To meet the demands of their jobs, advertisers need to rethink Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). It’s more than a performance metric that applies to every company in each campaign. Instead, it’s an efficiency metric that can be combined with other metrics to supercharge results. 

Want to know more? We thought so. That’s why we partnered with Adweek to create a brand new guide: Everything You Need to Know About ROAS Right Now. It’s available now, just click here to download! 

Why ROAS Matters

When we first kicked off the project, we had free range to pick any topic. So, why did we focus on ROAS? The short answer is because we know real business results matter most to GroundTruth customers and advertisers around the globe. 

We also knew the conversation surrounding ROAS lacked nuance that could prevent companies from scaling their campaigns and improving their performance. At the beginning of the year, GroundTruth CMO, Brandon Rhoten, warned that companies need to start thinking differently about how they understand and apply ROAS. The conversation around that article resonated so well with audiences across industries that we thought it was time to create a longer, practical guide to help companies succeed in 2024. 

The partnership with Adweek only made the final guide better. We are excited it’s now available for you to download. 

What You’ll Get from the Guide

Inside the guide, you’ll find an in-depth discussion of the state of advertising today and what that means for marketing professionals. We show how to combine ROAS with other key metrics to improve the overall performance of your media, and give you a step-by-step process for crafting a strategy that works in today’s market. 

“The factors that can make or break a campaign in today’s market aren’t clean cut. Advertisers need to consider a myriad of factors. If you’re not already doing that, this guide will help ramp you up to the level you need to be competitive. For anyone else, this guide provides new ideas that can help bring new life to your media strategies,” Rhoten said. 

Are you ready to upgrade your ad campaigns and drive real business results for your company? Download Everything You Need to Know About ROAS Right Now from Adweek and GroundTruth! 

Download the Guide Now

The post Adweek and GroundTruth Release Guide to Increase ROAS appeared first on GroundTruth.

Digital advertising is getting expensive and stressful. Multichannel ad buys, cookieless targeting and unpredictable consumer behavior mean every marketer is facing higher CPMs, greater scrutiny of their media budgets and more difficulty measuring results. The good news? Strategic use of Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) can make the planning and measuring process simpler.

In partnership with Adweek, this guide will help you rethink your approach to ROAS to prove multichannel campaign impact, understand the customer journey and optimize your overall marketing performance.

Insights include:

• Good vs. Bad ROAS: Beware of hard and fast rules. Take a more nuanced approach based on the outcomes you need to deliver.
• Consider Context: You can’t measure the impact of your ad spend on awareness if every part of your program is focused on driving the immediate sale.
• Power in Pairs: ROAS doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Pair it with other KPIs to get a clearer picture of how your campaigns are really performing.

Download for more!

Download Now

Fill out the form below to access the strategy guide.

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The change keeps my job exciting. It also forces a lot of conversations, both with my own teams, and with our customers, about what trends matter. Everyone wants to put their ads where their customers are, but no one wants to waste money on impressions that don’t lead to real business results (in GroundTruth speak, that’s RBRs). 

Knowing what trends to follow and which to ignore is more of an art than a science, but I’ve come up with a few personal philosophies to help our partners balance the need to build an omnichannel marketing strategy while keeping a healthy Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). Here’s what I tell our customers. 

Some Marketing Trends Become the Standard

Change happens faster every year. It’s easy to become skeptical that everything is worth paying attention to. And most of it won’t be. But successful marketers don’t wait until something becomes standard to create a plan. You have to be proactive to get that competitive ad spend. And you need to understand what audiences respond to in order to reach your target ROAS quickly. 

Connected TV, for example, is still in its early stages. But, GroundTruth customers are already leveraging the power of streaming to reach audiences and break records for their campaigns. Teams aren’t throwing their whole budget, or even huge budgets, at new channels, but they are creating room to experiment and evolve with their customers. And because they’re trying new ideas sooner, they have a competitive advantage. 

ROAS should help you improve your strategies

One advantage of trying new things is improving ROAS across all campaigns as teams learn what works and for which audiences. One of the advantages of ROAS as a key metric for your advertising performance is its versatility. You can calculate ROAS for different geographic regions, for customers and potential customers, for messaging. It’s a metric that tells you how effective your ads are and how much further you can push your team to reach the highest revenue possible. 

When you’re thinking about new marketing trends and technologies, use ROAS to help guide your experimentation. Look at the channels your teams are successfully using already, and consider whether you can push those ads to an even broader audience to get even more revenue. If your ROAS for audiences in a certain city is 5:1, what surrounding areas can you add to your targeting to push that to 6:1? Not only will your team make more profit, but more money gives your team freedom to try new things and learn even more about what works. 

It’s Better to Move Fast and Pivot

The most important thing to remember is marketing teams will always need to try new things. Waiting for a sure thing never helped anyone rise to the top. To succeed in 2024, you need to evaluate emerging technologies and trends and invest in what makes sense for your company. By jumping in early, pivoting quickly to what you learn, and updating your strategies, not only will you avoid ruining your ROAS, but you will likely improve it. 

If the question is, “Can you follow marketing trends without risking ROAS?”, the answer is—probably not. But, if the question is, “Can I make smart choices about emerging trends and still reach my revenue targets?”, then the answer is—you might have to. 

Key Takeaways: 

• 2024 is an expensive year that will require experimentation and thoughtful iteration from teams.
• ROAS is a flexible metric that can help teams get a high view of how efficiently they’re spending based on audiences, channels, and campaigns.
• Not all marketing trends that show up will stay, but successful marketers will invest in the ones that make sense, and learn something new each time.

The post Can Companies Follow Marketing Trends Without Ruining ROAS? appeared first on GroundTruth.

And the chance to get in front of millions of engaged individuals really is rare. But it also creates a conundrum—one that marketers have debated for years. Should you build a brand marketing campaign or a performance marketing campaign? Do you try to get your brand in front of new audiences? Or do you try to inspire conversions and purchases while people are living in the moment? Can you do both? Let’s talk about it. 

Brand Marketing Defines What’s Possible for Your Company

Brand marketing is what most people think of when they discuss ads shown during major events. These campaigns aim to broaden awareness for a company, its strengths, its values, and the overall tone of the company. These are the clydesdale horses or Betty White eating a candy bar. 

Brand marketing campaigns are essential for growing your audience of potential customers, reaffirming your existing customers’ allegiance to your brand, and ensuring you stand out against competitors. They aren’t known for driving revenue. At least not directly. 

But without brand marketing campaigns, you don’t have the audience necessary to execute performance marketing campaigns. You don’t know how to refine your messaging to reflect exactly why people love you. And, ultimately, you can’t grow. 

Performance Marketing Drives Real Business Results

Performance marketing uses the audiences built by brand marketing and turns them into customers. Performance marketers focus on real business results, such as Return On Ad Spend (ROAS), store visits, incremental sales or check growth, and other metrics tied to measurable outcomes. In short, performance marketing focuses on action and revenue—the results of all your efforts. While these kinds of ads don’t typically have a memorable catchphrase, they turn passive fans into repeat customers. 

A major mistake companies make while planning for big events is focusing only on brand marketing campaigns. They get all the attention, but don’t have a plan for what to do with all the new eyeballs. Recently, Solo Stove rolled out a brilliant partnership with Snoop Dogg, but failed to convert into new sales because their performance marketing campaigns didn’t have the same attention. 

You can avoid overspending and ensure real business results with a combination of brand marketing and performance marketing campaigns, especially during shared events. But you need to make a plan now. 

Brand Marketing vs. Performance Marketing? Who’s the Winner?

In truth, both brand marketing and performance marketing are important, but neither of them will work without each other. Companies need both to ensure their marketing efforts result in real business results. But how should they work together? Let’s talk about it. 

Plan Your Brand and Performance Marketing Strategies

To deliver the real business results you need, here are the steps you need to take before launching your major event advertising campaigns. 

1. Know why customers love you: Brand marketing campaigns that work don’t try to reinvent the wheel. They take what works for their most loyal customers and find a clever way to get new people to care. Is your thing humor? Lean into it. Is your brand known for bold choices? Don’t shy away from that. Authenticity and clarity make a successful brand ad. 
2. Pick one goal and stick with it: Performance marketing fails when it tries to do too much at once. Pick one or two conversions you want new audiences to complete and funnel all new traffic there. Choose something realistic that delivers value right away. A focused campaign is a successful campaign. 
3. Keep building from what you learn: With new customers, key metrics like ROAS and cost per acquisition, will start to shift. These metrics show you where to iterate and where to expand your strategies. Keep an eye on these important business results so that you can scale and repeat your success. 

GroundTruth Delivers Real Business Results for All Your Advertising Campaigns

GroundTruth has a proven track record of driving real business results for all types of businesses, like PepsiCo’s Yachak Mate Organic Energy Tea which saw a 583% boost in incremental visits to stores carrying their products after one of their campaigns. Want to learn more about what’s possible for your brand and performance marketing campaigns? We have answers! Schedule a call and we’ll show you how you can turn your marketing campaigns into real business results with GroundTruth.

The post Brand Marketing vs. Performance Marketing: Which Makes the Biggest Difference for Real Business Results? appeared first on GroundTruth.

It sounds simple enough. Measure performance constantly, optimize in real time, and don’t let your ROAS metric fall below the goal. But there is nuance to understanding ROAS, particularly when running sophisticated, multi-channel ad campaigns. The numbers aren’t black and white, at least not in performance reports. To be successful this year, companies need to start thinking differently about what ROAS measures and how to improve it for your 2024 goals. 

ROAS requires nuance to help teams solve the most important problems

Our marketing team just finished our planning process for this year. The single question that guided all our strategy sessions was “What problem are we trying to solve?” We know the objectives we need to achieve, but the reality is we could get there using a variety of strategies. Remembering the main driver of each tactic helps us decide how to measure ROAS in a meaningful way. 

For example, we might track ROAS for new business compared to existing customers to understand how we’re impacting customer retention and growth. We might compare ROAS from different channels (including mobile, CTV, DOOH, foot traffic, online store visits, etc.), using different media on different audience segments to understand what resources we need. We know which channels are an investment for the future and which ones need strict adherence to our target. And the same is probably true for your organization. At least, it should be if you want to be competitive in the year of big advertising budgets. 

As a single metric, ROAS is a powerful way to understand what provides a reasonable return in your marketing mix at the most crucial moments of your customers’ decision process. Add to it another, correlating measure of business impact, like foot traffic, and it becomes even stronger. By connecting ROAS to your other performance metrics, you improve your chances of running an efficient and impactful campaign. 

ROAS requires context for each channel 

The other critical change to how your marketing team uses ROAS is to always keep context in mind. I mentioned earlier that we have some channels that are an investment in the future. We, like most teams, have identified places we want to expand. That might mean breaking into a new market, trying a new advertising channel, or repositioning your company. In terms of performance, that means you’ll need to decide what your target is, and how long you’re willing to wait before you reach that target. 

Let’s say your ROAS for display ads right now is 3:1. That works for a market that is familiar with you and people who know the quality of your product. The same steps you took to reach that ROAS will not work when you’re trying to break into a new customer base. You cannot expect the same formula to work under new conditions. As such, you need to rethink what your threshold will be for each channel and plan for the months that may require more spend. A single ROAS target won’t work for everything. It may be useful as a gutcheck, but in order to make the best optimization decisions, you’ll likely need a flexible range based on the context of your campaigns. 

It sounds counterintuitive to make your targets flexible, but when you’re thinking about quarterly and long-term growth goals, adding context to your performance data is critical. 

Always prioritize real business results

It takes a sophisticated marketer to find the balance for all of your team’s efforts. This year will require teams to be creative and precise in the ways that they reach their audiences efficiently and effectively, driving a return for that investment. It might mean new ways of thinking about foundational marketing strategies or ensuring context when considering specific metrics like ROAS. But the good news is we have access to the tools we need to tie most decisions to real business results, further enhanced by media partners that can measure correlating real business results like foot traffic. And that is a great place to start the year, despite the challenges 2024 will pose to CPMs. 

Key Takeaways: 

• 2024 will be an expensive year for advertising, putting pressure on CPMs and ROAS
• Ensuring you’ve defined a clear problem to solve, not just a KPI, is important 
• ROAS should be evaluated in context of the problems you’re solving 
• Comparing correlating metrics to ROAS, like foot traffic or sales, will help you show a real business result to your marketing investment

The post Companies need to rethink ROAS in 2024 appeared first on GroundTruth.

Of course, some metrics are necessary. Don’t fix what isn’t broken. But, how do we know what is or isn’t broken if we don’t at least take the time to inspect our reporting practices? In 2024, with record-breaking ad spend predicted, it makes sense to clearly define what success looks like for your marketing team and how your team tracks your daily efforts towards that success. 

At the top of that list is Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). It’s the single metric that can tell teams whether their campaigns are effective. But that’s just one layer. ROAS can also tell you which channels are driving real business results, how your audience is changing, and more. How does one metric do all that? Thank you for asking. Having a ROAS strategy to measure marketing performance is key for 2024.

ROAS as your big picture performance metric

The most basic way to calculate ROAS is total revenue generated from paid advertising divided by the total spend for paid advertising. But, conversions don’t happen in a vacuum. Broad awareness campaigns, specific, location-based marketing, and other factors all contribute to a final sale. So, narrowing your focus on this simple understanding of ROAS misses how all your advertising efforts move customers towards their final purchase.

To be successful in 2024, marketers need to consider the way all the ad campaigns work together to generate revenue. Calculate big-picture ROAS by dividing total revenue by total ad spend. Zooming out in this way, making sure all ads are accounted for, means teams can see how efficient their efforts are. However, to optimize your advertising campaigns, you’ll need to go deeper into your reporting metrics. But keeping an updated big picture ROAS number at the top of the entire marketing teams’ minds ensures that you never veer too far off track. 

ROAS to track new business and returning customers

Another critical factor for growing your business in 2024 is keeping a steady stream of repeat customers. Not only does it cost more to convert a new customer, but repeat customers also work as part of your marketing team for free. They can tell their community members about your restaurant, give your product to their colleagues, or spread the word to tourists looking for insider knowledge. 

Marketers who track both ROAS on new business and ROAS on return customers are much more likely to focus on what’s working and maximize spending because they have a better understanding of what’s working and on who. Tactics like audience targeting, user tracking, and retargeting campaigns all help your team understand how much it costs to acquire new customers and what it costs to create a loyal customer. Spending a few months creating a base of repeat customers gives your team the freedom to optimize the campaigns that attract new customers. When both start working together, you start to see supercharged growth. 

ROAS to understand each channel

The last way to measure ROAS to grow your business in 2024 is to calculate ROAS by channel. GroundTruth CEO, Brandon Rhoten, talks frequently about how marketing performance metrics all need to be understood in context. When you have a problem you’re looking to solve, like more sales in Q1 or a better positioning in the market, to accomplish that goal, different channels move the needle in different ways. As such, you need to look at your performance metrics, like ROAS, in the context of each channel and a comprehensive strategy. 

When trying to optimize your advertising campaigns, or understand which channels are right for you, and which you should abandon, you need to calculate ROAS for each of those channels. Look at performance both in relation to each other, but also in terms of the long-term future of your business. If a channel, like Connected TV and Over-the-Top (CTV and OTT) for example, has a low ROAS right now but looks like it will be promising in the next 6 to 9 months, continuing investing in the channel right now might be best for long-term success. 

The right ROAS strategy will vary depending on your goals and your resources. But the one thing that remains universal is that using ROAS as a way to understand the efficiency and long-term effectiveness of your ad campaigns is the right strategy for all marketers. 

GroundTruth Can Help Improve ROAS with Unique Audiences Across All Channels

Start improving ROAS across channels with GroundTruth’s unique audiences. Through real-world behavior, we help companies maximize advertising dollars by ensuring the most motivated audiences see their message. Want to know more? Contact us today and we’ll show you how we can help turn your advertising into real business results. 

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