At TripleDart, we are responsible for managing a large monthly ad budget of $15M for all of our clients. This is a complex and challenging task, but we have developed effective strategies and tools to help us succeed and drive pipeline
Some of the tools we use include Growth Nirvana, Factors, Looker Studio, and Hubspot. In order to ensure that our ad campaigns are successful and drive revenue, it is important for us to track and analyze various performance metrics, understand what is working, and make adjustments to improve results.
To ensure that ads drive revenue, performance data is critical. Not only do we have to know what to measure, we have to make sense of all of the metrics we’re capturing on a regular basis, figure out what approaches are working and ultimately, decide what changes to prioritise so we can improve results over time.
Growthnirvana + Datastudio helps us do all of this efficiently with real-time dashboards, goal-tracking, alerts and more.
With with product, we essentially consolidate all of our data from separate tools into a single platform in order
to:
- Monitor performance metrics
- Track pipeline performance across channels
- Set goal projections to automatically monitor progress
- Create alerts on the various goals that we set
In other words, it is a tool that allows us to do proactive monitoring across accounts to understand what we are doing right, what we need to improve, and, more importantly, what isn't working.
Here is how our PPC team these tools to monitor performance and keep the engines running on our paid ad campaigns…
Dashboards for Monitoring, Analyzing and Reporting
Dashboards allow us to pull data from multiple tools into a single view. This makes it easier for us to draw correlations between our metrics, helping us understand the ways we can improve performance across the different channels. To effectively do this, we focus on creating two different types of dashboards - Overview and Drill down dashboards.
We combine data from Google Ads, Google Analytics, LinkedIn Ads, Meta Ads, Twitter Ads, Hubspot, and Salesforce to provide a complete view of the funnel from impressions to revenue level.
While the Drill down Dashboards help us dig deeper into our data in order to understand the factors that contributed to our performance. This could be at a campaign level or even just honing into the performance of one specific metric.
Overall Account Performance (Overview Dashboard)
At an account level, we track spends, impressions, clicks, click-through rate (CTR), cost-per-click (CPC), primary conversions,secondary and your cost per lead (CPL), Cost per MQL. Doing so will help us understand the channels we should minimize or maximize spending in order to help us focus our efforts on the ones that yield the best results.
To provide an example, check out this dashboard we used for one of our clients:
We use high-level metrics to get a clear understanding of the performance of our clients multi channel ads accounts. You can also do multiple filters and see high level individual performances.
The comparison period in the Performance Overview table allows us to track the performance of key metrics month over month. If we see a red comparison period, it indicates that we need to investigate further at the campaign level to understand the cause of lower performance.
With this dashboard, we can improve paid performance by monitoring three key areas: impressions, clicks, and cost per click (CPC), impression share etc
- If we see a drop in impressions, we may consider adjusting our bid type, adding ad variants, or refreshing our audiences.
- If clicks have declined, we may review our creatives and ad copy to ensure they are resonating with our audience.
- If CPC is increasing, we may check auction insights to identify the keywords contributing to the spike.
- Also it will be easy for us to keep a tab on down the full metrics like leads, opportunities etc
Why is this important?
It is important to understand these metrics at the account level because they can help us identify specific areas of concern and also serve as leading indicators of revenue, pipeline, and efficiency for our paid media campaigns.
Channel & Campaign Performance (Drill-down Dashboard)
When it comes to channel & campaign-level metrics, having access to this dashboard allows us to track which channel/campaigns may be contributing to lower performance.
Check out the example below:
Channel level Performance
- With channel level breakdown we can measure & compare performance of CPL, cost, conversions and opportunities with with different channel
- We can also drill down and see region level performance and conversion contribution for each country. Based on this we can easily re allocate budgets
- We can also set different attribution at channel level. For ex - Linkedin first touch works the best because this channel always plays a better role in assisting the conversions
Campaign Level Performance
Leading indicators:
By having access to this data every month, we can prioritize a couple of aspects to improve paid performance:
- Top Performing Campaigns: Reviewing conversions by campaign allows us to identify the top performing and the worst performing campaigns. We can then reallocate budgets between campaigns to invest more in the campaigns that are performing better.
- We can also use this dashboard to monitor the conversions of our priority campaigns. A drop in conversions will indicate that we should review our metrics to identify the causes of the significant drop (impressions/clicks/CTR/CPC) to optimize them accordingly.
Performance indicators:
- CPC needs to be monitored on a daily basis for all the campaigns so it’s good to create a table view and see comparison of the previous period
- CPL and CAC are other two metrics we need to keep in mind while we optimise the campaigns.
Why is this important
Without a clear understanding of these metrics at a campaign level, it would be challenging to maximize performance and accomplish our client's objectives. It helps our revenue strategist reallocate resources across channels, minimize spending, and maximize results. It is also an excellent way to help us make better data-driven decisions and build trust with our clients.
Overall CPA Trends and Channel trends
To better understand our CPL trends for BOFU/demo, we use Data Calculations to create the simple equation: (spend from all channels) / (the sum of all demo conversions across channels).
This new calculated metric will allow us to make more strategic decisions.
In the following example, we are calculating the overall CPL metric across Google ads, LinkedIn ads, and Facebook ads.
We then use these metrics to create monthly and weekly charts to monitor CPL ranges using trend lines. Here is an example below:
How do we use this monthly CPL trend dashboard for optimization?
- Is the weekly CPL trend high? In this case, we would then review our campaign level or channel level dashboards to understand what is contributing to that spike. Tip: build CPL trend reports channel-wise.
- Is the monthly CPL trending lower? If so, we would check the channels that show the best conversion rates and increase spending (after cross-checking opportunities/deals created by channels).
- Is the lead to Opportunity ratio declining? If so, we would pull hubspot and see if we there is any campaigns bringing irrelevant and junk leads and optimise for keywords, copies and forms.
Why is this important?
Using a CPL trend dashboard allows us to gain perspective of how much we are paying per qualified lead on a monthly basis. This information will enable us to make strategic decisions and prioritize spending across channels.
Pipeline Performance: Opportunities, Deals, Closed Won (Overview Dashboard)
To create this dashboard, we carefully selected a mix of metrics, such as deals by channel, deal amount by channel, closed-won by channel, and opportunities by channel, that would help us understand the pipeline and make informed decisions.
We recognize that it is important to track the connection between paid media and the pipeline, as a successful ad campaign does not necessarily translate into increased pipeline.
Growthnirvana enables us to create a dashboard that directly links our paid media efforts to pipeline data from a CRM like Hubspot, Saleforce. This allows us to see the relationship between paid media metrics and pipeline metrics, such as deal amount, deal count by source type, closed-won amount by source type, and more. By using this dashboard, we can effectively leverage our paid media budgets and optimize their impact on business growth.
Paid Ads to Closed Won ( Overview Dashboard)
Once we are able attribute paid ads to closing customers it’s time to backtrack to campaign and ad level. Amplifying the campaigns and the messaging is the best way to accomplish the best possible results.
Win Rates and Pipeline created at channel/geo:
Pipeline and win rate dashboards at the channel and geography level can be particularly important for SaaS businesses because they allow us to understand and optimize the effectiveness of sales efforts in different regions and through different channels.
By tracking pipeline and win rates at these levels, the company can identify which channels and regions are most successful in generating leads and closing deals, and allocate spends accordingly.
Lead Quality Dashboard
- Helps identify which channel efforts are most effective at generating high-quality leads
- Enables us to optimize lead-nurturing efforts and improve the efficiency of the sales process
- Helps us understand the characteristics and behaviors of high-quality leads, allowing for targeted marketing and sales efforts
- Allows the client to track and measure the impact of lead-quality improvements on overall sales and revenue
- Can help the company make data-driven decisions about how to allocate resources and optimize lead generation and nurturing efforts.
- Work on gaps on the product, pricing based on the leads feedback
The Time Saver Dashboard (Overview Dashboard)
It can be difficult and confusing to manage multiple ad systems and view data in isolation, which can complicate strategic decision-making.
To address this challenge, we created a single dashboard that brings together core metrics from all of our channels in one view. This "Time Saver Dashboard" allows us to easily see the big picture, make informed decisions, and save time.
The specific metrics included on the dashboard may vary based on the client and their goals, but we typically include metrics that we use frequently. By using this dashboard, we can more effectively manage our ad campaigns and make data-driven decisions.
Closing Thoughts
Our Data analytics systems change the way we speak about your performance by quickly helping us determine what can be improved.
Here are some scenarios we have stumbled across with specific clients:
CEO of a client account - I don't think paid ads are yielding the results they ideally should
Before looking at our dashboards: The sales team is not converting the leads we’re generating.
After: If you look at the dashboard here, we are generating high quality leads at a good cost per lead (CPL). They are even moving to opportunities but are getting closed lost. We need to evaluate closed-lost reasons to see why this is happening..
CMO - Why is our cost per lead spiking this month?
Before: I want to turn off the video campaigns that are not performing well.
After: If you look at the CPL trend report, The CPL spike is coming from a particular channel - paid social in particular. And if you look at the paid social dashboard, the video ad campaign is the one contributing to this spike. So we should just turn that video campaign off..
Regardless of the tool you use to measure how effective your paid media programs are, it is essential to clarify what is working and what needs to be updated.
We hope that the information we shared above about how we use growthnirvana was helpful and gave you more context on what needs to be measured and ways to do so.
What matters, in the end, is to understand the objective you are trying to accomplish and how everything is orchestrated to reach that goal. Falling into the trap of creating a predictable pipeline that does not convert is much more common than you would think. Ultimately, your goal as a marketer is not to show dashboards with positive data but to move the needle in terms of revenue.
