ATOM

Proving Facebook Contribution vs Attribution

Increase in Budget

ROI Improvement

Overview

Home Services client, deemed a “COVID Winner”, saw leads and revenue dip during the most recent period.
Traditional media including television and radio enjoyed advantageous CPMs.
Weather factors were favorable during the cycle.
Average ticket price and close rates remained strong and in line with expected performance.
Broader industry characteristics showed strength in demand and lead volume.
The company clearly had a lead generation issue.

The Challenge

Traditional advertising metrics appeared to be positive with low CPMs.
Paid search efforts were performing at cacceptable cost per acquisition rates through branded search had fallen in volume
Programmatic Facebook advertising had recently changed from a ‘Reach’ strategy with focus on optimization toward the lowest cost of ad impressions to a ‘Conversion’ strategy which optimized against Facebook-measured acquisition costs.
Impressively, the ‘Conversion’ campaign, now several months running, returned Facebook acquisition costs cut nearly in half.
Overall media performance looked to be strong. So what was wrong? Where were the leads?

Capabilities

Scale Marketing’s Attribution to Optimization Modeling (ATOM) was run against the most recent quarter.
ATOM provides an understanding of the contribution for each medium against a business KPI.
ATOM assessment of the contribution by Facebook had dropped dramatically by a factor of more than 45%.
As a bi-product of the Facebook campaign optimized toward Conversions, the number of impressions in the market had dropped by more than 80% against similar budgets.
Perhaps cheaper, less targeted impressions were more valuable for the client?

Outcome – ATOM Helped Improve ROAS by 12%

Scale ran a stratified Facebook A/B geo test with two disparate campaigns: Reach vs Conversion.
Hypothesis: The volume of impressions delivered in a ‘Reach’ campaign contributed more than the targeted impressions of the ‘Conversion’ campaign.
Conclusive results: The ‘Reach’ campaign show a 12% lift in the KPI vs the same expenditures on the ‘Conversion’ campaign.
From a linear perspective the cheaper lead cost of the Facebook ‘Conversion’ campaign made sense.
However, the resulting loss of upper-funnel impressions had a dramatic negative impact.
ATOM provided analytical insights as to the true contribution of impressions and prove that the less-targeted, cheaper impressions of a ‘Reach’ campaign were more beneficial than the more precisely targeted efforts.
With ATOM, Scale was able to make timely strategic adjustments to get the client back on track saving valuable time and money.

“I had a very high degree of comfort given Scale’s principals (Morrie and Jason) built their former business with their own advertising dollars. I tend to be a harsh critic, especially with marketing as it one of my core competencies. They had already put their money where their mouth is, which is highly unusual in the marketing industry”.

Matt Stock
President, U.S. Waterproofing