Funnel R/F

Before school, I spent some time working in the ad-tech industry at a firm called X+1. We focused on providing software that allowed companies to run their online display marketing campaigns in a sophisticated manner by being able to purchase ads and then also have sophisticated analytics about the results of those campaigns. One could then use those analytics to optimize their online marketing spend by doing more of what worked and less of what didn't. One product we offered that we were still trying to get support from the clients was called Funnel R/F.

When I ran campaigns, the name of the game as far as most clients were concerned was conversions, with post-click conversions being much more coveted than post-impression conversions (clicking on the ad and then buying the product vs just having seen the ad and then buying the product). Within our campaigns, we used to separate our campaign spend between broad reach marketing and retargeting. Broad reach campaigns were ones in which we were trying to get individuals who had never been to the client's site to come to the page and to ultimately buy whatever product it is that the client was trying to sell. Retargeting / remarketing, on the other hand, was the act of following around individuals who had been to one of the relevant pages on our site, but had not yet purchased the product. For example, I go to the easports.com FIFA 2013 website, but I do not buy the video game. This individual is clearly interested in purchasing the product, but has yet to do so, so I'm going to use display banners to keep reminding him as I'm confident he'll be more likely to buy the game than a random person I'm trying to reach on my broad reach campaign.

As a result, when you look at conversion rates, remarketing looks astronomically better than broad reach. Clients would look at these results and demand that we put more money towards remarketing. The only problem is that there are only so many people within the remarketing pool and only so many available ads that target these people and so one cannot spend a lot of money or reach a lot of people with this strategy alone. Additionally, as people buy the product, they move out of the remarketing pool and so if you do not have more people visiting your site to continue to grow the pool, you will run out of people to target.

That is where broad reach campaigns come in. While broad reach campaigns are not great at getting individuals to convert, they do a serviceable job of moving people further down the marketing funnel.

    

What we would tell our clients is that the broad reach campaign was causing people who might have been completely unaware of the brand as well as those who were aware to move from that stage to consideration, but not necessarily all the way to conversion. Once they entered consideration, by going to the FIFA page for example, they would now enter the remarketing pool and remarketing would get the credit for the conversion.

While this sounded logical to the client, they wanted a way to be able to quantify to what extent the broad reach campaign was moving individuals into remarketing vs how much of it was their own organic traffic they were generating that was bolstering the size of the remarketing pool. Funnel R/F allowed us to do that. It tracked individuals movement between whatever we deemed as different stages of the funnel and then allowed us to generate data on what rate various marketing efforts were able to successfully move individuals further along the funnel.

There are still issues with fully executing this because of the amount of data being created, but the concept stuck out to me as a powerful one. The funnel has always been a core marketing concept, but as we are able to collect more and more data online, we should be able to better quantify the success of branding and different mediums of marketing at actually moving individuals further along the purchase funnel.