunity data on their efforts.
The connection between Ruler and Ark Advance’s client works like this.
A user, let’s call her Sara, visits the site for the first time.
With Ruler’s code on-site, it’s able to track Sara’s referring source, in this case PPC, and store that along with other marketing variables.
Sara returns a number of times after this session. She eventually converts into a lead.
Here, Ruler fires that data over the client’s CRM. There it shows the first-touch click source.
When Sara later converts via her demo, the revenue data inputted to the CRM by the client is scraped by Ruler.
It fires it to the chosen analytics tools where it’s automatically attributed to the influencing channels, campaigns, ads and keywords.
It’s this data that Chris uses to prove his impact.
With this data in place, Ark Advance was in a better position to make data-driven decisions on their digital ads.
For this particular client, COVID was impacting their budget.
As a result of lockdown, there was a huge demand for work but the lead time to getting the work done was taking longer and longer.
Ark Advance was tasked with reducing paid budget without affecting the return on ad spend.
With Delacon and Ruler Analytics working together, Ark Advance received a full view of their leads and the customer journeys each took.
Related: How to track full customer journeys
With Ruler specifically, they were able to achieve the following:
With Ruler in place and Delacon supporting with call tracking, Ark Advance was able to definitively prove return on investment for their marketing initiatives.
This is vital for digital agencies looking to prove the impact of their work.
These broad reports allowed Chris to take a quick look at the performance of ads and marketing to see if it’s working or not.
Alongside this broad return on investment view, Ruler also allows Chris to view the detailed impact of his marketing campaigns.
Ruler offers a number of reports that can allow you to break down your marketing performance.
They include:
Chris and his team use reports like these to make changes to improve their ad effectiveness. From turning off ads that drain budget, to turning up budget on keywords that drove more revenue, Ark Advance had what they needed to make data-driven decisions.
And there you have it.
A walkthrough of exactly how our customers use our data to better inform their marketing activity.
For any marketer, being able to prove your return on investment is essential. But it’s even more pertinent for those working in an agency setting as you need to consistently prove you’re worth the investment.
Ruler can help you achieve that. Read more about how Ark Advance uses Ruler Analytics for its clients.
Or, see the data for yourself by booking a demo. You’ll see all of the reports in action and how the data can help you elevate your marketing strategy.
