How to Measure Marketing Performance for Better ROAS (Episode 3 of 5)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Two by Zero Company, Your Pay Search, Social Media and Programmatic Ad Experts.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:06)
Welcome back to the special edition of The Bliss Business Podcast. We are having a five series discussion about how to turn your marketing dollars into investments that pay off, that give you a great return. And we're talking with Josh Prizer, who is the VP of Digital Marketing at Zero Company. And so far, we've talked about how to turn your costs into an investment. The very first episode, we did a little bit of the fundamentals of marketing spend and introduced the concept of ROAS versus ROI. And then in episode two, we talked about setting proper expectations and setting good goals to maximize your return on advertising spent. And then today in episode three, we're going to talk about really about measuring the performance so that you can get better return on advertising spent. So today is all about crunching the numbers, know the numbers. How do you measure marketing performance? Who better realize? Let's go right into it. Welcome back, Josh. Good to have you.

**Josh Prizer** (1:15)
Good to be here.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:17)
So first question I have for you is what metrics are essential for measuring marketing investment performance? Let's start with that.

**Josh Prizer** (1:26)
You know, it really does depend on your sales funnel. And that's why that exercise we did in the last episode is so important, to kind of walk through each step of the sales funnel and determine your action points and what your final goals are. Because the more steps we can track along the course of that sales funnel, the better your investment is going to turn out. But typically, some of the things you'd want to measure would be contact form submissions, phone calls. One note I'll mention on phone calls is the default, let's say, in Google Ads is to track all calls that are at least 30 seconds in length. And of course Google wants that number low because the more conversions they track, the better it looks like your campaign is going. If you're working with an agency, talk to them and make sure they're not sticking with that default.
Most of us know a 30-second phone call probably wasn't a good phone call, so you probably don't want to track that as a conversion. You want to figure out a length that makes sense. Usually we say about 60 seconds is reasonable, but for some businesses it might be 90 seconds, two minutes, etc. So pick a reasonable length for a phone call to track as a conversion action. And then if you have the ability or if you are actually, especially like in retail, if you have online sales that are happening, you want to be able to for sure track those sales on your site as well.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:00)
Great. So 30-second phone call is probably not a good measurement of success.

**Josh Prizer** (3:06)
Probably not. And you don't have the order form. Yeah. Anything that you can track. In fact, I should mention too, I forgot to mention what we sometimes refer to as soft conversions.
So these are maybe steps along the sales funnel that would indicate the person is interested, even if they're not ready to take that next step just yet. So that might be like an email newsletter sign up, download of a white paper. Really, any action you think might indicate interest, you want to track that if at all possible.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:41)
And I would think this goes back to what we talked about in episode 2, which was the bottom of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and top of the funnel. So depending which campaign you're driving towards, there's going to be different conversion metrics, I would think. I like the idea of maybe it's an insurance agency. You call in and you've got to make an appointment with an agent. That might actually take 30 seconds, right? So in that case, that might be a middle of the funnel kind of a lead that's worthy of tracking. Is that a way to think about it?

**Josh Prizer** (4:12)
Yeah, absolutely. Again, I always feel like you can't track too much. You really can't. I mean, you'll be surprised sometimes about the data that becomes interesting, where you start putting connections to that data, and it starts to tell a story, and then you can eventually analyze it and take actions based on that data.

**Tullio Siragusa** (4:35)
Okay. So we've talked about a little bit of what to track, but how do you go about effectively tracking and analyzing these metrics? What are some of the tools, some of the methodologies?