91% of offline leads attributed to paid media activity through Ruler

About Hitsearch

Founded in 2007, Hitsearch provides tailored digital solutions for their clients focused on driving results, meaning and connection. Serving multiple customers over a wide range of industries, Hitsearch creates digital marketing campaigns that connects brands with their audiences and forge tangible results.

As a partner, Hitsearch utilises Ruler Analytics across a number of their customers, to help evidence the effectiveness of their digital campaigns and optimise for the future. We spoke to Victoria Foster, Senior Account Manager, about overcoming the challenges of attributing offline conversions to online activity.

The Challenge

Having access to the full picture is so important for a digital marketing agency, especially when serving B2B clients. For products with a more complicated sales cycle, leads will often call to discuss their requirements, build a relationship with the sales person and make the purchase offline.

While reporting tools such as Google Analytics can provide a wealth of insight into the traffic being driven to a website, agencies can often lose visibility over the impact their campaigns are having as leads engage with a business in different ways. For Hitsearch, this was proving an administrative headache when trying to manually match lead generation activity to sales for a particular client.

Victoria explained, “We knew that around 70% of conversions occurred over the telephone for our customer. We had no ability to join up offline conversions with online activity beyond very basic source/medium and even then it was imperfect.

This left a lot of opaque elements to our data and decisions were made based on assumptions and general trends as opposed to more data-driven conclusions.”

Digging into the available data further only uncovered more gaps, making it difficult for the team to make validated recommendations for campaign management and optimisation.

“We found that around 50-90% of revenue each month was not being attributed to a channel, as the majority of sales were being made offline on the phones with no tracking in place.“

To help demonstrate their value to the client, and inform their strategies, Hitsearch needed a way to definitively prove their impact on offline conversions. Fortunately, Victoria and the team knew where to turn.

“We had been aware of Ruler Analytics’ Marketing Attribution solution for a while, and some of the team had worked on similar campaigns previously where the platform was in use.”

“Having Ruler in place means we know exactly where calls are coming from and specifically what drives the valuable conversions, so we can better manage time and budget to scale in this area.”

The Solution

Hitsearch implemented Ruler’s tracking code onto the client’s website, alongside dynamic phone numbers to allow for tracking the lead source. From Ruler’s dashboard, Hitsearch is now able to report on the impact their campaigns have on driving both online and offline sales by keyword, campaign or UTM basis.

The enriched conversion data is also fed into Google Analytics and Google Ads for further analysis of campaign performance.

Victoria added, “Ruler is a great tool for understanding the value each marketing activity we conduct has, particularly when we’re utilising many different channels. For this client, the majority of sales happen over the phone, and getting visibility on this journey is critical.”

“A cost per call is useful as a metric, but being able to dig into the true value of calls is where we started to glean real insight on the value of our activity and customer personas, which helped to further refine our strategy.”

Armed with a new stream of accurate and reliable data, Victoria is now able to uncover valuable insights through marketing attribution and definitively report on Return on Ad Spend.

“Layering on Ruler Analytics with attribution data allowed us to build a complete picture of our performance across channels including considering models beyond last click. Assigning a value to the calls meant we could use a ROAS-based model to help drive more real-time decisions with regards to our investment strategy.”

Hitsearch was also able to streamline their own processes utilising Ruler, as the administrative task of mapping calls against campaign data could be automated, ready for reporting.

In order to ensure a smooth implementation process, Ruler’s team were on hand every step of the way, taking a consultative approach to ensure Hitsearch and their client can reap the rewards as quickly as possible.

Victoria said, “The team at Ruler have always been incredibly helpful to us both in terms of platform roll-out and then in getting the most out of the technology. They respond quickly and are a pleasure to work with.”

The Results

By utilising Ruler Analytics call tracking and marketing attribution tools, Hitsearch was able to attribute sales to leads and the activity that drove them.

Victoria continued, “We knew that our digital efforts were impacting calls as we could see in Google Analytics that organic landings and paid sessions were increasing, engagement was high, and the client had told us that calls were increasing too.”

In fact, Ruler was able to uncover even more favourable results than Hitsearch had anticipated, accurately attributing 28% more calls to their paid campaign efforts.

Victoria explained “With the help of Ruler we were able to start tracking the source of calls, and saw that channels such as paid were responsible for 91% of all calls instead of the 71% we thought, and organic optimisations were 10% higher than where we thought they were.“

“Ruler provides us with greater visibility and understanding on what drives revenue, and the ability to be more cost-effective with our marketing spend.

“This meant the client was happy, because they had better visibility of where sales were coming from and what channels they should continue investing in, and we were able to better justify our hard work!“

Editor’s Note: Ruler Analytics is an official Google partner. Our offline conversion tracking integrates with your website, CRM and Google Ads so that you can match leads to revenue and evidence which campaigns drove offline sales. Learn more here.

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