Digital Marketing Click-to-Close Analytics

Campaign attribution data in the digital marketing space will help you become ruthlessly efficient at investing in campaigns by linking marketing touches to revenue. That’s important, especially in uncertain times when budgets are tight.

But campaign attribution is just one piece of the puzzle. To optimize budgets and processes, you need click-to-close analytics — attribution data that measures how campaign touches influence sales from the first click as well as funnel metrics that allow you to track volume, velocity and conversion rates.

The data you receive from your martech stack tells you important things about your marketing activities, but it doesn’t relate to sales right out of the box. Using Google Ads, you can engage customers to complete a form, which creates a lead. But engagement isn’t revenue, and a lead isn’t a sale.

Full Funnel Visibility Inside the CRM

To see the big picture, you need to be able to get full funnel visibility inside the CRM, including the ability to identify digital touches and track engagement through the funnel. The digital aspect is key during a time when in-person events are rare to nonexistent. You need to know which digital programs are creating opportunities that ultimately result in revenue.

With a tool like Full Circle’s Digital Source Tracker, you can fine-tune digital marketing investments and track digital engagement to measure impact in the context of the marketing-sales funnel. This allows you to get a clearer picture of how leads progress through the funnel across stages, i.e., how many MQLs become SALs and then closed deals.

Full funnel visibility also lets you work more closely with sales to hit revenue targets because you can slice and dice funnel metrics across campaign types, by individual campaigns, etc., to see which of your efforts are generating the most leads while monitoring lead progress through the funnel.

Full funnel metrics allow you to identify issues like marketing-to-sales handoff problems to make the entire process more efficient. Funnel reports also let you identify bottlenecks in the funnel and gain insight into where to focus engagement efforts to move leads along to the next stage.

Who Is in the Room?

But process efficiency also requires working closely with your sales colleagues to ensure that the process of converting clicks into closes goes smoothly. That’s why it’s so important to operate within the context of a single source of data truth: your CRM.

It’s critical for marketing and sales leaders to meet frequently and share information to make sure they’re on the same page vis-à-vis revenue objectives. The key funnel metrics — volume, velocity and conversion rates — can help marketers figure out precisely what’s needed to achieve revenue targets, monitor progress and make adjustments as needed.

But it’s not just the leaders of each department who need to be in the room: sales operations and marketing operations people need to interact too. Demand gen professionals and lead processors need to be there, and also the CRM administrator in case the teams need to add a process.

During the meetings, teams should:

• Review metrics (compare volume, velocity and conversion rates to plan targets)
• Create an action list (e.g., investigate metrics that are rising or falling unexpectedly)
• Recommend changes if course corrections are needed (e.g., improve handoff processes)

When done systematically, this approach can double productivity in some cases, and 30% increases in efficiency are not uncommon.

So, if your goal is to optimize marketing from click to close, make sure you can generate meaningful metrics — data that speaks to revenue rather than activities — and advocate for greater alignment with your sales team. With campaign attribution to improve how you invest marketing spend and funnel metrics to improve operations, you’ll soon be operating at peak efficiency.