Most customer journeys start the second a new user clicks on your ad. That is… if you can get them to click your ad! 

We sat down with David Rodnitzky, the founder of 3Q Digital, an New York City-based growth marketing agency, and Anne DiNapoli Block, SVP and Head of Communications at creative agency Trade School to hear their perspectives on how the paid media landscape has changed since the pandemic and how their clients are shifting to more customer-centric advertising strategies. 

Here’s what they had to share on how brands can combine performance marketing, customer experience, and ai analytics to understand complete consumer journeys – from the moment a user clicks on your ad, arrives on your website, and, ideally, moves all the way to checkout.

What effect has the pandemic had on media spend and strategy this year? 

Anne DiNapoli Block: Marketing has intrinsically changed. We saw every big-box retailer across America dissolve Black Friday. Brands offered savings during all of November and for the first time ever, we were not pushing to drive that influx of in-store traffic the day after Thanksgiving. 

Last year, many of our clients invested in getting an early start on holiday gift-giving inspiration, building online experiences that drive that eCommerce, and growing the role of the influencer. Some of that is because of the production challenges that COVID has poised brands. We used to be able to do shoots in less than four weeks, but now there’s a lot more planning and nimbleness that has had to go into ad production. On the media side, that’s meant looking at different types of units to drive what we would have historically thought of as inspirational and more upper-funnel reach strategies. It also means looking at how to create a more collapsed funnel strategy so that we can really create a storyline on-site and ensure that the experiences our clients are building lives cohesively across the board. 

Every brick-and-mortar brand investing in developing that inter-connective experience by defining how their in-store and online experiences work cohesively together.

With digital consumption up so significantly, the new normal is here to stay. I don’t see that shift back happening. Trends across the media landscape right now show that there is this deeper immersion, especially in mobile commerce. I think now it’s a matter of every brick-and-mortar brand investing in developing that inter-connective experience by defining how their in-store and online experiences work cohesively together. That will help brands identify where somebody is in their DXP journey and know exactly what to serve them the moment they land on an experience.

David Rodnitzky: During the pandemic, I’ve seen companies optimizing for macroeconomic trends and not microeconomic trends. There has been a lot of reactive behavior from companies based on news that’s happening. When the pandemic first started, we had clients outright pause spend. People said, “The sky is falling, pause spend!” but I would say in the last three to four months, we’ve had clients increase their spend aggressively as the stock market recovered and, as it turns out, the sky hasn’t fallen! 

But, I’m not sure that either of those approaches is the right answer. I think the right answer is to look at and act based on your metrics. For those companies that had paused spend early on, had they looked at their numbers, seen their conversion rates remained unchanged, and noticed their competition had paused their spend, they would have realized their cost per acquisition was lower and they had a huge market share opportunity. They would have been in a great position. A lot of people came back and tried to achieve that, but it was too late. The answer is to look at your data and adjust in real-time. 

The answer is to look at your data and adjust in real-time. 

How have you seen media budgets shift as a result of the pandemic? 

DiNapoli Block: The role of brand continues to be really strong, the reason for that being it really continues to build consumer trust, especially during these more uncertain times. There’s a lot of different ways to do that and it’s important to note that the tactical execution of brand has shifted. You might need to change which channels that you support brand on, or really look at how audience data and first-party data could be layered into some of those strategies to help you be more effective. Those are the larger shifts that I have seen. 

The role of brand continues to be really strong, the reason for that being it really continues to build consumer trust, especially during these more uncertain times.

When it comes to focusing on channel selection, the biggest takeaway from 2020 that we’ve seen is the Facebook boycott was an interesting time. We just did a huge competitive audit across many different verticals for one of our clients. It was interesting to see there are a lot of different challenges not only with social injustice, but also the shift in consumer privacy. I’m curious to see what that owned data strategy could look like, knowing that some of our brands are trying to build their own walled gardens with their data so media exposure pumping into their data sets is becoming increasingly important. I do think the long-term effects of privacy may start changing social media significantly. 

Rodnitzky: We did a survey of 1,000 CMOs back in July and one of the questions we asked was, “Where is your main concern: top of funnel, bottom of funnel, or post funnel/upsell and retention?” We found most CMO’s top concern was actually top of funnel followed by retention followed by performance marketing or bottom of funnel. I think that you can interpret that in a couple of different ways. Firstly, it helps people feel more confident around their direct response marketing. It’s much more quantifiable and easy to understand. You could also interpret it as, during the pandemic, being on-brand and maintaining a lift and preference with consumers is really challenging and requires a lot of pivoting. 

We also asked people “Who do you most want to hire right now?” We found that there was a pretty low interest and prioritization in hiring media buyers and coders, which is another way of saying the soft and hard sciences aren’t in demand. Interestingly enough, the area that was most in demand was data and analytics. Those are the people who understand hard science, but can turn it into soft science. When you look at this intersection of brand and performance marketing, that’s where analytics become particularly important because you can understand the full conversion funnel and attribute credit appropriately.

Brand marketers have to understand performance metrics and performance marketers need to understand brand storytelling. Data is in the center of that.

There’s no longer a business case for CMOs to throw all their money into brand and then win an award in France and say,” Look, this worked!” There has to be a data-driven component to everything you do. Brand marketers have to understand performance metrics and performance marketers need to understand brand storytelling. Data is in the center of that. I have seen a change in the way people are thinking about the intersection of performance and brand because of digital experience analytics. 

What are the most common mistakes you see clients make?

DiNapoli Block: Across the board, we see that brands don’t have someone or a process in place to do a lot of dot-connecting. You need one person dedicated to your online experience, optimizing where media should even drive to be more effective, and ensuring you’re not using duplicative messages and audience sets. 

Oftentimes, we have brands compete against themselves in some of the biddable environments with their own data sets. You need a careful balance when you have up to 50 different campaigns and messages in-market. That goes back to the infrastructure of your data and analytics, how you’re tracking customer exposure across their many activities over time, and how you’re identifying a customer when they land on your experience. Where have they come from? What are they looking at? What have they been exposed to over time? What actions are they taking? Being more informed on all of these touchpoints and which campaigns you have in-market can help you prioritize certain messages for certain audiences.

Rodnitzky: If people don’t buy-in to the concept of testing and user experience at the top, it will never trickle down anywhere. I think that unfortunately there are a lot of CMOs that say they are in favor of testing but, ultimately, believe in testing some things, but not others. 

I think that unfortunately there are a lot of CMOs that say they are in favor of testing but, ultimately, believe in testing some things, but not others. 

If I had a magic wand to stop inter-office politics, I would let you know. At the end of the day, everything has to come from the top, as everything relating to culture does. If the CEO and CMO don’t really believe in being agnostic and instead believe in what their favorite employee thinks is the right decision, you’ll never get anywhere. 

How can performance marketers partner with on-site teams to build a better customer experience?

Rodnitzky: Many years ago, I worked for a legal website that allowed people to search for lawyers through the site. The lawyers were paying the company thousands of dollars a month to be listed. We had a big yellow banner on the front page that said “Find a Lawyer,” but our DXP software told us it only had a 0.5% click-through rate. Instead, visitors were clicking on all these blue links on the side of the page. We did live user testing with CS Live and realized people were going right over the yellow banner to use a blue link because they thought it was an ad. We thought the flashy yellow button would get everyone’s attention, but in reality, people were avoiding it to go to the little blue links. 

We changed that banner into blue text links that said “Here are some useful resources if you’re looking to find a lawyer” and by not being market-y and instead focusing on user experience, the click-through rate went from 0.5% to almost 8%. It was a massive success for the business.

DiNapoli Block: The role of content as we know it is really changing. Brands are becoming publishers and taking more prevalent roles in providing customers with the inspiration and education that leads to conversion. 

What advice do you have for performance marketers trying to create more customer-centric advertising campaigns?

Rodnitzky: My first piece of advice is to avoid the HiPPO, or the highest-paid person’s opinion. It’s very easy to have the CEO come in and tell you that you need to have flying toasters on your site and that’s the only way to drive conversion, but, everyone’s opinion is just an opinion. 

Avoid the HiPPO, or the highest-paid person’s opinion.

The second piece of advice I always give people is from a guy named Chris Goward who wrote a book called, “You Should Test That: Conversion Optimization for More Leads, Sales and Profit Or The Art and Science of Optimized Marketing.” No matter what suggestion someone has for conversion rate optimization, his answer is to say, “You should test that.” That ultimately is the essence of conversion rate testing. If you can create a process where you’re rapidly and intelligently creating a testing methodology: isolating variables, coming to statistical significance, finding a conclusion, determining the success of one test, and moving onto the next one. Do that as fast as you can and you’ll be successful. 

One of the things I tell clients all the time is, “If you do one conversion rate test a month for 12 months, you’ll probably have a 20% lift in performance.” It almost doesn’t matter what it is, just do it. It’s amazing how many clients or just companies, in general, don’t do that. 

This interview is an excerpt from a recent Contentsquare event, “CX Talks: Candid Conversations about The Intersection of CX and Media.” To watch the full event and hear even more ways brands are building customer-centric advertising campaigns, click here to watch the event on-demand. 

This article was written by our partner REO, as part of our series highlighting direct insights from our large ecosystem of partners.

In 2019, for the first time ever, digital ad spend represented more than 50% of total global marketing spend. Whilst the UK was considerably ahead of this trend (63.8% of UK’s total ad spend was attributed to digital in 2018, 66.4% in 2019), the US has now joined the group with online ad spend going from 48.6% in 2018 to 54.2% in 2019. With eMarketer forecasting a 17.6% year-on-year growth (to $333.25M) in worldwide digital marketing spend, the need to ensure each of your marketing channels is delivering the best possible ROI has never been higher.

Within the conversion rate optimization (CRO) space, most brands conduct A/B testing without fully considering which marketing channel or source their customers have come from. Customers are typically bucketed into various user segments based on their purchase history, onsite behavior, geographic and demographic data. However, users within the same audience segment can often demonstrate varying behavioral attributes when navigating through the purchase funnel, across countless online and offline touchpoints.

Let’s Take Paid Search as An Example

If a user arrives on your website via paid search, you already know what they searched for and which ad they clicked on; however, users who click on the same ad, but searched for different terms/items, will often experience the same customer journey. For instance, if a customer has searched for “luxury men’s white shirt” – not only do you know the item they are looking for, you also know they are looking at the higher end of the market.

A/B Testing the landing page a user is taken to is quite common, but you can go a step further and explore how to change the experience for the customer based on their search criteria.

A potential testing idea could involve pre-sorting these shirts by highest price first, and on the Product Listing Page (PLP), displaying all the available men’s white shirts. This can develop into personalization if the user has visited the site previously, within the cookie period; e.g. by storing size data within the cookie, you could pre-select the shirt size which the user filtered by on their previous visit. 

Reducing the number of clicks and filters it takes a user to find their item can only have a positive impact on conversion rate, especially on mobile. So, by showing a customer the items they’re looking for, sorted by their desired price point and filtered by their size, you will make the purchase journey more tailored to that specific customer.

Understanding a visitor’s context (location, date and time of day, device, internet connection, etc) as well as their intent (are they here to complete a quick purchase, to research and compare products, to seek inspiration, to test a coupon, etc) add an invaluable layer of behavioral understanding to your analysis, and will allow you to execute a more impactful form of personalization.

Making the Affiliation between A/B Testing and Voucher/Cashback Partners

By applying this testing method to the affiliate channel, you can optimize the largest click and revenue drivers; namely voucher and cashback websites. After all, you can already assume that users coming from these two affiliate types are both online-savvy and price-sensitive.

Voucher and discount websites should have a conversion rate of at least 20-25% on mature affiliate programs – so any of these affiliates who have a conversion rate lower than that, represents an opportunity for incremental revenue. For cashback sites, expect this figure to be upwards of 40%.

A test idea for these two affiliate types could be to re-enforce the discount or cashback offer listed on the affiliates’ website. For instance, if the deal was “Save £15 when you spend over £100” – you could use a “loading bar” at the top of the page which gradually fills up as you add items to your basket, until the user hits the spend threshold to activate the discount. 

For cashback sites, you could test a cashback calculator onsite, which automatically calculates the amount of cashback the user will earn if they purchase everything currently in their basket. This type of gamification can be incredibly effective in increasing the number of units per sale and, in turn, the average order value.

Serve Less Content, but More Dynamically

“Content is King” – we’ve all heard it before, but how can you be smarter in how you serve it? Content, and specifically dynamic content, is another channel where source-based A/B testing can improve engagement, click-through-rates and leads/ sales. If you know the article or blog post a user has come from, you can use this insight to serve them relevant and dynamic content, making their customer journey more seamless and less detached across the two sites.

User journey analysis shows that visits to content sites usually happen in the “Discovery Phase” of the sales funnel – including on product review sites, influencer social posts, news/magazine sites and blogs. Such content is informative and persuasive; perfect to push the user towards the bottom of the funnel.

Some of the more content-heavy merchants, such as insurance brands or high-end technology retailers, will have an eclectic and extensive array of content across their website, making navigation more muddled. A solution? Reducing the amount of content on-site and instead, storing the less frequently visited content pages elsewhere, to then be served dynamically.

For example, if a user looking to buy insurance is reading up on excess and the impacts it has on a claim and future premiums, the existing content about excess could be tweaked accordingly – which could be as simple as changing the title of an article, calling out the keywords or changing the order of the content on that page.

Again, a granular analysis of how customers are interacting with individual elements of content will help paint the complete picture of engagement. Measuring clicks alone will only tell one part of the customer behavior story: tracking metrics such as exposure, attractiveness and conversion rate per click (to name a few) will give a more complete view of how content is contributing to (or stalling) the user journey.

As the capabilities of A/B testing and personalization platforms continue to evolve, the way you test and analyze a customer journey should follow suit. One of the major challenges of channel/source-specific testing can be a lack of traffic volume. If you have insufficient traffic, it will take a while before a test reaches significance. For example, the 5th highest paid search term, or 4th largest voucher site probably won’t have the volume to justify running an A/B Test on.

Want to Know More?

Contact us! REO is a digital experience agency. We are an eclectic mix of bright and creative thinkers, embracing the best of research, strategy, design and experimentation to solve our clients’ toughest challenges. We work across a variety of sectors, with companies such as Amazon, M&S, Tesco and Samsung. 

Also invaluable to our company is our scope of partners, including Contentsquare, which allows our customers to capture the nuances of their end users’ behavior for even more sophisticated segmentation and ultimately, deeper personalization.  

Whatever the challenge may be, REO applies design thinking to identify and deliver big growth opportunities.

Hero image: Adobe Stock, via blankstock