Established in 2002, Ark Advance is a marketing agency based in New Zealand that provides high performance digital advertising campaigns to those targeting the homeowner market. The team works to drive leads and sales for a select group of industry categories using channels like Google, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook and more.
We spoke to founder and manager, Chris Price, to find out more about how the Ark Advance team utilise Ruler Analytics for their client work.
Since the team specialise in supporting businesses targeting the homeowner market, there’s one common theme Ark Advance see. Offline conversions. With clients using sales reps to provide quotes either in a showroom, or via home visits, they previously had difficulty linking their offline sales back to their online marketing. Across paid channels, clients knew that there was scope to yield high revenue per sale. However, campaigns were expensive, competitive and difficult to measure.
While clients struggled to understand what was working, Ark Advance struggled to prove how their impact on paid campaigns was affecting a client’s bottom line.
The Ark Advance team began using Ruler Analytics on client work in order to accurately measure how their efforts were impacting sales.
Founder Chris said, “We focus on the homeowner market. These transactions tend to not complete over the website. Often it’s someone responding to a lead request and so sales happen once a sales consultant has provided a quote. As such, the purchase journey involved a lot of offline behaviour. Prior to working with Ark Advance and Ruler, clients were not accurately measuring that part of the journey.
Using Ruler allows us to track the online journey and map that along the full journey, including offline touchpoints; emails, phone calls, face to face meetings and web meetings, store/showroom visits, home visits etc.”
And for one client in particular, the results of using Ruler have been great.
“We work for a national window treatment company and support them with their paid campaigns. Our job was to help them to drive more profit from their paid spend and understand how social channels are starting or positively influencing customer journeys.
We started by integrating Ruler to their quoting software. We attribute based on that, so we can understand where accepted quotes have come from. It’s helped us rebalance ad spend, given us granular insight and helped us understand profitability by campaigns, which are split out by products.
We’ve found channel preferences for products which has helped us optimise campaigns. And beyond that, it’s helped with keyword bidding and setting maximum and minimum spends too.”
From a client perspective, it’s clear to see the impact Ark Advance has on their clients. Not only do Ark Advance support from a campaign perspective, but they also help their clients streamline their processes.
Chris explained, “Ruler has helped processes be put in place, and made decisions happen. Most clients come to use not realising they can integrate their quoting software with their advertising tools. It means we can all better understand which advertising campaigns are delivering which sales.
For us, the biggest thing is that Ruler provides us with marketing profitability and clarity around the customer journey. Prior to using Ruler, we were collecting as much data as we could but it wasn’t as accurate or as granular.”
And it goes beyond that too. “We have much more transparency between us and the client around profit. There’s no misunderstanding around what we’re delivering. Prior to using Ruler, we would go into a meeting and ask how business is going. But now, we know every day how business is going.”
From a paid perspective, the impact of Ruler, especially when tracking offline conversions, is indescribable.
Chris added, “Search advertising can be a bottomless pit. When it's working to some degree it's hard to turn off auto bidding because you’re scared to lose what profitability you have. But when you don’t know what’s working, you keep spending more and more and eventually budgets go up but the profits don’t match. Ruler comes in here to help you navigate that journey and show you how to navigate through the complexity and risk to deliver more more for less.”
