5 Advanced Ways to Maximize your RoAS

Once you have followed the generic advice around match types and automated bidding, it’s easy to feel lost about how to further improve your ad campaigns.

Well, here are five methods to kick your ads into high gear:

1) Avoid relying on vulnerable cookies

The 3rd party cookies used by Facebook and Google are increasingly unreliable, due to iOS 14 and ad blockers. You can’t trust you are really seeing the correct amount of visitors and events.

So, verify the data with reliable 1st party cookies.

Tools such as Fathom only collect a minimal amount of anonymous data. Others such as SegMetrics record each customer’s full journey by connecting the visitor cookie to their contact ID.

2) Optimize for sales using Offline Conversions

Google and Facebook both support “Offline Conversions”. It is designed for uploading conversion data about purchases made in physical stores, but it is also ideal for purchase events such as:

• When sales happen after a long email funnel
• Deals closed on a sales or demo call 
• Conversion from trial to paid subscription
• Payments that are collected on a separate website
• Sales outside of the 7-day attribution window

You can manually upload this conversion data each week using CSVs, or you can automate the process with SegMetrics’s Conversion Feeder. It feeds conversion data to the advertising AIs, without being impacted by iOS 14.

3) Separate funnels for different lead types

Let’s say you have two ads, one that will appeal to newbies and one that addresses a pain point of experienced folk. Visitors download a lead magnet and enter your email sequence.

No information can be ideal for both of these groups. Yet they are usually all poured into the same sequence. It would be better to build out different content variations instead.

Experiment with sending your leads into different funnels based on:

• Decision making stage 
• First time buyers or switching from competitors
• Pain point that attracted them
• Company size/industry
• Demographics such as age or parent status

That way you can send information specific to them, instead of trying to have mass appeal with each message.

4) Measure success using LTV, not small events

Measuring success with PDF downloads or trial signups isn’t good enough.

To make the most of your ad spend you need to see where your big spenders came from. Whether it’s leads that turned into customers, trial signups that became paying subscribers, or customers that become repeat buyers.

The attribution from ad platforms hides the fact that leads aren’t converting into customers at an equal rate. SegMetrics users find that there’s as much as a 3x variation in the LTV of leads from different campaigns, with some “successful” campaigns actually wasting their money.

There is a range of tools (such as SegMetrics) that will track customer journeys from ad click to repeat purchases, so stop measuring success through proxy metrics.

5) Test upsell combinations and strategies

Boosting the average order value (AOV) is a great way to get the most from your ad clicks.

So, go ahead and run an A/B test on your upsell (just remember to use an A/B test calculator to confirm the winner). Or if you don’t have an upsell, test a new strategy for promoting follow-up purchase. You could try:

• An upsell vs a downsell
• A delayed “next purchase” suggestion
• Other complimentary products
• Offers exclusive to existing customers

Of course, you will ideally want to see whether people from different ad campaigns work best with different upsells instead of treating them as one uniform group of people. You could do this using the tags in your email platform, or with a few clicks using SegMetrics.