Funnel Blog

What would the Manhattan-swilling, cigarette-smoking, suit-clad advertising executives be doing if AMC’s hit show Mad Men were set in today’s advertising climate rather than the 1960’s? To start, you’d have to exchange the Manhattans for craft IPA’s, the Lucky Strikes for vape pens, and the suits and skinny ties for flannel shirts and skinny jeans. Just as Mad Men was set in the tumultuous ‘60’s, a turning point in advertising and culture, today’s advertisers face a similar inflection point. A seismic shift is underway in the advertising world, thanks to advances in technology, of course spurred by the now ubiquitous World Wide Web. We’re living in the Internet Age and what that means more than anything is we have more data on consumers than ever before-- maybe Ginsberg was right to be paranoid about computers replacing ad execs...

You work so hard to attract people to your website with a variety of marketing activities and platforms. However, when they finally arrive, the chances are they’ll leave again without making a purchase. The frustrating truth is that 92% of people who visit a retail website for the first time don’t intend to buy anything, according Episerver. In fact, AdRoll says just 2% of visitors actually convert on their first visit to a website.

Google Analytics is by far the most used analytics tool available. It’s estimated that more than 80% of all websites worldwide use Google Analytics (GA) for measuring their website usage. However, many users jump straight in without laying a strong foundation or gaining a proper understanding of the tool.

A common topic for discussions we have internally as well as externally with customers is that of metrics. Since Funnel, at its foundation, is a data aggregation service this probably comes as little surprise. Some of these discussions are simple and straightforward. A customer needs metric X from advertising platform A so we’ll make sure our connector to that particular platform includes that metric when downloading data.

After working with multiple advertisers ranging from small ecommerce companies to big retail brands we have noticed that there is almost always a couple of quick fixes that can be done to improve AdWords accounts performance and thus companies overall business KPIs.

For anyone working in digital marketing, it can be a challenge to keep track of the multitude of conversions that various advertising platforms track, as well as the definitions of those conversions. Metric names and definitions can change, appear and disappear periodically and the AdWords Help Center has a lot of content to sift through. In this post, we’ll try to bring some clarity by summarizing what we know about the conversions found in AdWords. On top of the metrics listed below, AdWords users can also define their own custom conversion events and actions. However, this post will focus on a group of selected standard conversion metrics available to all AdWords users.

I recently wrote a post about how to name your advertising campaigns in a way that makes managing your ad accounts easier. One of the most important learnings from that post was to be consistent when naming ad campaigns. This means, always use the same structure, the same variables and share this information with everyone managing campaigns in ad accounts. This sounds like a fairly easy task, but the truth is it's hard to follow these guidelines if you don't have a structured process in place.

I was talking to a colleague the other day who told me about a conversation they just had with a customer. The customer had asked “Why can’t I create pie charts in Funnel?” and my colleague’s response, jokingly, was “Our product team really doesn’t like pie charts”. While it’s true most of us are no huge fans of pie charts, the reason we haven’t invested in supporting a pie charting option is because we believe they are rarely a good fit for the problem they’re intended to solve.

Most media buyers use a digital marketing agency to build and optimize campaigns. A good agency can multiply your marketing power and increase the return on your marketing investment. A bad agency can waste your time and money. So how do you make sure that you are getting the right results? I spoke with some of the best media buyers and agency heads that I know, and created an agency checklist with their 5 main tips.

Today we have some exciting news to share! Funnel has raised a $10 million Series A financing from Balderton and our existing investors Industrifonden and Zobito. This new funding allows us to invest heavily in our quest to report on all marketing data.