The modern buyers’ journey is nothing if not nebulous. Consumers bounce between on- and offline touchpoints, move back and forth through the “funnel,” and ultimately carve unique paths to purchase over and over again.
Changing buying behaviors have made it increasingly challenging to track shoppers through the classic, once-straightforward sales funnel. Similarly, even the most sophisticated marketing teams often struggle to accurately measure and assess the long-term impact of marketing activities aligned with each stage—especially top-of-funnel (TOFU) brand awareness, brand lift, and programmatic advertising.
Unlike the value of lower-funnel marketing activities, which can be more clearly demonstrated through KPIs such as conversions and sales, TOFU marketing focuses on broadening awareness and educating consumers about your brand, its services, and its products. The intangible nature of awareness makes it difficult to quantify and attribute direct results to specific media efforts.
Many brands fall into the trap of relying solely on vanity metrics, such as impressions or click-through rates, to gauge TOFU media performance. While these metrics provide a glimpse into the reach of campaigns, they fail to capture the true impact on brand perception and long-term success. Relying on such shallow metrics can lead to misguided decision-making and ineffective resource allocation.
To more accurately measure the success of these top-of-funnel actions, you must establish metrics such as aided and unaided brand awareness, ad recall, and unique reach. You can track these via brand lift studies and other data sources.
Lead generation also goes beyond awareness building to qualify potential customers and nurture them along the journey, with the ultimate goal of converting them to customers. You want high-quality leads, which you can measure using lead scoring algorithms, monitoring visitor-to-lead ratio, and lead-to-opportunity rate.
Consider a campaign that solely focuses on increasing impressions without considering the quality of those impressions. It may achieve high reach but fail to engage its target audience effectively. This approach not only wastes valuable resources, but doesn’t generate meaningful brand awareness, move the right consumers through a path to purchase, or lead to eventual conversions.
Accurate top of funnel measurement helps you and your team find valuable insights that shape your marketing strategies. But you need to understand which metrics and KPIs are most impactful to your brand. To do so, start by ensuring that your execution strategy, data collection strategy, and measurement strategy are in alignment with each other.
If you’re running an upper-funnel campaign on a specific platform, it’s a good idea to begin by tracking the metrics you can measure on the platform itself. Next, identify and integrate sources outside the platform that help track data which measures growth and performance. For example, this could include implementing brand lift studies, leveraging sentiment analysis tools, surveying your audience, and tracking website visitors and sources driving that traffic.
Aggregating all your data from various sources into a single dashboard provides you with a holistic view of your TOFU marketing efforts, with real-time insights into the performance of your campaigns. You’ll be able to track and maintain data relevance by regularly identifying the KPIs that inform your decisions and eliminating the metrics that aren’t adding value to your overall campaign goals.
By democratizing your data into one source of truth with generative AI capabilities, you’ll also have the ability to create custom reports tailored to your specific campaigns and goals—allowing for detailed and actionable AI-generated insights down to the campaign level.
Tracking individual KPIs aligned with your TOFU marketing efforts makes it possible to strategically optimize that media to drive even stronger performance. And by measuring the incremental impact (the additional lift on your KPIs caused by a particular marketing event or campaign) of your media efforts on your overall business goals, you’ll gain further insights to help shape future campaigns.
Ideally, a brand awareness campaign will increase the volume and likelihood of visitors converting long-term. So, end-of-funnel conversions, which are measured by your brand’s source of truth, should be impacted by additional awareness. To determine whether this is actually the case and gather an agnostic view of the contributions from TOFU media, you can design tests that measure the overall impact a specific media channel or tactic has on a business goal.
These comprehensive incrementality factors can be measured at multiple levels and applied to reporting, budgeting, and forecasting.
Mastering top-of-funnel measurement is a crucial step to build meaningful brand awareness and generate a pipeline that can fuel long-term success. By setting up a solid data collection and analytics foundation, you can begin to track and attribute the activities that drive incremental impacts down the line. Similarly, you’ll be able to test and optimize your campaigns to better resonate with your audience, identify specific audience segments that respond positively to your messaging, and more effectively manage your media spend and resource allowance to yield higher brand awareness and engagement.
What was once a linear path from awareness to consideration to action is now a nebulous landscape in which each touchpoint plays a variety of roles in a customer’s journey to purchase. Get insights into the ever-changing retail landscape.
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