Q&A with Instapage Product Manager: The New Advertising Attribution Solution with Enterprise Analytics

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
– John Wanamaker

With digital ad spend topping $83 billion in 2017 (and forecasted to continue to soar higher year over year,) having irrefutable data to back up your ad spend as a digital marketer is more important than ever.

At Instapage we believe that to maximize conversions, all digital ads should go to a dedicated post-click landing page. Marketers also need to attribute their ad spend to post-click landing pages (and any variations) to determine ROI properly.

We just announced our new Advertising Attribution Solution and sat down with Instapage Product Manager Brad Thompson, who developed this new product from start to finish to get the full scoop:

Why is ad attribution important to digital marketers?

BT: Properly attributing which ad ultimately led to an actual sale is the only way to identify whether the dollars spent on the ad were allocated efficiently or wasted. Without detailed attribution data for individual leads, digital marketers can only infer these insights at a low resolution, being left to guess which of a marketer’s many campaigns are generating leads that convert to sales. By passing attribution data from the initial ad through to the final sale, the missing information in this equation, the cost per visitor, and more crucially, the cost per lead, is made available.

Armed with attribution data, digital marketers may learn that ads previously thought to be performing well by generating high quantities of leads may be revealed in fact to be generating low-quality leads that don’t convert to sales. Conversely, ads that appeared to be poor performers by lead volume may be shown to be more efficient because their cost per lead is lower. These insights can allow digital marketers to optimize their ad spend and thus spend their advertising money more efficiently.

What makes ad attribution so difficult for digital marketers?

BT: Ad attribution is difficult today because all the various data points available aren’t being connected in a meaningful way. For instance, marketers know the CPC for a particular ad campaign in Google Ads. They know the conversion rate on a particular post-click landing page in Instapage. And downstream in the marketing funnel, in Salesforce, perhaps, they know the rate at which their sales team converts leads into sales. But there has been no cohesive way of putting those pieces of data together because they have not been passed along from the beginning to the end of the funnel. The CPC for a visitor to the initial ad campaign is completely unknown to the sales representative by the time that visitor has become a lead because the tools haven’t been talking to one another and sharing that kind of data.

What is the new Advertising Attribution Solution and how does it work?

BT: Our new product allows Enterprise customers to gather cost per visitor, cost per lead, and campaign data from their Google Ads account and display it within the Instapage analytics page in the Page Overview tab:

These cost data are also available in the Performance by Variation module, allowing users to evaluate the performance of their A/B tests and to understand not just which variations are converting well but also the cost at which those conversions are being made.

The product also allows attribution of this cost and campaign data, plus referral source and other metadata, to be passed along via webhook to the next step in the marketing funnel. This compounds the usefulness of these valuable insights by allowing them to be factored into the determination of overall cost of customer acquisition at the very end of the sales process.

Why do marketers need this data for their post-click landing pages?

BT: Because wasting money on ads that don’t ultimately produce sales can make the difference between a successful campaign and a failure. Conversion rates aren’t the end-all factor; sometimes a post-click landing page with a low conversion rate may be producing leads at a lower cost than another page with a higher conversion rate. Having access to this information can allow marketers to make better-informed decisions about where they allocate their marketing dollars.

Are there other platforms that provide the same data?

BT: No. Advertisers obviously have access to the CPC for their ad campaigns, and they know their conversion rates. But no other platform has combined these insights to calculate the initial cost of acquiring the visitor to the post-click landing page against the conversion rate on the page to determine the cost per lead.

What makes this new feature unique to Instapage?

BT: It is unique because the cost per visitor and cost per lead metrics are not available as part of the analytics products for any other post-click landing page platform.

How does passing the lead metadata make it easier for advertisers to analyze their post-click landing page variations?

BT: Having an integration with Google Ads allows advertisers to view the performance of their post-click landing page variations not just as defined by conversions on one variation versus another, but as a measure of the cost of each of the leads generated by those conversions. This is a much more powerful form of analysis because it provides the cost per lead, a metric previously unavailable.

Collect more post-click landing page data insight than ever before

By leveraging the powerful new insights from the Advertising Attribution Solution, dedicating budget to ads and post-click landing pages that aren’t converting well will be a thing of the past. Chris Briggs, Creative Director at Verizon Digital Media Services, has already seen some impressive results:

Instapage has become an important part to scaling our Google Ads campaigns. The ability to create, A/B test, optimize, and analyze the success of our post-click landing pages has made our team smarter and faster. Now our designers can create an entire campaign without developer resources. Even more, the service we receive from our dedicated Customer Success Manager has made an enormous impact on our ability to meet our ROI goals.

Get the Advertising Attribution Solution, sign up for an Instapage Enterprise demo today.