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Mastering top-of-funnel marketing measurement in retail and CPG

Molly Deaville
Molly Deaville
Growth Account Director UK
Length
5 min read
Date
2 September 2024

The modern buyers’ journey is nothing if not nebulous. Consumers bounce between on- and offline touchpoints, move back and forth through the “funnel,” and ultimately carve unique paths to purchase over and over again. 

Changing buying behaviours have made it increasingly challenging to track shoppers through the classic, once-straightforward sales funnel. Similarly, even the most sophisticated marketing teams often struggle to accurately measure and assess the long-term impact of marketing activities aligned with each stage—especially top-of-funnel (TOFU) brand awareness, brand lift, and programmatic advertising. 

Tracking the right data

Accurate top of funnel measurement helps you and your team find valuable insights that shape your marketing strategies. But you need to understand which metrics and KPIs are most impactful to your brand. To do so, start by ensuring that your execution strategy, data collection strategy, and measurement strategy are in alignment with each other. 

If you’re running an upper-funnel campaign on a specific platform, it’s a good idea to begin by tracking the metrics you can measure on the platform itself. Next, identify and integrate sources outside the platform that help track data which measures growth and performance. For example, this could include implementing brand lift studies, leveraging sentiment analysis tools, surveying your audience, and tracking website visitors and sources driving that traffic. 

Aggregating all your data from various sources into a single dashboard provides you with a  holistic view of your TOFU marketing efforts, with real-time insights into the performance of your campaigns. You’ll be able to track and maintain data relevance by regularly identifying the KPIs that inform your decisions and eliminating the metrics that aren’t adding value to your overall campaign goals.

By democratising your data into one source of truth with generative AI capabilities, you’ll also have the ability to create custom reports tailored to your specific campaigns and goals—allowing for detailed and actionable AI-generated insights down to the campaign level. 

Testing for incremental growth

Tracking individual KPIs aligned with your TOFU marketing efforts makes it possible to strategically optimise that media to drive even stronger performance. And by measuring the incremental impact (the additional lift on your KPIs caused by a particular marketing event or campaign) of your media efforts on your overall business goals, you’ll gain further insights to help shape future campaigns. 

Ideally, a brand awareness campaign will increase the volume and likelihood of visitors converting long-term. So, end-of-funnel conversions, which are measured by your brand’s source of truth, should be impacted by additional awareness. To determine whether this is actually the case and gather an agnostic view of the contributions from TOFU media, you can design tests that measure the overall impact a specific media channel or tactic has on a business goal. 

These comprehensive incrementality factors can be measured at multiple levels and applied to reporting, budgeting, and forecasting.  

Full-funnel marketing begins at the top

Mastering top-of-funnel measurement is a crucial step to build meaningful brand awareness and generate a pipeline that can fuel long-term success. By setting up a solid data collection and analytics foundation, you can begin to track and attribute the activities that drive incremental impacts down the line.

Similarly, you’ll be able to test and optimise your campaigns to better resonate with your audience, identify specific audience segments that respond positively to your messaging, and more effectively manage your media spend and resource allowance to yield higher brand awareness and engagement.

Questions?

Growth Account Director UK

Molly Deaville