Benchmarks & Stoplights: Turning Data Into Daily Decisions for Ad Optimization
Turn your best performance days into a live decision system with clear green, yellow, and red signals—so your team knows exactly when to scale, pause, or pivot.
CJ Hunter
October 25, 2025
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min read
table of contents
TL;DR
Benchmarks & Stoplights turn your historical performance data into actionable signals—green to scale, yellow to monitor, red to trim—helping you make confident, data-driven decisions in seconds.
Benchmarks are built from your own most profitable days (not generic averages), providing a realistic and personalized baseline for performance evaluation.
Stoplights operate across every level—platform, campaign, ad set, and ad—so teams can quickly identify which parts of the funnel deserve more budget or need optimization.
Multi-touch attribution ensures decisions are grounded in a unified, cross-channel source of truth, cutting through the noise of biased in-platform metrics and aligning spend with true business impact.
Most marketers spend hours debating dashboards. What if your data told you in seconds what to scale and what to cut?
That’s the promise of Northbeam’s benchmarks & stoplights. You define what “great” looks like by distilling your most profitable days.
Then your dashboard lights up green, yellow, or red against those standards—so you can scale winners, trim waste, and move on with your day.
No more debating which metric to trust. Just clear signals, grounded in your own best days, that turn data into decisions.
To see the full webinar I did on optimizing your ads, click the video below:
What Are Benchmarks & Stoplights?
Let me keep this simple.
Benchmarks are performance profiles pulled from your most profitable days, defined by you. They’re not averages from the internet—they’re your actual patterns when things go right.
Stoplights are the green/yellow/red signals that compare today’s numbers to those profitable-day profiles, across platform, campaign, ad set, and ad levels. Green says “press the gas.” Yellow says “watch closely.” Red says “ease off.” This cuts through analysis paralysis and gets you acting fast, with confidence.
Here’s why this matters: in a multi‑touch world, in‑platform metrics are biased toward their own channels.
Benchmarks and stoplights sit on top of a shared, multi‑touch source of truth, so the signal you get reflects how growth actually happens across channels—not just what one platform claims.
Setting Up Benchmarks
Here’s how I set this up so the signal is clean and actionable.
Step 1: Identify your most profitable days over a meaningful window (I often see 6–12 months). Exclude promo and coupon spikes—you don’t want to benchmark to discount‑driven anomalies you don’t intend to repeat.
Step 2: Segment by new vs. returning customers, by product categories/SKUs, and blended targets. That way, when the stoplight fires, you know if it’s aligned with your objective—acquisition, retention, or blended efficiency.
Step 3: Store those performance profiles as reusable benchmarks. From there, stoplights render against them automatically wherever you work—platforms, campaigns, ad sets, and ads—so the scaling opportunities don’t hide inside a single top‑line number.
💡Pro tip: create saved views tailored to each role. Leadership keeps a high‑level blended view; media buyers get stoplights closer to the money (campaign/ad set/ad) for acquisition vs. retention; creative gets views that help validate concepts and hooks. Shared source of truth, role‑specific clarity.
Reading Stoplights In Action
Here’s the rulebook I run:
Green = Scaling opportunity. If it’s green against the right benchmark (e.g., first‑time ROAS/CAC for acquisition), you can scale with confidence.
Yellow = Caution/monitor. Hold, gather corroborating metrics, and confirm direction before you move budget.
Red = Inefficiency → trim. Reduce spend, re‑allocate, or fix what’s broken (creative, targeting, or landing experience).
Now, let me address the moment that spooks a lot of teams. In my demo, (which you can see here) you’ll see Meta showing a 0.36 ROAS in Northbeam, while in‑platform showed ~2.7.
With stoplights aligned to the brand’s benchmarks, we could see Meta was actually on track. Not because we’re sugarcoating—because we’re measuring against a multi‑touch, profitable‑day baseline that reflects how the business really makes money.
The quick takeaway: don’t let a scary number force the wrong move. Read it through your benchmarks and stoplights before you decide.
Daily Workflow With Stoplights
I want your daily pass to feel like a repeatable loop you can run forever. Here’s the flow I coach teams to use:
1. Gut Check Your Goal
Are you optimizing for new customer acquisition, reviewing a promo, checking a new category, or validating creative? When you know your goal, you know which stoplights matter most today (first‑time vs. blended vs. returning).
2. Open Your Saved View and Scan Top‑Down
Start at platform/channel stoplights, then drill to campaigns, ad sets, and ads. You’ll spot scale pockets inside an overall yellow, and see waste that’s hiding under a blended green.
3. Apply the Scaling Rules
If it’s green against the right benchmark, scale confidently. If it’s red, trim. If it’s yellow, hold and confirm with supporting metrics (CTR, CPM, CPC, conversion rate, new customer percent, revenue per visit). Keep it simple, that’s how you move fast without being reckless.
4. Diagnose with Supporting Metrics
Low CTR, high CPM? Creative/targeting mismatch; fix the angle, hook, or audience.
Strong clicks, weak first‑time conversion? Ad‑to‑landing mismatch—align the promise that earned the click with the page that receives it.
Good conversion, low revenue per visit? Improve the offer—bundles, cross‑sells, post‑purchase upsells, or price testing.
Use red to find friction; use green to fund iteration.
5. Re‑Check and Validate
Come back tomorrow or next week, look at the stoplights again, confirm your moves, and repeat. This is how you escape one‑off heroics and build durable performance habits.
Attribution Posture
A quick note on why this works so well with Northbeam’s attribution settings.
I recommend a conservative posture; clicks‑only model on a one‑day window, and accrual reporting (tie revenue to the timestamp of the touchpoint).
This strips inevitable lower‑funnel catchers (brand search, email/SMS, direct) from over‑claiming and pushes credit back to the actual demand generators. It also prevents “false flags” from cash‑mode spikes (like an email send) that weren’t the real driver. Your benchmarks depend on this integrity; your stoplights are only as trustworthy as the accounting underneath.
Conclusion
Benchmarks and stoplights compress decision time and turn your best days into a daily guidance system. You define winning based on reality.
The dashboard lights up with simple, trustworthy signals. And your team moves budget with speed and conviction—scaling what’s working and cutting what isn’t, without the endless debate.
Try Northbeam for yourself. Build the daily loop once, then run it every morning for faster, smarter optimization.
In today’s competitive landscape, marketing success depends on understanding not just who your customers are but how they behave.
Behavioral data captures the actions and interactions users take across your digital ecosystem, from clicks and scrolls to purchases and feature usage.
Unlike other forms of user data, behavioral data offers a living picture of user intent, engagement, and friction in real time.
This article explores what behavioral data is, where it comes from, and how to analyze it for actionable behavioral marketing insights.
You’ll learn how leading marketing teams use behavioral tracking to personalize experiences, prevent churn, and allocate resources more effectively, all while maintaining ethical, transparent data practices.
Behavioral Data & Its Role in Marketing
Behavioral data captures what users actually do: the clicks, scrolls, page views, sessions, and conversions that map every interaction across your digital ecosystem.
Unlike demographic or firmographic data, which describe who your users are, or attitudinal data, which suggest what they believe, behavioral data shows the truth of how they behave.
This distinction makes behavioral data the most dynamic and revealing signal in modern marketing.
It surfaces user intent, identifies friction points, and uncovers the paths people take on their journey from first touch to loyal customer.
By tracking and interpreting these interactions in real time, teams gain a living, breathing view of their audience that evolves as quickly as user behavior itself.
Types & Sources of Behavioral Data
Behavioral data comes from nearly every point of contact between a user and your brand. Each click, view, or interaction adds another clue about intent, engagement, and value. The strongest insights emerge when you connect these signals across channels.
On-Site and In-App Behavior
On-site and in-app behavioral data include the most immediate actions: page views, clicks, scroll depth, navigation paths, session length, and drop-off points.
These reveal how users explore your site or product and where they hesitate or lose interest.
Engagement with Content and Campaigns
Email opens, ad clicks, video views, and social interactions all reflect how users respond to your messaging, highlighting what resonates and drives follow-up actions across channels.
Transaction and Commerce Behavior
Product views, add-to-cart events, purchases, and abandonments capture commercial intent. These are some of the clearest signals of conversion likelihood and revenue potential.
Feature and Product Usage
Post-purchase behavior offers rich insight into customer value: which features users adopt, how frequently they engage, and which actions correlate with long-term retention or churn risk.
Offline and Cross-Channel Triggers
When available, in-store visits, event check-ins, or location data can connect digital and physical touchpoints, helping marketers form a continuous picture of the customer journey.
Enriched Behavioral Data
Combining multiple signals, like clicks, dwell time, and scroll behavior, reveals engagement intensity and intent.
Adding contextual layers such as time of day, device type, or location helps predict when and how users are most likely to act.
Challenges in Behavioral Data Collection
The more data you collect, the harder it becomes to keep it clean and consistent.
Duplicate identities, bot traffic, missing data, and cross-device fragmentation can distort insights and weaken decision-making. Investing in strong data governance and identity resolution is essential for accuracy and trust.
How to Analyze Behavioral Marketing Insights
Collecting behavioral data is only the first step. The real value comes from transforming raw signals into patterns, predictions, and action.
By analyzing how users move through your product or campaigns, marketers can uncover what drives growth, what slows it down, and where to focus next.
Here’s how to use behavioral data in marketing:
Behavioral Segmentation
Not all users engage in the same way.
Grouping users by behavior patterns, such as frequent users, dormant users, or high-intent browsers, helps tailor experiences to each group’s needs.
According to Growth-Onomics, campaigns built on behavioral segmentation can achieve 10–30% higher conversions compared to one-size-fits-all messaging.
Funnel and Path Analysis
Mapping how users progress through your funnel reveals where they succeed and where they drop off.
By examining navigation paths, session sequences, and exit points, teams can identify friction zones and optimize the steps that lead to higher completion or purchase rates.
Cohort and Retention Analysis
Cohort analysis compares groups of users who share a common trait, such as acquisition date or campaign source, to see how engagement and retention evolve over time.
It’s a powerful way to measure the long-term impact of marketing decisions and uncover which channels or features sustain loyalty.
Predictive Modeling and Propensity Scoring
By applying machine learning or statistical models, marketers can use behavioral signals to predict what users are likely to do next: whether they’ll churn, re-engage, or upgrade.
These predictive insights allow teams to prioritize outreach and personalize timing with precision.
Anomaly Detection and Trend Shifts
Sudden changes in user behavior often serve as early warnings.
A spike in drop-offs or a dip in feature usage can signal a broken experience, performance issue, or shift in audience interest.
Automated monitoring helps teams respond before small issues become widespread problems.
Behavioral Triggers and Automation
Once you understand behavior patterns, you can act on them in real time.
Set up triggers, like cart abandonment emails, onboarding nudges, or personalized homepage experiences, that respond automatically to user behavior.
This turns insights into impact, driving engagement while reducing manual effort.
Applications: Driving Growth with Behavioral Data
Once behavioral insights are in place, marketers can turn them into concrete strategies that drive growth, retention, and efficiency.
By understanding how users act, not just who they are, teams can personalize experiences, refine journeys, and optimize spend based on what actually moves the needle.
Personalization and Content Targeting
Behavioral data powers personalization that feels natural, not forced.
By analyzing browsing history, click behavior, and content preferences, marketers can tailor offers, recommendations, or creative assets to each user’s demonstrated interests.
When personalization reflects real actions rather than assumptions, it builds trust and boosts engagement.
Retargeting and Remarketing
Not every interaction ends in conversion, but behavioral retargeting helps close the loop.
Dynamic ad creative can automatically show users the products or services they viewed but didn’t purchase, keeping intent alive across channels.
When tied to behavioral thresholds (like time since last visit or cart activity), these campaigns turn lost opportunities into recoverable value.
Onboarding and Activation Flows
Early behavior is one of the strongest predictors of long-term success.
Monitoring how new users engage (which features they try, where they get stuck, or what they skip) allows teams to guide them toward key “aha” moments faster.
Adaptive onboarding sequences, in-app tips, and behavior-based nudges all help accelerate activation.
Retention and Churn Prevention
Declining activity patterns can reveal churn risk before it happens.
By tracking metrics like session frequency, feature use, or content engagement, marketers can flag at-risk users and proactively re-engage them with reminders, loyalty offers, or personalized outreach.
A small, timely intervention often saves a customer relationship.
Optimizing User Journeys and Removing Friction
When users repeatedly drop off or hesitate in specific areas, it’s often a sign of friction, whether that’s due to unclear messaging, broken UX, or irrelevant steps.
Funnel and path data highlight these pain points so teams can refine copy, simplify navigation, and reduce cognitive load, improving both satisfaction and conversion rates.
Resource Allocation and Campaign Optimization
Not all engagement is created equal. User behavior analytics show which segments or campaigns deliver the strongest downstream impact, including higher conversions, longer retention, or greater lifetime value.
With these insights, marketing teams can shift budget and focus toward the behaviors and audiences that drive the most growth.
In short, behavioral data doesn’t just describe the customer journey, it actively guides how brands shape it in real time.
Ethical Considerations & Data Governance
As behavioral data becomes more sophisticated, so does the responsibility to handle it ethically. Users expect transparency, control, and respect, and brands that deliver on those expectations build lasting trust and loyalty.
Privacy, Consent, and Transparency
Every interaction tracked should come with clear communication about how data is collected and used.
Transparent consent mechanisms, from cookie banners to preference centers, empower users to make informed choices and strengthen brand credibility in the process.
Anonymization and Data Protection
Even when consent is granted, identifiable data should be handled carefully.
Techniques like anonymization, de-identification, and aggregation help preserve analytical value while protecting user privacy.
The goal is to understand patterns, not individuals.
Regulatory Compliance
Compliance with privacy laws such as the GDPR, CCPA, and emerging regional regulations isn’t just a legal box to check, it’s a marketing advantage.
Companies that embed ethical data handling into their operations earn consumer trust and reduce long-term risk.
Transparency and accountability are core to sustaining user relationships.
Balancing Utility and Intrusion
Personalization should enhance the customer experience, not overstep it. Behavioral insights can quickly become invasive if they feel manipulative or overly precise.
Striking the right balance means using data to serve user needs, not just brand goals.
Governance and Data Quality
Good data governance ensures that behavioral insights remain accurate, representative, and fair. That means auditing data sources, correcting bias or sample skew, and validating inferences before acting on them.
Behavioral data is only as reliable as the systems and standards that manage it.
When used responsibly, behavioral data deepens relationships rather than exploiting them, allowing marketers to deliver relevance with integrity, and innovation with accountability.
[Example] Behavioral Data in Marketing
To see data in action, let’s look at how a SaaS company might use it to boost user retention and reverse churn through behavior-based interventions.
1. Detecting the Signal
User behavior analytics reveal that users who stop using Feature X within their first two weeks are 60% more likely to churn by Month 2.
The company sets up a dashboard to monitor feature usage daily and flags users whose engagement drops below a set threshold.
2. Segmenting the Audience
Two segments are defined:
Healthy users: actively using Feature X multiple times per week.
At-risk users: engaged early but showing declining or zero activity after Week 1.
3. Designing the Intervention
The marketing and product teams collaborate to create targeted nudges for the at-risk group:
An automated email highlighting how top users benefit from Feature X.
A short in-app tutorial that reintroduces the feature’s value and provides an incentive to try it again.
4. Acting on the Behavior
These messages are triggered dynamically: as soon as a user meets the “at-risk” criteria, the system deploys the re-engagement sequence automatically.
5. Measuring the Impact
After 30 days, the team compares cohorts: users who received the nudge show a 22% higher retention rate and a 35% higher likelihood of upgrading to paid plans compared to the control group.
Why It Works
By connecting usage data with automated triggers, the company transformed passive observation into proactive engagement.
Instead of reacting to churn after it happens, they used behavioral insights to predict and prevent it, turning early warning signs into growth opportunities.
Behavioral data isn’t just diagnostic; it’s prescriptive. When used thoughtfully, it closes the gap between insight and action, allowing marketers to intervene at precisely the right moment to change the outcome.
Implementation Prompts & Next Steps
Using behavioral analytics in your marketing strategy doesn’t require an overhaul, just a few focused steps to align teams, tools, and tactics. The goal is to start small, prove value, and scale as insights compound.
1. Audit Your Data Collection
Start by mapping out where and how behavioral data currently flows through your systems.
List key touch points (website interactions, app usage, campaign engagement, purchase events) and identify what’s missing.
Clean, comprehensive tracking is the foundation for every insight that follows.
2. Define High-Value Behavioral Signals
Choose two or three metrics that directly tie to growth goals, such as feature engagement, repeat logins, or cart abandonment rate.
Instrument these carefully so you can measure changes in real time and tie them to outcomes like retention or conversion.
3. Build Behavior-Based Segments
Group users by observable actions rather than static traits.
For example:
Group A: frequent users or buyers
Group B: new but inactive users
Group C: churn-risk users showing declining engagement
Launch one tailored campaign for each to validate whether different behaviors truly require different approaches.
4. Set Up Dashboards and Alerts
Use user behavior analytics tools to visualize and monitor trends across cohorts, funnels, and events.
Configure alerts to flag anomalies like sudden drops in activity, usage spikes, or changes in conversion behavior so you can investigate and act quickly.
5. Run Iterative Experiments
Pick one high-impact behavior, such as a checkout drop-off point or low engagement feature, and test a single change like new messaging, a simplified UI, or a retargeting email.
Measure, learn, and repeat. Behavioral insights improve exponentially when paired with experimentation.
Small, systematic improvements like these create a feedback loop between marketing and user behavior, helping teams stay agile, data-informed, and one step ahead of customer needs.
From Insights to Action: The Power of Behavioral Data
Behavioral data turns guesswork into guidance. By observing what users actually do, not just what they say or who they are, marketers gain a real-time window into intent, friction, and opportunity.
From segmentation and personalization to churn prevention and journey optimization, these insights transform every touchpoint into a learning loop.
When paired with ethical data practices and smart experimentation, tracking user behavior for growth can also improve the customer experience.
The takeaway is simple: behavioral data is most valuable when it drives action. Start small, stay curious, and let your users’ behavior lead the way toward sustainable growth.
The best growth teams don’t just look at averages, they study how groups of customers behave over time.
Averages might tell you that retention is holding steady, but they won’t reveal that your most recent customers are churning faster, or that last quarter’s cohort is spending more slowly than the one before.
Cohort analysis groups customers by a shared characteristic, and then tracks how those groups evolve across consistent time intervals.
By comparing outcomes like retention, engagement, or revenue period over period, you uncover patterns that aggregate metrics often obscure.
In this guide, you’ll learn:
When to use acquisition vs. behavioral cohorts
How to interpret cohort tables and retention analysis curves
Which questions cohorts answer better than traditional segmentation
How to apply cohort insights to messaging, lifecycle programs, product nudges, and budget allocation
What Is Cohort Analysis & Why It Matters
Cohort analysis is the practice of grouping customers who share a meaningful trait at a specific point in time.
For example, you may group together everyone who made their first purchase in April, and then track how their behavior unfolds in consistent intervals (days, weeks, or months since that first purchase).
Basically, instead of looking at broad averages or segments, you’re watching how groups move over time.
Cohort analysis vs segmentation:
A segment is a snapshot: “high-value shoppers” or “subscribers who opened last week’s email.”
A cohort is (usually) a time series: “customers acquired in Q2” or “users who completed onboarding within 7 days.”
With cohorts, you’re not just asking who they are but how their behavior evolves; whether they ramp up quickly, form lasting habits, or drop off early.
From a business perspective, this shift in lens unlocks several advantages:
Distinguish acquisition from retention. Cohorts clarify whether growth is driven by bringing in more customers or by getting existing ones to stick around longer.
Spot product-market fit signals. If newer cohorts retain better than older ones, it suggests your product or marketing changes are hitting the mark.
Guide lifecycle investments. Cohorts reveal exactly where drop-offs occur, whether that’s during onboarding, in months 2-3, or after a promotion ends.
Enable realistic lifetime value cohort forecasting. Instead of relying on blended averages, you can model spend and churn analysis by cohort to get more accurate projections.
Finally, cohorts make experimentation cleaner.
When you launch a change (say, a new onboarding flow or pricing strategy) you can measure its impact directly by comparing post-change cohorts against earlier baselines, while controlling for time-based effects like seasonality.
The Main Cohort Types
Not all cohorts are created equal. Depending on your goals, you might group customers by when they first arrived, what they did inside your product, or even their predicted likelihood to churn.
The three most common (and useful) types are:
1. Acquisition Cohorts (Time-Based)
These cohorts group customers by when they first interacted with your brand, whether that’s initial signup, first purchase, or first touchpoint.
They help answer questions like:
Are our newest customers retaining better than earlier ones?
Do promotion-driven cohorts lapse faster?
Which acquisition months generated the strongest downstream lifetime value cohorts?
2. Behavioral Cohorts (Event-Based)
Here, customers are grouped by milestones or actions, such as:
Completing onboarding within seven days
Using a feature three times in their first month
Making two or more purchases within 30 days
Opting into SMS updates
These cohorts reveal which behaviors correlate with long-term value and which nudges can accelerate customers toward their “aha” moment.
3. Predictive Cohorts (Model-Based)
Predictive cohorts use machine learning or rules-based models to group customers by their likelihood of future outcomes.
For example, using cohorts to forecast LTV, churn risk, or upsell readiness.
They’re particularly powerful for targeting high-impact interventions like retention offers, VIP perks, or win-back campaigns.
Where Cohorts Shine
Across all three types, cohorts provide sharper insights than averages:
Retention: Visualize survival curves to spot “cliff” periods where customers fall away.
Monetization: Track cumulative revenue to see payback periods and the lasting impact (or decay) of promotions.
Channel quality: Compare downstream metrics for customers acquired from different campaigns or offers, without relying on blunt last-click logic.
Non-Linearity and Overlap
But keep in mind that customers aren’t static: they can move between behaviors and risk levels.
That’s why cohort definitions should be consistent but flexible enough to reflect product changes. For instance, an onboarding redesign might shift which behaviors best predict retention.
How to Read a Cohort Table
Cohort tables are the bread and butter of cohort analysis, but they can feel intimidating at first glance.
Once you understand the structure, though, they become one of the most powerful ways to visualize customer behavior.
Month
Month 1
Month 2
Month 3
Month 4
Month 5
Month 6
January Cohort
100%
50%
40%
35%
30%
25%
February Cohort
100%
65%
50%
40%
35%
30%
March Cohort
100%
70%
65%
50%
40%
35%
April Cohort
100%
80%
70%
65%
50%
40%
Structure:
Rows represent cohorts; for example, everyone who made their first purchase in January, February, March, and so on.
Columns represent intervals since the anchor event, such as Week 0, Week 1, Week 2 or Month 1, Month 2, Month 3.
Cells contain the metric you’re tracking; most often retention (active rate), repeat purchase rate, or revenue per user.
This layout allows you to compare how different cohorts behave over time, and spot patterns that would be invisible in an average.
Patterns to look for:
Diagonal trends: If newer cohorts consistently perform better (or worse) than older ones, you may be seeing the impact of product improvements or acquisition channel shifts.
Early-life retention: The first 1-2 intervals are often make-or-break. A steep fade here usually points to onboarding friction.
Promotion fingerprints: Sharp spikes followed by rapid drop-off suggest discount-driven behavior rather than habit formation.
Plateaus vs. compounding: Flat cumulative revenue per cohort means limited expansion, while stair-stepped growth indicates that cross-sell or upsell strategies are working.
Normalization & denominators:
Consistency is critical. Always keep denominators the same (e.g., percent of the original cohort).
When analyzing revenue, use per-user or cumulative metrics to control for cohort size differences.
This ensures that small and large cohorts can be compared on equal footing.
Strategies & Plays Driven by Cohorts
Cohort analysis isn’t just about spotting patterns. It’s about using those patterns to shape smarter acquisition, activation, and retention strategies.
Here are some of the most effective plays for cohort analysis for ecommerce marketers.
Acquisition Quality Plays
Not all channels or campaigns produce customers of equal value. Cohorts let you compare retention, spend, and payback by acquisition source.
Identify which campaigns generate customers who stick around for 90+ days and reduce spend on those that churn early, even if the upfront CPA looks efficient.
Spot seasonal dynamics, such as holiday buyers who purchase once and vanish, and design post-purchase sequences tailored to those groups.
Onboarding Acceleration
The first days or weeks often determine whether a customer becomes long-term. Behavioral cohorts highlight who reaches critical milestones and who doesn’t.
Define cohorts around “aha” actions (e.g., creating a project, adding a payment method, completing a profile).
Use guided tours, checklists, or nudges to help lagging customers reach those milestones.
Track retention analysis curves to see how accelerating onboarding changes long-run value.
Monetization and Expansion
Cohorts also reveal where growth opportunities lie beyond the first transaction.
Create cohorts for customers who try a new product line, hit an AOV threshold, or upgrade to a subscription.
Test time-sensitive offers (like encouraging a second purchase within 21–30 days) and compare repeat rates against prior cohorts.
Monitor cumulative revenue per cohort to measure lift from cross-sell, bundling, or loyalty programs.
Churn Risk and Win-Back
Cohorts segmented by inactivity or churn risk help you prioritize interventions.
Define risk cohorts such as “no sessions in 14 days” or “no purchases in 60 days.”
Start with light-touch re-engagement (reminders, testimonials, social proof) before resorting to discounts.
Measure success by the reactivation rate and the retention curve of reactivated cohorts.
Pricing & Offer Tests
Because cohorts are anchored in time, they’re perfect for evaluating pricing and packaging changes.
Compare cohorts exposed to different price points or trial lengths.
Look beyond aggregate revenue to see whether short-term boosts come at the expense of long-term retention or payback.
B2C vs. B2B Nuances
B2C cohorts often emphasize purchase frequency, promotional impact, and early repeat behavior.
B2B cohorts focus more on behavior milestones, like inviting teammates or installing integrations, that predict renewal likelihood.
Tools, Data, and Setup
Cohort analysis only works if the data foundation is solid. Before you can run sophisticated plays, you need consistent tracking, clear definitions, and the right workflow in place.
Data Foundation
Event tracking: Use clean, consistent naming for your anchor event (e.g., first purchase, signup) and any key milestones. Ambiguity here leads to messy cohorts.
Identity resolution: Stitch sessions, devices, and channels into unified profiles so you can follow a customer’s journey across touchpoints.
Time buckets: Choose clear intervals (weekly or monthly) that align with your buying cycle. For fast-moving eCommerce, weekly may be best; for subscription businesses, monthly is often more telling.
Definitions to Standardize
Without standardized definitions, cohort metrics quickly become unreliable. Make sure your team aligns on:
Cohort anchors: What starts the clock: first purchase, signup, or another trigger?
Inclusion rules: Who counts as “new” versus “returning”?
Inactivity windows & reactivation criteria: At what point does a customer count as churned, and when do they re-enter?
Metric definitions: What exactly is an “active” or “retained” user? Are values measured per user or per account?
Workflow & Governance
A repeatable workflow keeps cohorts actionable rather than academic.
Instrument events
Validate data quality
Establish baseline cohorts
Launch experiments
Read results on new cohorts
Iterate
Add guardrails to avoid common pitfalls:
Use sampling checks so small cohorts don’t produce noisy conclusions.
Respect customer experience with frequency caps and preference centers when triggering cohort-based messaging.
Tooling Landscape (Vendor-Neutral)
You don’t need a specific platform to get started, but you do need the right categories of tools:
Web/app analytics: For basic cohort tables and explorations. For example, consider a GA4 cohort exploration for retention.
Product analytics: For behavioral and predictive cohorts, consider product analytics cohort playbooks with the ability to overlay charts by segment.
Marketing automation/journey builders: To act on cohorts in real time. For example, nudging “users who didn’t reach a given milestone by Day 7.”
Cohorts in Measurement & Forecasting
Cohort analysis isn’t just for diagnosing problems. It’s a powerful tool for measurement, forecasting, and communicating results at the executive level.
By anchoring customer behavior over time, cohorts give you cleaner comparisons and more reliable projections than averages ever could.
Experimentation
When you launch a new initiative, whether it’s a pricing test, onboarding flow, or marketing offer, cohorts create a natural before-and-after view.
By anchoring on the launch date, you can compare users acquired after the change to earlier cohorts, isolating its impact while controlling for seasonality and other time-based effects.
Attribution Complement
Attribution models help answer how customers converted by mapping the path of touches along the journey.
Cohorts answer what happens after: do those customers stick, grow, and pay back?
Together, attribution and cohorts provide a full picture: one approach for acquisition efficiency, the other for long-term value.
Forecasting and Budgeting
Cohort-level LTV curves and payback charts let you project revenue more realistically.
Instead of relying on blended averages, you can model how specific cohorts spend and churn over time.
This prevents a common pitfall: over-investing in channels that look cheap upfront but produce weak, short-lived customers.
Board-Level Storytelling
Cohort visuals also resonate at the executive and board level.
A single chart showing cumulative revenue by cohort versus CAC can illustrate improving unit economics, or highlight when acquisition quality has slipped.
It’s a clear way to demonstrate progress, justify budget allocation, and keep stakeholders aligned.
Implementation Considerations
Even the best cohort strategy can fall apart without the right cadence, metrics, and governance.
To keep insights consistent and actionable, teams should align on how often to review cohorts, which KPIs to track, and how to avoid common pitfalls.
Cadence
Weekly: Focus on early-life retention and activation milestones; the critical leading indicators of long-term value.
Monthly: Review cumulative revenue, payback trends, and emerging differences across acquisition sources.
Quarterly: Reassess cohort anchors, behavior definitions, and predictive features to ensure they still reflect how customers interact with your product.
KPIs by Objective
Acquire: 30/60/90-day active rate, first-to-second purchase conversion, time to second purchase.
Activate: “Aha” milestone completion rate by Day X, median time to value.
Monetize: Cumulative revenue per user, attach/expansion rate, average orders per user by interval.
Retain: Survival or retention rates at key intervals (e.g., Month 3, Month 6), churn analysis by risk cohort.
Win-back: Reactivation rate and post-reactivation retention curves.
Common Pitfalls
Overfitting: Small cohorts can produce noisy data; smooth trends before making decisions.
Shifting definitions: Changing what counts as “active” or “retained” mid-stream without backfilling history breaks comparability.
Promo distortion: Don’t mistake short-lived spikes from discounts or promos as durable gains.
Denominator drift: Watch for exclusions (like refunds or cancellations) that alter the base and skew results.
Change Management
Keep everyone on the same page with clear documentation and governance.
A simple one-pager listing definitions, SQL/event names, and links to dashboards helps teams avoid confusion and ensures that cohort metrics remain consistent across the organization.
The Power of Cohorts
Cohort analysis shifts marketing from static averages to dynamic trajectories.
By anchoring on meaningful events and tracking how outcomes unfold over time, you can see exactly where value is created (or lost) and tie your interventions to measurable improvements in retention, monetization, and payback.
The playbook is simple but powerful: start with crisp definitions, set consistent intervals, and build a baseline dashboard. From there, run targeted experiments, measure how new cohorts respond compared to prior ones, and keep iterating.
The reward is more than just sharper insights: it’s a durable growth system.
Cohorts give you the confidence to double down on channels and behaviors that create lasting value, while avoiding the trap of chasing short-term spikes that fade away just as quickly.
The products that thrive aren’t just the ones people try once, they’re the ones people return to again and again.
Habitual usage is the strongest signal of loyalty, product market fit, and long-term growth.
If your app, platform, or tool becomes part of a user’s daily rhythm, you’ve built something far more powerful than short-term popularity.
User stickiness, defined simply as the ratio of Daily Active Users (DAU) to Monthly Active Users (MAU), measures how often your customers engage with your product on a regular basis.
A higher percentage signals stronger habitual engagement and a greater likelihood that your product will retain users, monetize effectively, and scale sustainably.
In this article, we’ll break down exactly what user stickiness is, why it matters, how to measure user stickiness, and proven strategies to improve it. We’ll also cover implementation tips to ensure your data is accurate and actionable.
By the end, you’ll have a clear playbook for making your product not just popular, but sticky.
What Is User Stickiness
At its simplest, user stickiness is a way of measuring how often your customers keep coming back.
Stickiness vs. Retention
As we define this key metric, it’s important to distinguish stickiness from retention.
Retention shows whether a user keeps coming back over time; think of it as continuity. Stickiness, on the other hand, captures frequency: how regularly users engage once they’ve signed up.
A product can have strong retention but low stickiness if people only log in occasionally, or high stickiness but poor retention if usage is intense but short-lived.
Together, these two metrics tell a more complete story of engagement.
Why User Stickiness Matters
From a business perspective, stickiness is powerful because frequent engagement compounds value.
Users who return daily or weekly are more likely to:
Stay loyal and less likely to churn.
Discover and use more features, which increases monetization opportunities.
Deliver better ROI on acquisition spend, since converting them yields longer-term payoff.
In other words, stickiness doesn’t just show how popular your product is, it shows whether it’s embedded in your users’ routines, which is the real driver of sustainable growth.
How to Measure User Stickiness
The most widely used way to measure user stickiness is through the Daily Average Users (DAU) / Monthly Average Users (MAU) ratio, also known as the DAU/MAU stickiness ratio.
Stickiness ratio = DAU ÷ MAU
For example, if you have 5,000 DAU and 20,000 MAU, your stickiness is 25%. That means one in four of your monthly users engage with your product on a daily basis, a strong sign of habitual usage.
While DAU/MAU is the standard, it’s not the only option. Depending on your product and usage cycle, you may want to track:
WAU/MAU (Weekly Active Users ÷ Monthly Active Users) to capture weekly engagement patterns.
Cohort analysis, which groups users by signup date or acquisition channel and tracks how their stickiness changes over time. This can help you see whether new features or campaigns improve frequency of use.
To track these ratios, most teams rely on a mix of analytics and business intelligence (BI) tools.
Popular options include:
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for top-level reporting.
Custom dashboards that integrate DAU and MAU data from multiple sources.
BI platforms like Looker, Tableau, or Mode for deeper analysis and visualization.
The key is to choose a measurement approach that reflects your product’s natural usage cadence and provides consistent, comparable data over time.
Stickiness Benchmarks By App Type
So what counts as “good” stickiness? The answer depends heavily on your industry.
Different types of apps naturally invite different usage cadences:
Social and messaging apps: 50-80%. Users often check in multiple times per day, so these products typically see the highest stickiness ratios.
Productivity tools:40–60%. Daily work habits drive strong engagement, but usage may taper on weekends or holidays.
Fintech and e-commerce apps: 15–30%. People don’t manage finances or shop every day, so stickiness is lower, but still meaningful when compared to peers.
These ranges offer helpful context, but it’s important not to treat them as hard rules. Upward movement in your own numbers is usually more valuable than hitting an external target.
For example, a fintech app with a stickiness rate growing from 12% to 20% is often in a stronger position than one stuck at 25%.
To make benchmarks actionable, start by establishing your internal baseline (what’s typical for your product today) and then measure progress against that.
External comparisons should serve as guardrails, not goals, to help you calibrate expectations and spot opportunities for improvement.
Key Drivers of User Stickiness
If stickiness shows how deeply your product is woven into users’ routines, the natural question is: what makes people come back again and again?
While every product is different, a few common drivers tend to make the biggest impact:
Onboarding Clarity and Speed
First impressions matter.
A confusing or drawn-out onboarding flow can derail new users before they ever form a habit. Quick wins and early exposure to value are critical.
Performance and UX Reliability
People won’t return if your product is slow, buggy, or unintuitive. Smooth, reliable performance is table stakes for building trust and repeat usage.
Relevant Personalization
Customized recommendations, tailored dashboards, or context-aware reminders help your product feel indispensable rather than generic.
Habit-Forming Features
Streaks, reminders, daily dashboards, or other lightweight nudges create rhythms that encourage users to return at predictable intervals.
Value-Rich Content or Functionality
Ultimately, people stick around for utility. Whether it’s fresh content, powerful features, or unique insights, the core value needs to keep evolving.
Feedback Loops and Iteration
Products that improve based on user feedback reinforce the sense that engagement leads to a better experience, which in turn drives more engagement.
Together, these drivers create a reinforcing cycle: onboarding unlocks early value, performance and personalization sustain it, and habit-forming features plus ongoing improvements deepen loyalty over time.
Strategies to Boost Stickiness
Once you know where your product stands, the next step is figuring out how to move the needle.
Improving user stickiness isn’t about one big initiative. It’s about layering small, targeted improvements that make your product more engaging over time.
Here are some of the most effective tactics:
Segment Your Users
Not all customers behave the same way. Segmenting by behavior, persona, or lifecycle stage allows you to tailor messaging, features, and nudges for maximum relevance.
Streamline Onboarding
Help new users find value fast. Highlight “aha” moments early so they form a habit before friction or confusion sets in.
Personalize Content and Reminders
Personalize content and reminders – Use behavioral data to deliver timely notifications, recommendations, or updates that feel helpful rather than intrusive.
Nudge Feature Usage
Tooltips, badges, and progressive disclosure can gently introduce users to underutilized features that deepen engagement.
Act On User Feedback
Monitor drop-off points, support tickets, and surveys to identify what frustrates users most and fix it quickly.
Run Experiments
Test variations of messaging, workflows, or features to see what improves frequency of use. Even small tweaks can make a measurable difference.
Track and Iterate
Stickiness gains often come from compounding improvements. Keep measuring, learning, and refining to sustain progress.
Think of these as building blocks: segmentation helps you understand who you’re serving, onboarding gets them to value, personalization and nudges keep them coming back, and feedback plus experimentation ensure your product keeps evolving in step with user needs.
Implementation Considerations
Measuring stickiness may seem straightforward, but the way you implement it can make the difference between meaningful insight and misleading numbers.
A few key considerations help ensure accuracy and actionability:
Consistent Definitions
Align on what counts as a Daily Active User (DAU) and Monthly Active User (MAU) across all analytics tools.
If one platform defines “active” as any login while another requires a completed action, your ratios will be impossible to compare.
Seasonality and Campaign Effects
Expect spikes around holidays, launches, or major campaigns. Build in context when interpreting changes so you don’t mistake a temporary surge for a lasting trend.
Segment-Level Analysis
Stickiness isn’t one-size-fits-all. Break it down by cohort, persona, or acquisition channel to see which groups are forming habits, and which ones aren’t.
This can reveal whether your product resonates more strongly with certain audiences.
Complementary Metrics
Stickiness is powerful on its own, but it’s most useful when paired with retention, activation, and lifetime value (LTV).
Together, these metrics show not only how often users engage, but also whether they stick around, find value, and ultimately contribute to growth.
Handled carefully, stickiness becomes more than a single ratio. It becomes a practical lens for understanding user behavior and driving smarter decisions.
Bringing It All Together
User stickiness is more than just a ratio. It’s one of the clearest signals of engagement, product-market fit, and long-term growth potential.
By measuring how often people return, you gain insight into whether your product is truly becoming part of their daily or weekly routines.
The good news: stickiness isn’t fixed.
With consistent measurement, thoughtful experimentation, and a commitment to iteration, you can steadily strengthen the habits that keep users coming back.
At the end of the day, popularity fades, but habits endure.
The most resilient products aren’t the most popular ones. They’re the stickiest ones.
Audiences no longer meet brands in a single place.
One moment, it’s a quick scroll past a sponsored Instagram post. The next, it’s reading a media mention in an industry outlet, or opening a company’s newsletter.
These interactions are fragmented, fleeting, and scattered across countless channels.
The PESO model unites Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned media to help marketers turn disconnected touchpoints into cohesive, strategic campaigns.
Instead of treating each channel as a silo, PESO shows how they can reinforce and amplify one another for greater impact.
In this article, we’ll break down what the PESO model is, explore each of its four components, and show why integration matters. We’ll also outline a practical implementation framework, map key KPIs, highlight common pitfalls, and offer best practices to ensure success.
Whether you’re just starting with PESO or looking to refine your approach, you’ll leave with a clear roadmap for putting the model into action.
What Is the PESO Model & Its Origin
The PESO model is a communications framework that brings together four types of media: Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned.
Instead of treating each channel as an isolated tactic, PESO helps marketers design campaigns where these elements reinforce one another.
The concept was popularized in 2014 by Gini Dietrich, founder of the communications blog Spin Sucks.
Dietrich introduced PESO as a way to move beyond the old silos of “advertising versus PR” and reflect the reality of the modern digital landscape, where lines between channels blur.
For example, a blog post (Owned) might be promoted with ads (Paid), spark conversation on social media (Shared), and eventually be cited in a news story (Earned).
In today’s fragmented environment, where audiences discover brands through a mix of feeds, mentions, and direct brand touchpoints, the PESO model provides a structured approach.
It gives organizations a common language for planning integrated strategies, while also offering a practical map for how to amplify reach, credibility, and impact across platforms.
The Four Components Explained
The PESO model is built on four distinct but complementary types of media. Each plays a unique role in shaping how audiences discover, engage with, and trust your brand.
Understanding the strengths and limitations of each component is the first step toward designing an integrated campaign.
Paid Media
Paid media includes advertising and sponsored placements; anything your brand pays to distribute. Think search ads, social ads, display banners, or sponsored posts.
The main advantage is precision: you can target audiences by demographics, interests, or behaviors and scale visibility quickly.
Pros: Highly targeted, scalable, delivers fast results.
Cons: Costly over time, subject to ad fatigue, and easily tuned out if the creative doesn’t resonate.
Earned Media
Earned media is coverage you don’t pay for, such as press mentions, influencer shout-outs, or third-party endorsements.
It builds credibility because the message comes from someone other than the brand.
Pros: Carries strong trust and authority, often more persuasive than advertising.
Cons: Hard to control, unpredictable in timing, and inconsistent in volume.
Shared Media
Shared media refers to the engagement that happens on social platforms: likes, shares, comments, and user-generated content.
It thrives on authenticity and the ability to reach new audiences through organic amplification.
Pros: Authentic, community-driven, often viral in nature.
Cons: Algorithm dependence, reputational risk if negative sentiment spreads, and limited control over reach.
Owned Media
Owned media covers the channels your brand controls, like your website, blog, email newsletter, or resource library.
It’s the foundation of your narrative and provides long-term value.
Pros: Full control over messaging and format, evergreen potential, valuable for SEO.
Cons: Requires consistent resourcing and effort, slower to scale without amplification.
Together, these four components form the building blocks of an integrated media framework to help you reap PESO model benefits. When orchestrated intentionally, they create a cycle where each type amplifies the others.
PESO Model Integration Strategy
Each component of PESO has value on its own, but the real power comes from weaving them together.
When Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned media operate in sync, they generate a compounding effect that no single channel can achieve.
For example:
You publish a white paper on your website (Owned)
It is then shared on social channels (Shared)
It sparks discussion online and catches the attention of journalists or bloggers (Earned)
That coverage can then be promoted with paid campaigns to reach an even wider audience (Paid)
Each step reinforces the others, creating a loop of visibility, credibility, and engagement.
This integrated approach is more than just “nice to have.” In a landscape where audiences encounter brands in fragmented, unpredictable ways, orchestration ensures consistent messaging and maximizes ROI and PESO model benefits.
Instead of chasing results from isolated tactics, you build a connected system where every piece of content contributes to a larger media strategy.
Ultimately, PESO integration turns scattered touchpoints into a unified experience, amplifying reach, deepening trust, and delivering results greater than the sum of their parts.
How to Implement the PESO Model
Understanding the PESO model is one thing; putting it into practice is another.
The most effective way to execute an integrated campaign is to approach it as a phased strategy, starting with what you already have and layering on support from each media type.
1. Audit Your Assets
Begin by reviewing what you already own across PESO categories.
Do you have a strong blog library? A social presence with active engagement? Recent press coverage or ad campaigns?
This inventory highlights strengths to build on and gaps to address.
2. Select a Campaign Hub
Choose a high-impact owned asset to serve as the centerpiece of your campaign.
This could be a research report, a webinar, or a long-form blog post; something substantial enough to anchor the rest of your efforts.
3. Build the PESO Cascade
Once you have your hub, plan how to extend it across channels:
Shared: Post highlights, snippets, or graphics on social media to drive organic discussion.
Earned: Pitch the asset to media outlets, bloggers, or industry partners for coverage and third-party validation.
Paid: Amplify the best-performing content through targeted ads to reach new audiences and reinforce awareness.
4. Coordinate Across Teams
Messaging, timing, and creative elements should be consistent across all channels.
Align content calendars, synchronize agency or team contributions, and make sure every touchpoint reinforces the same narrative.
5. Launch, Monitor, and Iterate
Roll out the campaign and track performance in real time. Use early results to optimize distribution, adjust creative, or rebalance your paid budget.
Treat PESO in modern marketing as an ongoing cycle: each campaign should inform and improve the next.
When executed with intention, this framework transforms a single asset into a multi-channel engine, maximizing reach and ROI through integrated orchestration.
Measurement & KPI Mapping
An integrated PESO media strategy is only as strong as its ability to prove results.
Each media type comes with its own performance indicators, and tracking them consistently is key to understanding impact.
Paid Media Metrics
Impressions and reach
Click-through rate (CTR)
Cost per acquisition (CPA) or return on investment (ROI)
While these metrics provide useful channel-specific insights, the real value of PESO lies in integrated measurement.
For example:
Traffic from earned or shared placements boosting conversions on owned assets.
Cross-channel conversions where a customer first sees an ad, then engages with social, before converting on the website.
Aggregated PESO ROI that reflects the interplay of channels rather than isolated performance.
A unified dashboard that pulls in metrics from advertising platforms, web analytics, PR coverage, and social monitoring makes these connections visible.
It shifts measurement from siloed reporting to holistic insights, helping teams optimize campaigns and demonstrate how PESO integration drives business outcomes.
Common Pitfalls & Best Practices
Even with a solid framework, many organizations stumble when rolling out PESO campaigns.
Here are four common challenges, and the best practices that prevent them.
Teams often manage Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned channels independently, which leads to missed opportunities for amplification.
Instead, use a synchronized planning calendar that includes all channels. This ensures campaigns launch in concert and every channel supports the same initiative.
Inconsistent Messaging -> Consistent Brand
Without alignment, the same campaign may be communicated differently across platforms, weakening impact and confusing audiences.
Instead, establish a consistent brand voice and messaging framework. Provide guidelines and shared content assets so every channel reflects the same narrative.
Narrow Metrics -> Cross-Channel Metrics
Measuring each channel in isolation (clicks here, impressions there) ignores the compounded impact of integration.
Instead, track cross-channel metrics in a unified dashboard. Focus on outcomes like conversions, brand lift, or customer lifetime value, not just single-channel KPIs.
Poor Coordination -> Cross-Functional Processes
When agencies, internal teams, and stakeholders work separately, campaigns can stall or fragment.
Instead, build cross-functional processes that foster collaboration, including regular check-ins, shared dashboards, and clear ownership of tasks.
By anticipating these pitfalls and adopting best practices, organizations can avoid wasted effort and unlock the full potential of the PESO model.
Turning Strategy Into Action
The PESO model isn’t just a theory: it’s a practical roadmap for creating campaigns that resonate across today’s fragmented media landscape.
It works best when Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned channels are intentionally orchestrated, not run in isolation.
A simple way to get started is with a pilot campaign. Choose one strong owned asset (a blog, a report, or a webinar) and map its progression through the PESO cycle: share it socially, pitch it for coverage, and amplify it with targeted ads. Monitor the results, then refine and repeat.
By taking this structured approach, brands can transform scattered efforts into a cohesive system where every channel amplifies the others.
Seven Reasons Your Awareness Campaigns Aren’t Driving Revenue
As marketers, our number one priority is new customer acquisition. This only happens if you plant the seed for acquisition via awareness — that top-of-funnel that marketers love and hate.
If you’re reading this, there’s a strong chance you’re undervaluing your awareness campaigns right now.
But what does “undervalued” mean? I’m saying that you aren’t attributing full revenue credit to those campaigns.
Here’s some common reasons that might be happening.
Don’t blame me if this hurts.
1. Lower-Funnel Bias
Let’s face it — we all have KPIs we're supposed to hit, and whether I'm answering to myself, the CEO, or clients, I need to prove ROI from my marketing spend.
Marketing is always the first department that gets cut. That's never the right choice — we all know that — but we’re under pressure to show provable revenue growth, at risk of being defunded or even fired. This creates bias in our reporting.
That pressure leads us to highlight the things we know are driving revenue growth. And that's always bottom-of-funnel campaigns that we have clear last-click attribution on.
These ads are the closest, most-provable, most-easily-understood answer for the eternal question: “Which ads are driving revenue?”
To the untrained eye using a clicks-only model, it looks like my lower-funnel campaigns are the only ones that are working. But I know that's not true; these campaigns only work because I spent 60% of my budget on awareness campaigns actually filling the funnel.
But until Clicks + Deterministic Views, I never had a clear picture of how well my upper-funnel campaigns are driving revenue.
Your stakeholders, however, look at that 60% of your budget that has no attribution and want explanations as to why it “isn’t driving revenue.”
Here’s what happens:
You start cutting budget from top-of-funnel because you don't have data on how well it's working.
You start putting that budget towards bottom-funnel because on paper, bottom-funnel looks like the only thing that's working.
But this is a self-destructive prophecy. The only reason bottom-of-funnel is working is because you were putting money into top-of-funnel — building that awareness and interest that actually resulted in capturing conversions later.
Put simply: your awareness campaigns aren't driving revenue because you’re not measuring them on revenue.
2. You Can’t Out-Tactic Human Psychology
Very few of us sell things that can be purchased instantaneously from the moment someone sees a picture of it.
So why do we keep pretending like we can?
I see this all the time. Driven by hubris, operators assume their products can be sold via Meta ads on a one-day, clicks-only basis. That privilege is limited basically to cheap, easy-to-understand, or delicious things.
If you’re measuring all your ads on a one-day clicks-only basis, you’re essentially saying your product is an impulse decision only. You’re saying the only ads you want to run are the digital equivalent of candy in the checkout line at the supermarket.
I’m sure you value your product higher than candy in the checkout line; very few of us sell things that someone sees and immediately says, "I want that right now."
So why is one-day-clicks-only the most common attribution model we use to measure our marketing performance?
In reality, sometimes you have to talk to people a lot about things before they understand, some of us are selling products that are complicated, expensive, or genuinely disruptive. We have to tell people many times and explain over a long period why they should buy it.
So why am I measuring my awareness campaigns, consideration campaigns, and conversion campaigns on a model that's only useful for measuring candy in the checkout line? It doesn't make sense.
If I sell a product that people have to think about before they buy, I have to build a campaign and marketing structure that does the work of building education, trust, interest, and consideration.
You can't out-tactic basic human psychology unless you sell candy. It's time we stop pretending otherwise and start measuring our marketing campaigns like real marketers.
3. Engagement Does Not Equal Sales
We all know this one: likes don't necessarily translate into sales.
For lack of a better way of tracking upper-funnel or organic impact, I often find myself relying on vanity metrics like engagement, view-through rates, or sometimes even likes to understand if a campaign is driving those top-of-funnel awareness measurements I'm looking for.
The problem? People who engage are not necessarily the same as people who buy.
Actually, I'd go further and say most people who engage are never going to buy. And a lot of people who do buy don't even remember what they actually saw that inspired them to buy.
That's kind of the dirty secret of post-purchase surveys, right? They remember the loudest thing or the most recent thing that brought them to purchase instead of the full actual journey that got them there.
So using engagement metrics isn't the best way for tracking that silent majority of viewers who end up going on to buy.
It's important that you have a clear model for attaching a view to the later revenue it generated. Because if you’re building an entire creative experimentation structure off of vanity metrics like engagements or views, you’re going to build creative for vanity metrics and engagements instead of building creative that drives revenue later.
It's really important that you’re following the right signal when building awareness creative.
4. Relying on Platform Data
If you're relying exclusively on platform data — Meta, TikTok, Snap, looking only at their ads managers interfaces — you're only getting half the story on the performance of your ad campaigns.
Unless your entire digital funnel, including your awareness, mid-funnel, conversion, and actual conversion events, happens inside that one platform, you're missing critical context.
Think about it this way: let's say you're running a bunch of Pinterest campaigns. They're getting a lot of engagement, a lot of interest, even driving click-throughs, but they're not driving a lot of attributable sales. Those might look like campaigns that aren't doing well if you're only looking at platform data in Pinterest.
However, if you run a quick correlation analysis, you might see that actually, your Google and Facebook performance improved in the periods after you ran those Pinterest campaigns.
Now you know those two things are happening separately, in a vacuum, but you can't actually connect them together without some sort of first-party data, like what you'd get from Northbeam.
Without that kind of data, you might undervalue those Pinterest campaigns and how well they're driving awareness. You'd cut budget from them and then watch your Meta campaigns suffer later down the road; that's exactly the kind of thing we’re trying to avoid.
You need a scientific, full-strategy view of how all your channels interact with each other. Because especially for awareness campaigns, oftentimes awareness happens on one channel like YouTube, but purchase happens somewhere else like Google or Meta.
5. You Need More Than Just MMM and Incrementality
Some people only measure the success of their awareness campaigns based on media mix modeling results or incrementality testing.
But that's only two-thirds of the story.
You need those models to help you understand what channels are actually driving revenue, what spend is important, which campaigns or channels you're testing are actually driving incremental new customer awareness and generation.
But you really need to have MMM, incrementality, and MTA for every stage of your funnel if you want maximum visibility into how well your awareness is working.
Specifically for awareness campaigns, without a model like C+DV for measuring the performance of actual creatives, you don't have that insight. You need creative-level insight into which awareness campaigns are actually driving revenue for your business.
Otherwise, you'll spend forever doing campaign testing, running incrementality tests, and rerunning your MMM models when really what you need is to optimize your awareness campaigns as effectively as your mid-funnel or conversion campaigns.
That's why we built C_D+V: to help you understand which specific assets are responsible for generating your revenue at the top of funnel.
6. Creative Is Targeting, Now
Most of us still misunderstand the massive shift that happened since the launch of the algorithmic-first approach to social media — something that really started in earnest right after COVID.
TikTok pioneered this, but what they did was fundamentally change how social media works: from a friends-first feed into an algorithmic-first feed.
That means the way you get in front of people is not via targeting selections within the platforms themselves. The way you get in front of people — and the way you psychologically teach them about your product — is by making creative that gets their attention.
Instead of thinking of the internet, especially an algorithmic feed like TikTok, as a collection of demographics (young people, old people, Gen Z, Millennials, people who like cats, people who like dogs), you should think of it as communities of people who consume similar content.
Content that looks similar to each other. Content that follows a specific visual energy, style, or pacing.
That's the new way you communicate with people.
The only way you can really value creative as a discovery, top-of-funnel tool is by understanding which ads are driving the sales.
This sort of strategy requires you to think: How do I make content that travels through the algorithm and gets in front of the people I know will like my product and my message?
7. Brand Versus Strategy
Awareness isn’t about beating people over the head with your brand identity anymore. It's about speaking to them where they're at; the algorithm changed this.
Every subset of your audience is going to think differently about your product. You need to meet them where they are, and if you have no real data outside of engagement metrics, you don't know how these ads are actually being received.
So often we prioritize brand identity in our marketing when we should be prioritizing our strategic vision. I talked earlier about how you really get in front of people through creative testing and different types of creative; that means you need to change the way you're approaching your brand standards and brand identity in your ads.
Think about it: if you sell protein powder, there are going to be bodybuilders.
There are going to be ballerinas.
People who just need a little bit more protein in their life.
People trying to recover from eating disorders.
Athletes.
Grandmas and grandpas.
Dads.
All sorts of people who need protein powder.
Why do you think one message would work for all of these people when we live in such a fragmented, decentralized, algorithm-driven internet?
You need to say, "Okay, I'm going to adjust my brand to fit the styles of communication that all these different demographics actually use and respond to."
Instead of saying, "No, we only use this color," or "We only use this type of model," or "Our visuals have to be up to this certain standard," ask yourself:
For each subset of people on the internet that I want to communicate with, what sort of content works best for getting that person's attention?
It does not cheapen your brand to change the way your brand appears on the internet.
The most important thing is that the people online who are watching your ads feel like the product is for them.
How do you achieve that? By meeting them where they're at.
If you've ever rejected an ad because you felt it wasn't up to your brand standards, you're already damaging your awareness performance.
Instead of thinking about your ads from a brand perspective — "Does this creative fit my brand guidelines? Does it fit my style?" — ask yourself: Does this ad creative reach out to and have an impact on the people I want it to reach?
And the only way you can measure that is by using models that attach that performance back to revenue generated.
Try out Clicks + Deterministic Views now and start getting that awareness revenue you deserve.
Omnilux, the world leader in medical-grade LED light therapy, partnered with Northbeam and Pinterest to transform its digital marketing performance. By leveraging Northbeam’s Clicks + Deterministic Views (C+DV) model, Omnilux was able to better understand the impact of its Pinterest ad views on real business results: seeing a 659% lift in ROAS, a 728% increase in transactions, and a 671% lift in revenue compared to a traditional clicks-only model.
The challenge
Founded in 2003 and based in Napa, CA, Omnilux is a trusted name in skincare technology, known for its flagship product, the Omnilux Contour Face. While the company had built a strong reputation among dermatologists and skincare professionals worldwide, it faced a pressing challenge: identifying cost-effective channels that could reliably generate incremental demand and revenue.
As Omnilux prepared for the competitive 2025 holiday season, the team needed confidence in which channels were most efficient at driving purchases. Their goal was ambitious yet clear: achieve 3x ROAS on a 1-day attribution window—a benchmark critical for scaling growth profitably.
The solution
Wanting to better understand Pinterest’s role in the customer journey, Omnilux partnered with Northbeam to test Clicks + Deterministic Views, an industry-leading attribution model that goes beyond traditional clicks-only models by layering in verified impression & view data directly from participating ad platforms.
These platform events are combined with Northbeam’s industry-leading, first-party pixel and order data to provide a complete and accurate view of how marketing actually drives conversions. Unlike traditional “view-through” attribution, Northbeam links views deterministically, meaning every impression tied to a conversion is verified, not inferred.
Working closely with both Northbeam and Pinterest, Omnilux was able to quickly implement C+DV and begin measuring campaigns. This collaborative approach allowed the team to directly attribute both clicks and views to transaction data, providing unprecedented visibility into how Pinterest drives revenue.
The actual ad creative used on Pinterest and optimized with Clicks + Deterministic Views.
The results
The results were game-changing:
659% lift in ROAS
728% increase in transactions
671% increase in revenue
Significant lift in conversions among new-to-file customers
Beyond the numbers, Omnilux gained a qualitative advantage: a clear, data-backed understanding of Pinterest’s role in driving net-new demand. The marketing team was able to shift spend more efficiently, validate Pinterest as a growth channel, and streamline internal decision-making with trusted attribution.
“Northbeam’s partnership with Pinterest gave us a new level of clarity into how view-based engagements translate into real revenue. It’s been a game-changer for our strategy heading into the holiday season.” — Caleb Orion, Director of Acquisition & Ecommerce, Omnilux
Why Northbeam?
Unlike other attribution tools that rely solely on last-click models, Northbeam’s privacy-preserving device graph and deterministic data integrations deliver a truer picture of channel impact. For Omnilux, this meant cutting through the noise, eliminating wasted spend, and doubling down on what works.
Northbeam is pleased to announce Clicks + Deterministic Views (C+DV), a new attribution model now available in Northbeam.
C+DV takes verified impressions and view data directly from participating ad platforms and combines them with Northbeam’s first-party performance data.
Advertisers can use C+DV to measure how ad impressions and views influence conversions. This is “viewthrough” conversion measurement done deterministically, which means every impression tied to a conversion is verified, not inferred.
Put simply: you can now measure the impact of upper-funnel campaigns more accurately, whereas before advertisers struggled to measure those campaigns with clicks-focused models.
Clicks + Deterministic View solves a huge blind spot that plagues modern advertising, paving the way for a new era of growth marketing.
The problem: clicks-only has a blind spot
Clicks-only measurement is biased towards campaigns at the bottom of the funnel. This obscures the impact of your vital awareness campaigns.
If you’ve ever managed a digital marketing budget, you’ve probably fallen for this destructive bias.
It goes like this: you run amazing awareness campaigns on TikTok, Snap, and CTV. On these platforms people don't always click through immediately. The content performs great, engagement is solid, brand mentions are up, and revenue begins to climb across all your other channels.
But according to your attribution dashboard? Those awareness campaigns are basically worthless, as they aren’t connected to any measurable revenue via click behaviors.
The longer you ignore or undervalue your awareness campaigns, the sooner the performance of your bottom-of-funnel conversion campaigns dry up. This leads to further consolidation of budget to lower funnel campaigns, which creates a self-destructive cycle that eventually kills the ad account – and maybe even your business.
Before C+DV, marketers focused on clicks and not views because clicks used to be the most reliable measure for proving revenue.
It's like being a basketball coach and only focusing on stats about who scored the final basket, while completely ignoring all the assists, steals, and defensive plays that made it possible.
The marketing environment: attention is shifting
Media consumption is constantly changing, and marketers seeking competitive CPMs are looking to these new channels for efficiency. Yet many of the rising new channels are difficult to measure exclusively with click-based attribution.
As marketers, our goal is to get our message in front of the right people at the right time (in a measurable way, I’d argue.) As attention shifts to new channels, it’s our job to follow. So where are people going?
The short answer: video. Video-first, algorithmic-led social platforms lead in time spent on-app by users, with YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram dominating the field.
TikTok continues to lead the field in users’ time spent on app. The algorithm-driven discovery model of TikTok’s feed has sweeping influence on other social media, all of whom are launching similar feeds. Users love TikTok, and they love video – as marketers, we must react.
But how do you reliably measure the performance impact of these emerging video channels?
The solution: a different type of viewthrough model
As any marketer knows, videos drive considerably less clicks than static ads, but are massive for driving discovery and awareness.
Growth marketers needed a reliable model for measuring how these emerging placements drive revenue without clicks: C+DV is perfectly positioned to help you take advantage of this new media environment.
So what makes Clicks + Deterministic Views different? Instead of making educated guesses about what happened (like most view-through attribution models do), C+DV actually knows what happened.
We built direct integrations with the major platforms (Meta, TikTok, Snap, Pinterest, Axon, Vibe, and MNTN) to get verified impression data. Not modeled data. Not estimated data. The actual "yes, this specific person saw this specific ad" data.
Then we match that against our first-party pixel and order data using exact identifiers: order IDs, hashed emails, login data. When we say an impression led to a conversion, we can prove it.
This is called “deterministic” attribution, where other viewthrough modeling is “probabilistic.”
The difference between deterministic and probabilistic attribution:
Deterministic (what we do): Uses verified identifiers to directly connect an ad impression to a conversion. It's like having security camera footage.
Probabilistic (what everyone else does): Uses statistical models to guess which ad drove a conversion based on signals like IP address and device type. It's like relying on eyewitness accounts.
Early results from beta testers:
We've been testing this with select customers, and the numbers are shocking:
A luggage brand saw a 283% increase in attributed transactions once they could properly track their TikTok impact - allowing them to more accurately value TikTok in their paid digital funnel
A CPG company discovered 175% more attributed revenue than they thought they had - giving massive value back to the campaigns they thought were underperforming
A cosmetics brand recorded a 550% increase in attributed transactions - adding massive vision where they previously thought their paid digital wasn’t affecting revenue
These aren't small optimizations – these are massive revelations about how their paid media is affecting the bottom line.
“Northbeam’s partnership with Pinterest gave us a new level of clarity into how view-based engagements translate into real revenue. It’s been a game-changer for our strategy heading into the holiday season.” — Caleb Orion, Director of Acquisition & Ecommerce, Omnilux
What you can do with C+DV:
See the full customer journey: Finally understand how both clicks and views work together to drive conversions, instead of just seeing the last touchpoint. Witness the funnels that drive your conversions from the moment of discovery to the point of sale, and optimize accordingly.
Upper-funnel campaigns get their due: Quantify the actual revenue contribution of your awareness and prospecting campaigns that have been flying under the radar. Better connect revenue to top of funnel campaigns. Justify to clients, bosses, and stakeholders that your awareness campaigns are worth the spend.
Make decisions with confidence: Every impression tied to a conversion is proven, not modeled, so you can trust your data. Optimize, reallocate, and experiment in your top of funnel campaigns while knowing you have a way to accurately measure their viewthrough impact.
Smarter budget allocation: Know exactly which campaigns are driving downstream revenue and scale what actually works. Stop wasting spend on awareness campaigns that boost vanity metrics but don’t drive measurable revenue.
Cross-platform clarity: Get all your verified impression data combined with our order-level tracking in one unified view. See all your channels in one single dashboard.
Privacy-first approach: All data processing happens in our secure clean room, ensuring compliance and protecting user privacy.
Stop wasting money: Eliminate the over-crediting of last-click channels and avoid underspending on the campaigns that create real demand.
Watch our full webinar for a full breakdown in how to use C+DV.
How it works
Thanks to Northbeam's direct integration with each ad platform included in this model, Northbeam can do true in-app "impression matching".
This means that conversions can be matched with impressions that helped generate those conversions at the user level.
The logic is straightforward:
In C+DV, clicks still come first. If someone clicked an ad in their journey, that click still gets the credit (just like always).
Views fill the gaps. Views only get credit when there are no clicks in the journey, so we're not inflating your numbers or double-counting.
It's additive, not replacement. C+DV never overrides click credit—it only assigns value to orders that were previously categorized as "free" or "direct."
How does C+DV attribute credit?
When looking at ads under the C+DV model, paid clicks and paid views take full precedence over touchpoints with the following Category (Northbeam) labels:
- Direct
- Organic
- Organic Search
- Paid - Branded Search
- Email
- SMS
Credit between paid clicks and paid views is split as follows:
Each first-party (i.e. Northbeam observed) paid click touchpoint receives a share of credit.
For each participating C+DV partner platform, the remaining share of credit is distributed equally across all view touchpoints from that platform using the following methodology:
Views are grouped by platform and credit is divided within each platform “pool.” For example, if there is 1 view on Platform A and 10 views on Platform B, Platform B will receive more total credit, but each individual view will have less weight than the 1 view on Platform A.
We do not weight views from different platforms differently; the amount of credit assigned to each platform is dependent on how many views are in that platform’s “pool.”
Credit is not assigned based on where each touchpoint falls in the funnel; for example, if a customer views an ad on Snap, and later views an ad on Pinterest, the Pinterest ad does not earn less credit.
Top-of-funnel channels will see the biggest lift. If you have channels doing lots of demand generation or with low click-through rates, you'll see the highest impact.
Performance marketing stays accurate. For bottom-funnel campaigns with high click-through rates, you'll see more modest changes since clicks were already being tracked properly.
Upper-funnel campaigns will fill out a lot of previously-unattributed revenue. Those awareness campaigns that seemed like money pits? You're about to discover their real value.
The Bottom Line
We've been dealing with incomplete attribution data for so long that we'd almost gotten used to making important budget decisions with half the information. This feels like one of those moments where the industry actually takes a meaningful step forward.
As our VP of Product Stas Goldobin puts it:
"We built Clicks + Deterministic Views to set a new standard for attribution accuracy and transparency. There's no guesswork: every conversion is matched with certainty."
How to turn on C+DV
If you're already a Northbeam customer, here's how to get started:
Go to Account Settings > Model Settings > Attribution Models (or click this link)
Select Clicks + Deterministic Views and choose your platforms
Wait 24-48 hours for initial processing
Note: By selecting platforms, you're consenting to share impression data with us, so only admins can make these changes.
Ready to see the full picture of your marketing performance? If you're already a Northbeam customer, you can turn this on today in your account settings. If you're not, book a demo and we'll show you what you've been missing.
Digital advertising is at a turning point. As third-party cookies disappear, the industry is being forced to rethink how to connect with audiences in ways that are both effective and privacy-compliant.
Enter contextual targeting: a smarter, privacy-first approach that aligns ads with the content consumers are actively engaging with, rather than relying on invasive tracking of their personal data.
This shift isn’t happening in a vacuum. Privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA are tightening around data use, while browsers phase out cookie-based tracking and consumers grow increasingly wary of how their information is collected.
Together, these forces are accelerating the move toward strategies that respect privacy while still delivering performance.
In this article, we’ll unpack what contextual targeting is and why it’s gaining momentum. We’ll explore how AI is transforming contextual targeting with deeper semantic intelligence and real-time placement, compare it to other advertising methods, and highlight the measurable benefits it brings to advertisers and publishers alike.
Finally, we’ll walk through practical strategies, implementation steps, and real-world innovations, giving marketers a clear roadmap to move forward with confidence towards a future of cookieless advertising.
Why Contextual Targeting Is Gaining Momentum
The digital advertising industry is undergoing a fundamental reset.
With third-party cookies on their way out and regulators tightening their grip on consumer data, advertisers are under pressure to find methods that don’t rely on invasive tracking.
Contextual targeting is stepping into that role, offering a privacy-first solution that still delivers meaningful results.
Privacy-First Shift
Unlike behavioral targeting, which builds profiles from users’ browsing histories, contextual targeting analyzes the content on the page or screen in real time.
Ads are placed according to what someone is reading, watching, or listening to, not who they are.
This eliminates many compliance headaches while reassuring consumers that their personal data isn’t being harvested.
Trust and Relevance
Because ads appear alongside related content, they feel more natural and useful to the user.
A running shoe ad next to an article about marathon training is inherently more relevant than one based on past browsing history.
This alignment fosters trust while strengthening brand safety, since advertisers can control the environments where their ads appear.
Performance Uplift
Multiple studies show that contextually relevant ads outperform generic placements on metrics like engagement, recall, and brand lift.
When the surrounding content and the ad message reinforce one another, users are more likely to notice, remember, and act.
Applicability Across Formats
Importantly, contextual targeting isn’t confined to display ads.
It scales across channels: digital display, in-app, audio, connected TV (CTV), and even emerging formats like digital out-of-home.
That versatility makes it a future-proof strategy for reaching audiences wherever they consume content, without depending on tracking signals that are disappearing fast.
How AI Is Boosting Contextual Targeting
Traditional contextual targeting worked by scanning for keywords on a page; useful, but often blunt.
Modern advertising environments are far more dynamic, requiring greater precision and nuance.
That’s where artificial intelligence (AI) steps in, supercharging contextual targeting with deeper analysis, faster execution, and safer placement.
Semantic Intelligence
AI and natural language processing (NLP) move beyond simple keyword matching to interpret tone, sentiment, and meaning.
For example, the word “Apple” could signal technology or food depending on the surrounding context.
Semantic AI makes these distinctions automatically, ensuring ads don’t just match words but truly align with intent and subject matter. This avoids mismatches that frustrate consumers and compromise brand integrity.
Adaptable Analytics
Online content evolves constantly, from trending memes to breaking news. Static rules quickly become outdated.
AI-driven models continuously retrain on new data, learning the language shifts and cultural references that matter. This adaptability ensures that targeting strategies remain effective even as the digital landscape changes.
Real-Time Placement
One of the most powerful applications of AI is the ability to evaluate and act instantly.
AI-powered contextual advertising systems can scan live or streaming content and insert ads dynamically, in real time.
For example, scene-level contextual targeting on CTV means a sports drink ad can appear the moment a character finishes a workout, delivering in-the-moment relevance at scale.
Precision and Safety
Without relying on personal data, AI ensures that ads are delivered in brand-curated environments that match contextual preferences.
Machine learning models can identify safe versus unsafe placements (e.g., distinguishing between positive news coverage and harmful or sensitive topics), giving advertisers control without slowing down campaign execution.
Together, these advancements elevate contextual targeting from a compliance-driven fallback into a high-performance, future-ready strategy.
Advertisers can achieve both privacy-first marketing practices and unprecedented levels of accuracy, using AI to make contextual ads smarter, safer, and more engaging than ever before.
Benefits & Evidence
Contextual targeting isn’t just a stopgap for the post-cookie era. It’s proving itself as a more effective, scalable, and trusted advertising method.
The benefits show up across compliance, performance, cost, and innovation.
Privacy, Compliance, and Trust
Since contextual targeting doesn’t depend on individual identifiers, it sidesteps many of the privacy concerns now dominating digital advertising.
Regulations like GDPR and CCPA are pushing advertisers to abandon third-party tracking, and contextual targeting naturally fits within these frameworks.
For consumers, the appeal is just as clear: ads are matched to what they’re consuming in the moment, without prying into their personal histories.
That balance fosters trust and helps brands stay ahead of future regulatory changes.
Let’s see the data
Nearly 80% of respondents in a recent study favor transparency in how their personal data is used in digital advertising, and 62% feel uneasy about companies tracking their behavior online.
Enhanced Engagement
Ads placed in relevant contexts consistently outperform generic placements.
Studies have shown that consumers are more likely to remember ads that align with the surrounding content, with measurable lifts in metrics like click-through rate, dwell time, and brand recall.
For example, a travel ad placed alongside vacation planning content feels timely and helpful, whereas the same ad dropped into unrelated content risks being ignored.
Let’s see the data
New research shows that contextually targeted ads can increase consumer brand recall by up to
70%.
Cost Efficiency and Scalability
Contextual targeting leverages automation and AI to deliver ads quickly, at scale, and without the need for costly data integrations or third-party audience segments.
This translates into strong ROI, particularly as AI continues to improve contextual accuracy and reduce wasted impressions. Brands can stretch their budgets further while still achieving performance benchmarks.
Let’s see the data
Research shows that contextual targeting can increase purchase intent by
63%
compared to audience- or channel-level targeting.
CTV Innovations
Connected TV (CTV) is one of the fastest-growing ad channels, and contextual targeting is unlocking a new level of precision within it.
Scene-level targeting allows ads to be placed at the exact moment they’re most relevant: think a snack ad during a cooking show.
This in-scene relevance increases engagement while preserving the lean-back experience viewers expect from streaming content.
Let’s see the data
Studies show that contextual targeting on CTV boosts consumer ad recall by
4x.
Taken together, these benefits demonstrate that contextual targeting is not just privacy-compliant, but performance-driven.
It offers a rare combination of consumer trust, measurable results, and technological innovation, making it one of the most future-proof strategies in the advertising toolkit.
Strategies & Best Practices
To unlock the full value of contextual targeting, brands need a thoughtful strategy that blends contextual intelligence with strong creative, cross-channel consistency, and continuous measurement.
Here are our top strategies and best practices:
Hybrid Targeting
The most effective campaigns don’t rely on contextual signals alone. When combined with first-party data, like purchase history, loyalty program engagement, or email behavior, contextual targeting becomes more nuanced.
A brand can serve ads that not only align with the content but also reflect known customer preferences, creating a balance between personalization and privacy.
Creative Alignment
Even the smartest targeting falls flat if the creative feels off. Ads should mirror the tone, intent, and energy of the surrounding content.
For instance, a lighthearted podcast episode might call for playful visuals or copy, while a serious news article might demand a more restrained approach.
This alignment improves user receptivity and strengthens brand perception.
Cross-Channel Deployment
Contextual strategies aren’t limited to web display. They can be applied across connected TV, audio streaming platforms, mobile apps, and even emerging formats like digital out-of-home.
Cross-channel consistency ensures audiences encounter relevant, context-driven messaging in multiple environments, reinforcing recall and increasing conversion potential.
Governance and Transparency
To protect brand integrity, marketers should clearly define the governance and structure of their contextual ad strategy.
For example, a food brand might want to appear next to recipe content but avoid content discussing food shortages.
Just as important is transparency: explaining targeting logic to internal stakeholders and clients builds trust and prevents misalignment.
Continuous Optimization
Advertisers should treat contextual targeting as an iterative process: testing contextual versus behavioral or hybrid approaches, experimenting with creative variations, and tracking outcomes beyond clicks.
Attention metrics, recall studies, and brand lift surveys can reveal the true impact of contextual placements, enabling smarter optimizations over time.
By weaving these practices together, advertisers can turn contextual targeting into a high-performing, future-proof pillar of their media mix.
Rather than replacing old strategies outright, contextual targeting works best when integrated into a broader ecosystem that values privacy, relevance, and adaptability.
Implementation Guide
A thoughtful implementation process ensures that contextual targeting not only runs smoothly but also delivers measurable results.
Below are four steps to get your contextual targeting strategy up and running.
1. Choose AI-Native Platforms
Start by selecting platforms built with AI and contextual advertising analysis at their core, not just keyword targeting.
AI-native solutions are better equipped to understand nuance, adapt in real time, and scale placements across formats like display, video, and CTV.
2. Define Taxonomy
Before launching, establish a taxonomy that outlines the themes and content categories that fit your brand.
This includes both positive contexts you want to prioritize (e.g., fitness content for a sportswear brand) and exclusions you want to avoid (e.g., sensitive or negative news coverage).
A well-structured taxonomy ensures campaigns stay aligned with brand values.
3. Measure Meaningfully
Go beyond impressions and clicks. Contextual targeting’s value shows up in metrics like attention, recall, brand lift, and ROI.
By tracking performance at both the placement and creative level, marketers can prove the impact of contextually relevant advertising and secure buy-in from stakeholders.
4. Iterate on Strategy and Creative
Contextual targeting should be an ongoing process. Use performance insights to refine your taxonomy, optimize creative, and test new combinations of contextual and first-party signals.
Regular iteration ensures campaigns remain relevant as content ecosystems, consumer behaviors, and regulatory landscapes evolve.
Done right, implementation turns contextual targeting from a theory into a scalable, ROI-positive practice that future-proofs advertising programs.
From Compliance to a Competitive Edge
As third-party cookies fade, the benefits of contextual targeting without cookies have become clearer than ever, and contextual targeting has evolved from a fallback option into one of the most strategic approaches in digital advertising.
By focusing on the content people are actively engaging with, it enables privacy-first marketing that aligns with both consumer expectations and tightening regulatory standards.
When done well, contextual targeting drives higher relevance and engagement, placing ads in environments where they feel timely, useful, and trustworthy.
AI makes this scalable across display, mobile, audio, and CTV, delivering cost-effective placements without sacrificing precision or brand safety.
For marketers and publishers, the message is clear: contextual targeting doesn’t just replace cookies, it future-proofs campaigns by building trust, improving performance, and adapting to the privacy-first digital ecosystem.
Brands that invest in contextual strategies today will be best positioned to thrive in the cookieless advertising world of tomorrow.
As third-party signals fade and privacy controls rise, the question for brands isn’t if they should pivot their data strategy, it’s how.
The data landscape has changed dramatically: cookies are crumbling, walled gardens are tightening, and consumers expect greater transparency around how their information is used.
Marketers now face a complex puzzle. Different data sources come with different consent models, levels of quality, and degrees of scale.
Get the mix wrong, and you risk wasted budget, ineffective targeting, or worse: eroding the trust you’ve worked hard to build with customers.
This guide is designed to cut through the noise.
We’ll define the three core types of customer data (first-, second-, and third-party), show where each shines, and explain how to combine them responsibly.
You’ll also find practical frameworks for migrating toward first-party strength, plus governance and measurement checklists to ensure your strategy is both effective and compliant.
What Each Data Type Is (and Where It Comes From)
When marketers talk about customer data, the conversation usually centers on three categories: first-party, second-party, and third-party.
Each type differs in how it’s collected, how much control you have over it, and what it’s best used for.
First-party data
This is the gold standard. First-party data is information you collect directly from your customers through your own channels and systems.
Examples of customer data types include:
On-site behavior such as page views, clicks, or cart activity
Transaction history and purchase frequency
Customer service interactions (emails, chats, calls)
Data from preference centers, surveys, or loyalty programs
Because it’s gathered with direct consent, you control the context, accuracy, and recency. First-party data forms the foundation for personalization, retention, and long-term trust.
Second-party data
Second-party data is essentially someone else’s first-party data that you access through a trusted partnership. Think of it as data sharing with permission.
Examples of customer data types include:
A retail brand sharing loyalty data with a complementary CPG partner
A travel site exchanging booking information with an airline
Co-marketing campaigns where audiences are segmented and matched
This type of data is highly relevant and often more accurate than third-party sources, but it requires clear contracts, governance, and strong alignment between partners.
Third-party data
Third-party data comes from external aggregators who collect information from a wide range of sources: websites, apps, surveys, public records, and more. Marketers often use it for scale and reach.
Examples of customer data types include:
Audience segments for advertising platforms
Demographic or interest-based enrichment
Market intelligence panels and benchmarks
The tradeoff: third party data quality and accuracy can vary, availability is shrinking due to privacy regulations, and reliance on third party data can create compliance risks.
While third-party data can still play a role in broad awareness or filling specific gaps, its dominance is quickly fading.
First vs Second vs Third-Party Data: Advantages, Risks, and Best-Fit Scenarios
Each type of customer data comes with clear strengths, inherent risks, and specific situations where it performs best.
Knowing where each one shines (and where it doesn’t) helps marketers design smarter, more compliant strategies.
Criteria
First-Party Data
Second-Party Data
Third-Party Data
Accuracy
Very high: collected directly from customer interactions.
High: sourced from trusted partner’s first-party data.
Variable: aggregated from many sources with inconsistent quality.
Scale
Limited: constrained by your own audience size.
Moderate: depends on the size and relevance of partner audiences.
High: broad reach across demographics, geographies, and interests.
Consent Strength
Strong: explicit opt-in and clear compliance alignment (GDPR, CCPA).
Strong (when contracts are clear): governed by partnership agreements.
Weak: often indirect, facing growing regulatory restrictions.
Portability
High: can be activated across channels and integrated with clean rooms.
Moderate: requires secure exchanges and compatible systems.
Low: limited portability across platforms; often tied to walled gardens.
Cost
Generally low: you already own it, though capture/management systems carry overhead.
Moderate: may involve contracts, tech setup, or exchange costs.
High: purchased from providers, with recurring costs for updates or access.
Co-marketing campaigns, prospecting into adjacent audiences, channel enrichment.
Broad awareness, market sizing, upper-funnel testing, enrichment within specific platforms.
First-party data
Strengths:
First-party data is the most accurate and up-to-date, since it’s drawn directly from your customer interactions.
It’s collected with explicit consent, aligning closely with compliance requirements like GDPR and CCPA.
Because you own the relationship, it allows for closed-loop measurement, tying marketing actions directly to business outcomes.
Risks/limits:
The main limitation is scale. Your audience size defines the boundaries of your first-party data.
To grow its usefulness, you need seamless capture experiences (clear opt-ins, loyalty programs, preference centers) and compelling value exchanges so customers willingly share information.
Best fit:
First-party data is best for personalization, lifecycle retention strategies, seed audiences for modeling, and as the ground truth in clean-room collaborations.
Second-party data
Strengths:
Second-party data combines the accuracy of first-party data with the reach of partnerships.
Because it’s exchanged directly between companies, it often carries high relevance: your partner’s customers are likely to resemble your ideal prospects.
It also opens up category-level insights you might not capture on your own.
Risks/limits:
These relationships come with contractual and technical overhead.
You’ll need strong governance, alignment on use cases, and infrastructure like data clean rooms or secure exchanges.
Misalignment between partners can limit value or create compliance headaches.
Best fit:
Second-party data works best for co-marketing efforts, finding lookalike audiences through adjacent partners, and adding enrichment for specific channels (e.g., expanding an email list with partner insights).
Third-party data
Strengths:
Third-party data’s value lies in speed and scale.
Aggregators offer broad audience reach across demographics, geographies, and interests.
It can also deliver upper-funnel visibility and market intelligence that would otherwise be hard to access.
Risks/limits:
Accuracy and freshness vary widely, since the data often comes from disparate sources.
Growing regulation and browser privacy changes are reducing availability and increasing compliance risks.
It’s also difficult to port third-party data consistently across channels.
Best fit:
Third-party data is most effective for broad awareness campaigns, filling gaps where first- or second-party data isn’t available, and providing high-level market sizing or competitive context.
Use Cases & Examples
Marketers rarely rely on just one type of data. In practice, the strongest strategies blend first-, second-, and third-party data depending on the goal.
Here’s how each comes into play across common scenarios:
Acquisition
First-party: Start with the customers you know best. Using your own purchase history or high-intent site activity as a seed audience allows for more accurate modeled expansions.
Second-party: Partner data can help you discover adjacent audiences. For example, a fitness apparel brand might leverage a nutrition company’s loyalty data to find new customers with aligned interests.
Third-party: Broader segments from data providers still have a role in testing new markets or scaling awareness quickly, though quality checks and validation are essential.
Personalization
First-party: Behavioral signals (browsing patterns, past purchases) combined with declared preferences (survey responses, opt-ins) are the foundation of personalization engines.
Second-party: Enriching with partner insights (say, a travel site layering hotel preferences from an airline partner) sharpens relevance and reduces wasted impressions.
Third-party: While less common in personalization, third-party attributes can provide context, such as layering demographic markers or lifestyle segments onto first-party records.
Attribution & Measurement
First-party: Your own data is the source of truth for connecting campaigns to business outcomes.
Second-party: Partner data helps measure shared efforts, like determining the performance of a co-branded promotion across channels.
Third-party: Independent panels or benchmark datasets can add external context, helping validate your performance against industry norms.
Data Collaboration
First-party: Secure data clean rooms let you match your own data with a partner’s in a privacy-safe way, without directly sharing raw records.
Second-party: Selective exchanges with trusted partners expand reach while maintaining governance controls.
Third-party: Some walled gardens allow limited third-party enrichment inside their platforms, useful for audience validation or contextual layering.
Strategy & Decision Framework
A smart data strategy isn’t about choosing one type of data over another, it’s about sequencing and combining them in a way that balances precision, scale, and compliance.
Here’s a framework to guide decision-making:
Start with First-Party Strength
Your foundation should always be first-party data.
Audit the identifiers you already capture (emails, device IDs, loyalty program logins), review your consent records, and map every capture point across web, app, and offline channels.
Then, design high-value collection experiences. Think gated content, member benefits, or personalized offers that give customers a clear reason to share data.
Add Second-Party Selectively
Once your first-party base is strong, look for opportunities to partner.
The best partners are those with complementary audiences; not direct competitors but brands whose customers overlap with yours in meaningful ways.
Define the use case up front, outline how long the data will be shared, and agree on success metrics before you exchange a single record.
Use Third-Party Surgically
Third-party data should no longer be a default.
Instead, apply it sparingly in contexts where its utility clearly outweighs the risks. For example: testing into a new market or layering demographic context for high-level audience insights.
Always benchmark performance against your first-party data to validate incremental value.
Governance by Design
Strong governance is what keeps your strategy resilient.
Document every data source, its purpose, and its history. Establish retention rules and deletion expectations from day one.
Work closely with your legal and security teams to ensure compliance, and treat privacy not as a box to tick but as a core brand value.
Measurement & Governance
Collecting data is only valuable if it’s trustworthy, well-governed, and tied to measurable business outcomes. Marketers should track performance and enforce safeguards in parallel.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
To understand whether your data strategy is working, monitor:
Capture rate, match rate, and consent opt-in: Are you collecting enough data, and is it permissioned?
Profile completeness: How rich and usable are the customer records you hold? How effective are your identity resolution processes?
Lift vs. control metrics: Track how data-driven campaigns perform compared to holdouts: conversion rate, average order value (AOV), customer acquisition cost (CAC), and retention.
Media efficiency: Does better data reduce wasted spend and improve return on ad spend?
Data quality: Keep an eye on freshness, duplication, and conflict rate so your systems aren’t operating on outdated or contradictory records.
Controls and Governance Practices
Measurement means little without compliance and governance baked in:
Consent logs and purpose binding: Maintain clear records of when and how data was collected, and ensure usage aligns with stated purposes.
Subject rights workflows: Make it easy to fulfill access, correction, or deletion requests.
Data minimization and retention policies: Collect only what you need, store it for a defined period, and delete on schedule.
Clean-room policies and partner due diligence: Establish clear rules for collaboration, vet partners carefully, and confirm that privacy-enhancing technologies are in place.
Model validation cadence: Regularly test and recalibrate models that rely on your data, ensuring accuracy and fairness over time.
Strong measurement paired with robust governance ensures that your data mix not only performs but also stays compliant and resilient as privacy standards evolve.
Tools & Workflow
Turning raw data into business value requires the right infrastructure. A modern marketing stack should cover collection, collaboration, activation, and analytics, with privacy built in at every step.
Foundation
Start with systems that centralize and standardize your own data:
Customer Data Platform (CDP) or CRM to unify records across touchpoints.
Tag management and server-side collection to ensure accurate event tracking while reducing reliance on cookies and client-side scripts.
Collaboration
To safely expand beyond your walls, invest in technologies that support secure data sharing:
Data clean rooms that allow you to match and analyze datasets without exposing personally identifiable information.
Secure partner exchanges for controlled second-party data sharing.
Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) like encryption and anonymization to minimize risk in collaborative environments.
Activation
Once data is unified and governed, it can power real-time engagement:
Journey orchestration tools that personalize cross-channel experiences.
DSP and paid media integrations for efficient audience targeting.
Web and app personalization engines to deliver tailored content, offers, or product recommendations.
Analytics
Finally, analytics tools close the loop and measure impact:
Incrementality testing to validate lift and avoid over-attributing success.
Audience health scoring to monitor the quality and long-term viability of your datasets.
Implementation Plan
Shifting to a privacy-first, data-driven strategy doesn’t happen overnight.
If you’re wondering how to shift from third-party to first-party data, the most effective approach is phased: start with a baseline, build securely, test deliberately, and scale what works.
Phase 1: Audit
Begin by mapping what you already have. Identify all current data sources, the consent mechanisms tied to them, and any system dependencies.
Look for quick wins, such as fixing broken tags or improving opt-in language, to boost capture rates right away.
Phase 2: Build
Strengthen your first-party foundation.
Standardize event tracking, establish persistent identifiers, and ensure consent records are accurate and accessible.
At the same time, prepare for collaboration and responsible data activation by setting up clean room access and defining clear partner selection criteria.
Phase 3: Pilot
Run controlled tests with limited scope.
This might include a single second-party partnership to expand reach or a carefully chosen third-party dataset for enrichment.
Always benchmark these efforts against first-party-only cohorts to measure true incremental value.
Phase 4: Scale & Govern
Once you’ve proven impact, expand.
Broaden successful partnerships, refine enrichment, and embed learnings into standard workflows.
At this stage, governance becomes critical: formalize contracts, define retention and deletion rules, and set a cadence for ongoing validation to ensure compliance and data quality over time.
A phased roadmap not only reduces risk but also creates momentum, giving your team early wins while building toward long-term resilience.
Future-Proof Your Data Strategy
In a world where privacy is tightening and third-party signals are fading, not all data is created equal.
The path forward is clear:
Lead with first-party data. It offers accuracy, trust, and long-term resilience.
Use second-party data strategically to expand relevance through permissioned, high-value partnerships.
Apply third-party data sparingly, focusing only on contexts where it truly adds incremental reach or market insight.
Measure incrementality and enforce governance so that your data mix remains effective, compliant, and future-proof.
Marketers who embrace this balanced approach will do more than survive the loss of third-party cookies: they’ll build durable customer relationships, smarter activation strategies, and a stronger foundation for growth.
As third-party identifiers fade and consumer expectations for privacy rise, brands face a pressing challenge: how to gather data that is both permissioned and precise.
Zero-party data is information that customers intentionally and proactively share with a brand. It includes preferences, intentions, and context offered directly and with full consent.
Unlike inferred or observed signals, zero-party data is transparent by design, giving marketers a clear foundation for personalization without compromising trust.
In this article, we’ll explore why zero-party data matters in a privacy-first world and how it complements first-party behavioral data.
We’ll outline the collection experiences and value exchanges that actually work, show how to activate customer-declared insights across the journey, and map out the governance standards that keep programs compliant and effective.
By the end, you’ll have a framework for turning customer declarations into measurable business impact.
What Zero-Party Is Data & Why It Matters
Zero-party data (ZPD) is information that customers intentionally and proactively share with a brand.
Unlike first-party data, which is observed through behaviors like clicks or purchases, zero-party data is volunteered directly. It encompasses preferences, intentions, personal context, and even how customers want to be recognized.
Because it’s offered with explicit consent, it’s the most transparent and purpose-built signal set marketers can use for personalization.
And the business case for zero-party data has never been stronger.
As third-party identifiers continue to disappear and privacy regulations tighten, brands can no longer rely on external signals to reach the right audience.
Those that invest in building direct, two-way relationships with their customers earn higher trust, stronger conversions, and more efficient spend by cutting out wasted impressions and irrelevant targeting.
Zero-party data also provides the missing context that first-party data strategy can’t capture on its own.
First-party data shows what people did; zero-party data reveals why they did it. Whether that’s budget constraints, style preferences, or purchase intentions.
Combined, the two give marketers a complete view that closes critical gaps in intent, timing, and personalization.
Finally, zero-party data carries a built-in privacy-first advantage.
Because it is consented data at the point of capture and tied to a clear value exchange, it’s easier to defend under evolving regulations and simpler to sustain over time.
When brands demonstrate transparency and respect for preferences, customers are more likely to share again, creating a cycle of trust that powers long-term growth.
Zero-Party vs First-Party vs Second-Party vs Third-Party Data
Not all data is created equal. To understand the role of zero-party data, it helps to place it in context alongside first-, second-, and third-party sources.
Each type has its own strengths and limitations, and together they form the spectrum of information available to marketers today.
Attribute
Zero-Party Data
First-Party Data
Second-Party Data
Third-Party Data
Accuracy
Highest: volunteered directly by the customer
High: observed behaviors, but may not reveal intent
High: sourced from a trusted partner’s first-party data
Variable: depends on aggregation quality
Consent Strength
Explicit: provided knowingly at point of capture (quiz, survey, preference)
Strong: implied or explicit via direct relationship (e.g., transactions)
Moderate: governed by partner contracts and agreements
Weak: often indirect; under increasing regulatory scrutiny
Freshness
Very fresh: updated when the customer chooses to share
Fresh: collected in real time from owned channels
Moderate: depends on partner update cadence
Variable: can be outdated or inconsistent
Scalability
Limited: depends on customer willingness to provide data
Moderate: scales with your own audience size
Moderate: scales with size/relevance of partner audiences
High: broad reach across demographics and geographies
Legal Defensibility
Very strong: easiest to defend under evolving privacy laws
Strong: compliant if consent is well managed
Moderate: defensibility depends on partner’s governance
Weak: most at risk from regulation and platform restrictions
Zero-Party Data
Zero-party data is the most transparent of the group.
It includes volunteered preferences, purchase intentions, and contextual details that customers share proactively, often through a preference center, quiz, or survey.
Because it comes with explicit consent, it offers the highest clarity for personalization.
The trade-off is volume: without a strong value exchange, customers won’t always take the time to provide it.
First-Party Data
First-party data strategy captures the behaviors and transactions a brand directly observes, such as website activity, email engagement, or purchase history.
It’s generally reliable and scalable, but it lacks insight into the customer’s underlying motivations.
You may know what someone clicked or bought, but not why.
Second-Party Data
Second-party data comes from partnerships. It’s essentially another company’s first-party data, shared under a formal agreement.
This can be especially useful for audience expansion or market testing, provided permissions are clear and transparent.
Third-Party Data
Third-party data is aggregated or brokered, often sourced from multiple providers.
Historically, it’s been the fuel for digital targeting at scale, but its usefulness is rapidly declining.
Privacy regulations, browser restrictions, and rising consumer skepticism have made third-party data less dependable and riskier to use for precision personalization.
When evaluating which type of data to rely on, marketers should apply a decision lens:
Accuracy: How closely does the data reflect reality?
Consent strength: Was it given directly and knowingly by the customer?
Scalability: Can it be collected consistently across the audience?
Freshness: How often is it updated and validated?
Legal defensibility: Can you use it with confidence under evolving regulations?
Zero-party data may not always provide the scale of first-party data, but it consistently scores highest on accuracy, consent, and defensibility, making it the gold standard in a privacy-first era.
Collection Experiences & Value Exchange
Best practices for collecting zero-party data aren’t about asking as many questions as possible. They’re about designing the right experiences at the right time, and making the value exchange crystal clear.
Customers are more willing to share when they understand exactly what they’ll get in return, whether that’s better product recommendations, faster service, or exclusive perks.
The most effective ZPD programs weave these interactions seamlessly into the customer journey so that providing data feels natural, not like an interrogation.
High-Performing Collection Moments
Preference Centers
Think of these as profile hubs tied to a customer’s account or email.
Building preference centers that convert is a skill: a well-designed preference center should be easy to find and easy to edit, empowering customers to update their communication choices, product interests, or purchase frequency at any time.
Progressive Profiling
Rather than front-loading every question during sign-up, ask for one or two high-value fields at natural points in the journey: during onboarding, after a purchase, or when someone downloads content. Over time, you build a richer profile without overwhelming the customer.
Quizzes & Product Finders
Interactive quizzes for data capture are short, mobile-friendly, and outcome-oriented.
A skincare brand might ask about skin type to recommend products; a retailer might use a product finder to suggest bundles or style guides. These tools deliver immediate value while capturing structured preference data.
Surveys & Micro-Polls
Lightweight in-journey prompts can gather quick insights in exchange for something tangible: a discount, early access, or a piece of premium content. The key is keeping these surveys or polls short and tightly linked to the benefit.
Conversational Forms & Chat
Guided Q&A, often through chatbots, can feel more natural than static forms. The responses are stored as structured data points in customer profiles, making them easy to activate downstream.
Loyalty & Membership Flows
Programs that trade perks for durable data, like favorite categories, preferred channels, or replenishment frequency, encourage ongoing engagement. Members get better offers, and brands get richer insights.
Design Principles
The most successful ZPD collection experiences follow a few simple but essential principles:
Clear value exchange: Tell users upfront what they’ll get (better fit, faster help, sharper deals).
Keep it brief: Limit each interaction to three to five concise questions; use progressive capture to build depth over time.
Purpose limitation: Only ask for data you will actively use, and show customers how it will improve their experience.
Plain language & accessibility: No dark patterns, jargon, or clutter; prioritize inclusive design and mobile-first usability.
Testing plan: Continuously test copy, incentives, question order, and which fields are required versus optional to optimize engagement.
When brands respect customer time and attention, collection becomes an exchange, not a transaction.
Activation Across the Journey
Collecting zero-party data is only half the story. The real impact comes from activating zero-party data across channels and across the customer lifecycle: using what people tell you to deliver more relevant, respectful, and effective experiences at every stage.
Done right, activation not only boosts performance but also signals to customers that their input is heard and valued.
Awareness / Prospecting
Preference-based lookalikes can help identify new audiences who resemble your best-fit customers.
Just as important, declared preferences allow you to suppress misaligned audiences, avoiding wasted spend and protecting brand perception by not targeting those unlikely to engage.
Consideration
When shoppers are weighing options, zero-party data enables you to personalize content modules, category pages, and promotional offers to the specific needs they’ve declared, whether that’s a style preference, a budget limit, or a use-case scenario.
Conversion
Zero-party data can be the trigger for decision aids such as comparison charts, personalized bundles, or financing options.
By aligning offers to declared intent or constraints, you reduce friction at the point of purchase and increase the likelihood of conversion.
Retention
After the sale, customer-declared preferences fuel tailored replenishment reminders, curated product recommendations, and communication sent via the customer’s preferred channels and timing. This keeps engagement relevant and helps prevent churn.
Advocacy
Zero-party data doesn’t just drive sales, it can also activate loyalty.
When customers share their interests or communities of choice, you can invite them to participate in reviews, referral programs, or community forums that align with those values.
From awareness through advocacy, the goal is the same: turn customer preferences into actions that enhance experience, deepen trust, and deliver measurable results.
Measurement & Governance
Zero-party data programs succeed when they’re both measurable and trustworthy.
Without a framework for tracking impact and governing data use, even the best collection strategies risk falling flat or eroding customer trust.
The key is to define clear KPIs and establish strong governance practices from day one.
Zero-Party Data Program KPIs
Opt-in & completion rate: Track how many customers begin and complete each data-collection experience, broken down by channel and audience segment.
Attribute fill rate & profile completeness: Measure how consistently customers are populating the most valuable fields in their profiles.
Accuracy & drift checks: Use techniques like reprompt cadences, contradiction detection, or “last validated” timestamps to ensure data remains fresh and reliable.
Uplift vs. control: Compare ZPD-powered journeys against control groups to quantify the lift in conversion rate, average order value (AOV), retention, customer acquisition cost (CAC) efficiency, and customer lifetime value (CLV).
Preference adherence: Monitor how often your brand honors declared channel, time, and topic preferences. Rising complaint or unsubscribe rates often indicate gaps here.
Zero-Party Data Governance Essentials
Consent capture & logs: Maintain centralized records of consent, preference changes, and revocations, with full history available for auditing.
Taxonomy & purpose mapping: Tie each data field to specific, documented uses and accountable teams. This prevents “data hoarding” and ensures clarity of purpose.
Data minimization & retention: Collect only what you need, apply expiry and re-validation rules, and quarantine stale attributes to avoid misuse.
Bias & fairness reviews: Regularly evaluate both the questions you ask and how you use the data to ensure fairness and inclusivity, minimizing the risk of discriminatory outcomes.
By coupling clear performance metrics with rigorous governance, brands can prove the business value of zero-party data while maintaining the transparency and accountability that keeps customer trust intact.
Tools & Workflow
To turn zero-party data into meaningful outcomes, brands need the right tools and workflows to connect the dots from capture to activation. A strong tool stack ensures that data moves seamlessly, stays accurate, and powers personalization at scale.
Experience Capture
Start with the tools that gather input: preference centers, survey and quiz builders, and conversational forms or chatbots.
These experiences should be easy to deploy, flexible to customize, and able to store outputs in structured formats.
Consent & Preference Management
Centralized consent records form the backbone of a privacy-first strategy.
By keeping a single source of truth for preferences and revocations, brands ensure compliance while making preference data accessible to both orchestration and analytics teams.
Data Foundation
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and CRMs, coupled with identity resolution tools, unify declared fields with behavioral history.
This creates a consolidated profile that blends what customers do with what they say, which is essential for personalization.
Orchestration & Personalization
Journey builders, testing frameworks, and dynamic content modules allow teams to act on zero-party data in real time.
Whether it’s customizing a website experience or tailoring an email sequence, orchestration tools ensure that ZPD attributes actually shape customer journeys.
Analytics
Finally, robust analytics close the loop.
Dashboards should track KPIs like opt-in rates, profile completeness, and field-level impact, while also flagging accuracy drift.
Alerts and test results help teams iterate quickly and prove the ROI of their efforts.
When each piece of this workflow is connected, zero-party data doesn’t just sit in a profile, it fuels a continuous cycle of capture, consent, orchestration, and measurement.
Implementation Considerations
Building a zero-party data program isn’t just about tools and tactics, it’s about execution.
The most successful initiatives start small, prove value, and then scale with discipline. Here are key considerations for making that happen:
Field Design Workshop
Begin with the decisions you want to improve, not with a laundry list of questions.
Design only the fields that directly power those decisions, and resist the urge to over-collect. This ensures every question has a purpose customers can see.
Pilot & Iterate
Launch with one or two high-leverage experiences, such as a product finder quiz or onboarding flow.
Measure the lift in engagement or conversion, refine your copy and incentives, then expand gradually.
Iteration builds momentum without overwhelming teams or audiences.
Operational Readiness
Assign clear ownership for taxonomy, accuracy checks, and sunset or re-validation cycles.
Zero-party data is not “set it and forget it.” It requires ongoing maintenance to remain useful and compliant.
Cross-Functional Playbook
Create a single source of truth that aligns marketing, product, customer success, legal, and data teams on consent capture, data purposes, and approved uses.
This prevents siloed practices and keeps programs defensible under scrutiny.
Change Management
Train internal teams on how to “ask with purpose,” adhere to preferences, and activate new fields in real time.
The faster teams can act on zero-party data, the more customers will see the benefit, and the more likely they’ll share again.
With the right foundation and governance in place, zero-party data becomes less of a project and more of a cultural shift toward transparency and customer-led personalization.
Why Zero-Party Data Wins
Zero-party data is the clearest, most consent-forward signal available to marketers, and the perfect complement to first-party behavioral insights.
It transforms personalization from guesswork into a customer-led process, where people explicitly share what they want and brands deliver accordingly.
The strongest programs pair value-rich collection moments with strict governance and measurable lift goals.
It’s not enough to capture data; the real impact comes from activating it across channels and journeys so customers see immediate benefits from what they share.
Above all, zero-party data should be treated as a living contract.
Preferences evolve, contexts change, and regulations shift. By re-validating, refreshing, and consistently respecting the data customers volunteer, brands can sustain both trust and ROI over the long term.
In a world where third-party signals are fading, zero-party data is more than just a workaround; it’s the foundation for lasting, transparent, and growth-driving relationships.
One of the most confusing things for advertisers on Meta is why performance seems to swing up and down for no obvious reason. One week your ROAS is incredible, the next week it feels like the account fell off a cliff. Most advertisers assume something’s broken — maybe a creative wore out, maybe the bidding changed, maybe the pixel isn’t firing.
But more often than not, what you’re seeing is simply the Explore–Exploit cycle of Meta’s ad algorithm at work. Understanding this cycle is critical if you want to scale without panic.
What the Explore–Exploit Cycle Means
At its core, Meta’s delivery system is both a search and an exploit algorithm.
Explore mode: The system invests budget to go out and find new people, many of whom aren’t yet ready to buy. During this phase, ROAS will usually look weaker because you’re building demand, not harvesting it.
Exploit mode: Once Meta identifies high-intent buyers, the system leans hard into them. Performance spikes, conversion rates look fantastic, and you might feel like you’ve hit a new permanent level.
Then, just as suddenly, things dip again — because you’ve harvested that pocket of demand and the system goes back into Explore mode.
Why This Feels Like a Roller coaster
For advertisers who only look at day-to-day ROAS, these cycles can feel like chaos. I can’t tell you how many times a client has called me after three poor days in a row, convinced something’s broken. In reality, nothing’s wrong. The system is just back in Explore mode, doing the slower work of creating new demand.
The key is zooming out. Depending on your product’s average order value and sales cycle, it may take 7 to 14 days before the demand you planted during Explore mode actually shows up in conversions.
A Real-World Example
We worked with a home goods brand that had an average order value of around $1,000. Their account was shut down for a week due to a billing issue. During that pause, sales looked great — because they were still reaping demand planted by the ads that had run the week prior.
But the week after turning ads back on? Atrocious performance. Why? Because that pipeline had dried up during the pause. It took another full week of Explore spending before sales stabilized again.
That’s the Explore–Exploit cycle in action. If you’d pulled the plug after that “bad” week, you’d never give the algorithm the time it needs to rebuild demand.
How to Manage the Cycle Without Panic
Measure in Weeks, Not Days Look at 7–14 day trends instead of reacting to daily fluctuations. This smooths out the natural oscillations.
Know Your Customer Journey If your product sells on first touch (like a $20 impulse buy), the cycle is shorter. If it’s a $1,000 purchase, the cycle is longer. Set expectations accordingly.
Don’t Overreact to Dips When you hit a bad week after a great one, remind yourself: this is the system exploring, not failing. Pulling back budgets too soon just starves future growth.
Balance Demand Creation and Harvesting Use prospecting campaigns to fuel Explore mode and retargeting to maximize Exploit mode. Both are necessary — ignore one and the other collapses.
The Bigger Picture
The Explore–Exploit cycle is baked into Meta’s DNA. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. The system is constantly searching for new buyers and then doubling down on them once it knows who they are.
The advertisers who thrive are the ones who trust the process, ride out the valleys, and plan their strategies around the cycle instead of fighting it.
If you accept that volatility is normal, you stop chasing ghosts in your data and start focusing on the fundamentals: reach, frequency, creative, and consistent investment.
Closing Thoughts
Great weeks don’t last forever, and neither do bad ones. Meta’s algorithm is always oscillating between exploration and exploitation. The trick is not to panic when the pendulum swings.
If you can zoom out, understand the rhythm, and keep your budgets steady through the cycle, you’ll find that your account builds new baselines over time — and that’s how real, sustainable growth happens.
Have you ever clicked on a Google Ad and noticed a “?gclid=” string in the URL?
This little snippet of code is one of the most important keys to understanding your Google Ad performance.
The Google Click Identifier (GCLID) is how Google connects the dots between an ad click and a conversion.
Without it, you can’t reliably tie a purchase, form submission, or sign-up back to the exact campaign, keyword, and creative that drove it. It’s what makes Google Ads’ reporting and optimization features accurate.
Here’s how GCLID works:
Every time someone clicks on your Google Ad, a unique GCLID is added to the landing page URL.
That GCLID tells Google which ad was clicked, when, and under what targeting conditions.
When the person converts, that same GCLID lets Google attribute the result to the right ad spend.
Combined with UTMs, GCLIDs give you both precise Google Ads tracking and a full multi-channel view of performance.
Understanding how GCLID works, and how to make sure you’re capturing it correctly, means more accurate attribution, smarter budget allocation, and a clear picture of ROI.
What Is GCLID?
GCLID stands for Google Click Identifier, a unique tracking parameter that Google Ads automatically adds to your landing page URLs whenever someone clicks on your ad.
A GCLID might look something like this:
https://www.example.com?gclid=XYZ123
This seemingly random string is actually a powerful tracking tool.
Each GCLID is unique to a specific ad click and contains encoded information about the campaign, ad group, keyword, and other targeting details.
The purpose of a GCLID is simple but essential:
Link each ad click to its source so you can see which campaigns and keywords drive conversions.
Track performance across the customer journey, from the initial click to the final purchase or lead submission.
Enable more accurate attribution, helping you understand exactly where your ad spend is delivering the best return.
Because the GCLID is automatically generated and appended by Google Ads, there’s no manual setup required, but you do need to ensure your tracking systems capture and retain it for it to work effectively.
GCLID vs UTMs: How They Work Together
Marketers often confuse GCLID parameters with UTM tags, but they serve different, and complementary, purposes.
GCLID is automatic and generated by Google Ads when GCLID auto-tagging is enabled. It’s used primarily for Google Ads conversion tracking and reporting.
UTM parameters, on the other hand, are manual tags that you add to URLs yourself (or via a campaign builder tool).
UTMs are platform-agnostic and used for cross-channel tracking in analytics tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, or Northbeam.
The table below highlights GCLID vs UTM:
When combined, GCLID gives you the click-level precision Google Ads needs, while UTMs provide the big-picture view across every marketing channel.
How Does GCLID Work?
GCLID works behind the scenes to connect ad clicks with conversion data, and it does this in just a few quick steps:
A user clicks your Google Ad. When someone clicks on your ad, Google automatically generates a unique Google Click Identifier tied to that specific click.
Google appends the GCLID to your landing page URL. The click sends the user to your destination URL with the GCLID parameter attached.
Your analytics tools capture the GCLID. Google Ads and Google Analytics 4 (GA4) read the GCLID and use it to connect the click to details like the campaign, ad group, keyword, and timestamp.
The GCLID links clicks to conversions. When a user completes a tracked action, such as filling out a form, signing up for a trial, or making a purchase, the GCLID makes it possible to attribute that conversion back to the exact ad interaction.
This process is instant and invisible to the end user, but for marketers, it’s the backbone of accurate Google Ads reporting and optimization.
Why Is GCLID Important?
GCLID isn’t just a random string in your URLs. it’s the key to making your Google Ads budget work harder. Here’s why it matters:
Conversion Tracking
Without GCLID, Google Ads can’t reliably match ad clicks to conversions.
By linking each conversion back to the specific click that drove it, you can measure the true impact of your campaigns and justify your ad spend with GCLID for conversion tracking.
Offline Conversions
Many conversions happen offline, like a phone order, in-store purchase, or signed contract.
If you capture the GCLID from the original ad click (e.g., in a CRM form), you can later upload that data into Google Ads to connect offline sales with the campaigns that generated them.
Attribution Accuracy
GCLID provides click-level data that helps you understand exactly which campaign, keyword, and creative led to a conversion. This level of detail allows you to:
Optimize bidding strategies
Pause underperforming ads
Double down on high-ROI campaigns
In short, if you’re not tracking GCLID, you’re flying blind on where your ad dollars are actually paying off.
How to Enable and Track GCLID
Setting up GCLID tracking takes just a few steps, and once it’s in place, you’ll have a stronger foundation for measuring and improving your Google Ads performance.
Enable Auto-Tagging in Google Ads
Auto-tagging automatically appends the GCLID parameter to your ad URLs.
To turn it on:
Sign in to your Google Ads account.
Click the Admin (wrench icon) in the top menu and select Account Settings.
Under Auto-tagging, check the box for “Tag the URL that people click through from my ad”.
Click Save.
You can test this by clicking on one of your own ads and confirming the URL includes a ?gclid= parameter.
Link Google Ads with Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
Wondering how GCLID works in GA4 and Google Analytics? Linking the two tools ensures your GCLID data flows between Google Ads and Analytics for full-funnel reporting.
To link accounts:
In Google Ads, go to Tools & Settings → Linked accounts.
Choose Google Analytics (GA4) and select the property you want to link.
Enable Personalized advertising and Auto-tagging override if prompted.
Capture GCLID in Your CRM for Offline Conversions
If you track leads or sales outside your website (phone calls, in-store purchases, signed contracts), capturing the GCLID lets you later upload offline conversions to Google Ads.
Best practices:
Add a hidden form field on your lead forms to store the GCLID from the URL.
Pass the value into your CRM or marketing automation platform.
When a sale closes, export the GCLID and upload it to Google Ads via the Offline Conversions tool.
Use Google Tag Manager (GTM) to Grab GCLID from URLs
Google Tag Manager can capture the GCLID without extra coding.
Here are the steps:
In GTM, create a URL Variable that pulls the gclid query parameter.
Store this variable in a cookie or send it to your analytics platform.
Use it for attribution and offline conversion uploads.
With these steps in place, every ad click, whether it converts online or offline, can be accurately tracked and attributed back to the campaign that drove it.
Common Issues with GCLID and How to Fix Them
Even if you’ve enabled auto-tagging, GCLID tracking can break without you realizing it, leading to incomplete or inaccurate data.
Here are the most common issues and how to resolve them.
Lost GCLID During Redirects
Issue: When your landing page URL redirects (for example, from http:// to https://, or via geo-redirects), the GCLID parameter can be stripped from the URL.
Fix:
Ensure all redirects pass query parameters to the final destination URL.
Update your server or CMS settings to preserve parameters during redirects.
Auto-Tagging Not Enabled in Google Ads
Issue: Without auto-tagging, GCLIDs will never be appended to your URLs in the first place.
Fix:
In Google Ads, go to Account Settings → Auto-tagging and check “Tag the URL that people click through from my ad”.
Test by clicking on a live ad and confirming the GCLID appears in the address bar.
Tracking Discrepancies Between Google Ads and Analytics
Issue: You see conversions in Google Ads that aren’t reflected in Google Analytics, or vice versa.
Fix:
Confirm your Google Ads and GA4 accounts are linked.
Check that your GCLID in Google Analytics property is set to collect Google Signals data.
Ensure time zones and attribution settings align between platforms.
Troubleshooting Checklist
Use this quick checklist to identify and fix GCLID tracking issues:
Click on a live Google Ad and check for ?gclid= in the URL.
Confirm redirects are preserving query parameters.
Test landing pages in Google Tag Assistant to verify GCLID auto-tagging is working.
Review the linking status of GCLID in Google Analytics and Google Ads.
Check form and CRM setups for proper GCLID capture.
Best Practices for GCLID Tracking
To get the most value from GCLID data, and ensure you never lose critical conversion insights, follow these best practices:
Always Enable Auto-Tagging in Google Ads
Auto-tagging is the easiest way to ensure GCLIDs are appended to your URLs. Without it, you’ll lose click-level tracking in Google Ads.
Test Ad URLs Regularly
Periodically click on your live ads to confirm the ?gclid= parameter appears in the address bar. This helps catch broken tracking before it impacts reporting.
Capture GCLID in Your Backend Systems
Add a hidden form field to your lead capture forms to store the GCLID from the landing page URL. Pass this value into your CRM so it’s available for offline conversion uploads.
Combine GCLID Data with UTM Parameters
GCLID provides precise Google Ads tracking, while UTMs give you a cross-channel view. Using both ensures you can attribute conversions across your full marketing mix.
Preserve GCLID During Redirects
If your site uses redirects, make sure query parameters are passed along to the final landing page so you don’t lose tracking data.
With these best practices in place, you’ll have a reliable, consistent flow of data, giving you confidence in your ROI calculations and campaign optimizations.
The Bottom Line on GCLID
The Google Click Identifier (GCLID) may be just a small snippet in your URL, but it’s a big deal for marketers who want accurate, actionable insights from their Google Ads campaigns.
By capturing and preserving GCLIDs, you can:
Confidently link ad spend to conversions
Track offline sales alongside online actions
Gain click-level attribution for smarter optimization
Whether you’re running small campaigns or managing a large ad budget, getting GCLID tracking right is essential for measuring ROI and making data-driven decisions.
For most advertisers, ROAS is the north star. It’s the number that gets shared in boardrooms, the metric that determines whether a campaign is celebrated or cut.
But after years of working with brands that spend millions each month on paid social, I can tell you: ROAS alone doesn’t tell the whole story. In fact, it can often hide the very signals that determine whether your advertising is growing the business or just chasing its own tail.
Why ROAS Isn’t Enough
ROAS is seductive because it looks so clean. Spend a dollar, get three back — what’s not to love? The problem is, you can generate strong ROAS numbers while shrinking your brand’s future.
Here’s a common scenario: a campaign shows stellar ROAS, but when you zoom out you realize it’s just hitting the same warm audience over and over again. Incremental reach is declining. Year-over-year, fewer new people are hearing about the brand, but you’d never see that looking at ROAS alone.
If you only optimize for purchases, you risk overfishing the same pond. It feels good in the short term, but long term you’re missing the forest for the trees.
The Zero-Click Consumer
Part of the challenge is how consumers actually behave today. We’re living in a “zero-click” environment. People screenshot ads, search the brand on Google, jump into Amazon, or check out a review on YouTube. They might not click your ad at all, but it still played a role in their path to purchase.
That means click-through rates and last-click ROAS are losing relevance.
If you’re not paying attention to reach, frequency, and the quality of your creative, you’re blind to a huge portion of the customer journey.
Reach and Frequency: The Real Fundamentals
Think of reach and frequency as your advertising vital signs.
Reach tells you whether you’re consistently finding new people at scale.
Frequency makes sure you’re not burning out the same audience with repetitive impressions.
On Meta, for example, only about 20% of users are actively “in-market” at a given time. If your campaigns are only optimized for purchases, you’re just fighting over that small slice of users.
You’re leaving 80% of your potential future buyers untouched.
That’s why it’s critical to balance harvesting demand with creating it. The healthiest campaigns don’t just convert the people who are ready right now — they plant seeds with the people who will be ready in a week, a month, or even a year.
Beyond ROAS: Smarter Metrics for Today’s Advertiser
To track this bigger picture, I rely on a few custom metrics:
First-Time Incremental Reach (FTIR): What percentage of your impressions are actually reaching net-new people?
Purchases ÷ Reach: A directional conversion rate that shows how effectively you’re turning reach into sales.
Quality Click Percentage (QCP): Landing page views ÷ link clicks — basically a reverse bounce rate that uncovers issues like slow load times or poor mobile experiences.
New Customer %: The share of purchases coming from people who have never bought before. A rising percentage shows you’re expanding your brand’s base, while a declining one is a warning sign that you’re just recycling the same customers.
None of these replace ROAS.
But together, they create a much clearer view of whether your advertising is truly expanding your brand.
Advertising Is Coming Full Circle
In many ways, paid social today looks a lot like TV advertising decades ago. The question isn’t just “what did this spot return?” but “how many people did we reach, how often, and how strong was the creative?”
The fundamentals are back: consistent reach, healthy frequency, and compelling creative that entertains, engages, and earns attention. ROAS still matters, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle.
Closing Thoughts
If you only measure ROAS, you’re probably missing the very growth you’re trying to buy. Brands that win in today’s landscape are the ones that step back, look beyond short-term performance, and invest in reach, frequency, and creative fundamentals that build demand over the long haul.
That’s not just theory. It’s the reality I see every day managing large-scale accounts. The advertisers who understand this shift don’t just report good numbers — they build brands that last.
Everywhere you look, headlines warn about “new privacy protections” that will nuke your tracking. The legacy of iOS 14.5 looms. People are freaking out.
iOS 26 is expected to drop mid-September, right during the lead up to Black Friday Cyber Monday. But Apple’s own release notes on iOS 26 are sparse.
Is this another watershed update that will upend all our digital strategies?
Or is all this just FUD spread around by ecommerce SaaS tools seeking to capitalize on fear?
Customers are asking us if Northbeam’s parameters are on the chopping block. So we went into the lab and tested it ourselves. The results are boring – in the best way.
Apple’s Crusade: Privacy, or Hegemony?
Marketers have been living with Apple’s privacy standards for two decades.
iOS 16 and subsequent updates layered on more ITP rules, fingerprinting protections, and anti-cookie mechanics.
Every single update set off alarms in the DTC ecosystem. In the past, growth marketers were able to thrive by hacking Meta’s extreme tracking functionality, to squeeze maximum results out of complex targeting setups.
Every update removed depth of tracking, upsetting targeting and attribution strategies that growth marketers relied on. And now, with iOS 26, the cycle repeats.
The difference? This time there’s no actual change in UTM behavior.
Marketers on X were quick to clutch pearls, but we decided to test: how would iOS 26 affect Northbeam data?
Our Independent Testing
Instead of speculating, we ran controlled experiments across multiple devices in our Apple device lab.
Here’s how:
We constructed test URLs with both creative identifiers (nbt, utm_source) and click IDs (fbclid, gclid).
Loaded the URLs in Safari via different paths: clicking in Messages, Mail, Facebook in-app browser, direct typing, private browsing, and with “Advanced Tracking Protection” enabled.
Observed which parameters remained in the Safari URL bar and which disappeared.
We ran this on:
An iPhone on iOS 18
An iPhone on iOS 26 beta
Two Macs on current macOS builds
What We Found
Finding 1: Nothing new in iOS 26 UTM removal behavior is identical between iOS 18 and iOS 26. Anyone saying this is a “new privacy rule” is misinformed.
Finding 2: Creative UTMs are safe For URL parameters that are meant to identify ad creatives — they were not removed by the Safari browser. These include:
nbt (Northbeam’s signature tracking parameter)
utm_source
utm_medium
utm_campaign
utm_term
utm_content
nbt, utm_source, utm_medium, etc.
URL is clicked in Messages app
URL is clicked in Mail app
URL is typed directly into Safari
URL is clicked in Facebook app and opens in Facebook in-app browser
Safari (default settings)
UTM not removed
UTM not removed
UTM not removed
N/A
Safari (private browsing)
UTM not removed
UTM not removed
UTM not removed
N/A
Safari (with Advanced Tracking and Fingerprinting Protection)
UTM not removed
UTM not removed
UTM not removed
N/A
Facebook in-app browser
N/A
N/A
N/A
UTM not removed
Finding 3: Click IDs can get stripped For URL parameters that are meant to identify click IDs, session IDs, or user IDs (generally used by advertising platforms for granular tracking), those are removed by the Safari browser under certain conditions. These include:
fbclid
gclid
msclkid
twclid
dclid
yclid
fbclid, gclid, msclkid, etc.
URL is clicked in Messages app
URL is clicked in Mail app
URL is typed directly into Safari
URL is clicked in Facebook app and opens in Facebook in-app browser
Safari (default settings)
UTM removed
UTM removed
UTM not removed
N/A
Safari (private browsing)
UTM removed
UTM removed
UTM removed
N/A
Safari (with Advanced Tracking and Fingerprinting Protection)
UTM removed
UTM removed
UTM removed
N/A
Facebook in-app browser
N/A
N/A
N/A
UTM not removed
But note: none of this applies to the original ad click itself. If someone taps your Meta ad in the Facebook app, the click ID is preserved. It’s only when people copy/paste or share the URL later that stripping may occur.
What This Means for You
First, don’t buy into the panic.
Northbeam’s parameters remain unaffected. Our nbt tag and standard UTMs are untouched, across all devices and configurations.
Any tracking degradation you’ve heard about is not new. This has been happening since iOS 18.
If you see performance dips in Northbeam, it’s not because tracking broke. It’s because your underlying ad platforms are delivering weaker results.
Platforms that rely heavily on click IDs (Meta’s fbclid, Google’s gclid) are the ones at risk of degraded reporting in edge cases. Even then, the impact is limited to private browsing, Messages links, and advanced settings that only a fraction of users enable.
So if you’ve been worried about iOS 26 wiping out your attribution stack: breathe. It’s a nothingburger.
Why Good Attribution Still Matters
Even if this round of panic is overblown, the bigger picture hasn’t changed. Apple is steadily tightening the walls around user-level data. Platforms are incentivized to over-report their own performance. Ad auctions are only getting more competitive.
With Northbeam multi-touch attribution, you’re not relying on single-point metrics like ROAS or click IDs that can disappear when Apple flips a switch. You’re measuring across every touchpoint: clicks, views, and conversions on Meta, Google, TikTok, YouTube, Shopify, and more.
Instead of guessing which channel drove a sale, or waiting six weeks for an incrementality test, you get a real-time, deduplicated, revenue-backed picture of what’s working.
That clarity is what allows you to scale spend confidently, cut wasted budget, and prove profitability to finance.
This is the reason top ecommerce brands use Northbeam as their source of truth. It’s not just about surviving Apple’s latest update. It’s about future-proofing your entire growth engine.
Bottom Line
In other words: ignore the noise. Focus on building a growth strategy backed by attribution you can trust.
If you’ve ever clicked a Facebook or Instagram ad and noticed a strange string containing “fbclid” in the URL, you’re not alone.
Marketers often come across this mysterious parameter without knowing what it does — or why it matters.
This parameter, fbclid (short for Facebook Click Identifier), plays a critical role in Meta ad tracking.
It allows marketers to tie individual clicks to on-site behavior and downstream conversions, making it essential for accurate attribution and campaign optimization.
In this guide, we’ll break down exactly what fbclid is, how it works, and why it matters. You’ll learn how to capture and track it using tools like Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, avoid common pitfalls, and follow best practices to ensure you’re getting the most out of every Meta ad click.
What is fbclid?
If you’ve ever looked at a URL from a Facebook or Instagram ad and noticed a string like “?fbclid=XYZ123” tacked on the end, you’ve encountered the Facebook Click Identifier, or fbclid.
This parameter is automatically appended by Meta when a user clicks on an ad or link within its ecosystem.
At its core, fbclid is a unique tracking parameter that helps Meta monitor user behavior after an ad click.
It enables click-level attribution by linking the specific click to actions that occur further down the funnel, such as a page view, add-to-cart, or purchase.
This level of detail is essential for measuring campaign effectiveness and optimizing ad performance.
fbclid vs. UTMs: How They Work Together
It’s important to understand how fbclid and UTM parameters differ, and how they can work in tandem to improve tracking and attribution.
UTMs are manual tags created by marketers to track traffic across platforms like Google Ads, email campaigns, affiliate programs, and more.
They’re flexible and customizable, making them ideal for multi-channel tracking and reporting in tools like Google Analytics.
fbclid, on the other hand, is a Meta-specific parameter that is automatically added to URLs when users click on Facebook or Instagram ads.
It enables click-level attribution by linking user engagement to conversion events within Meta’s ad ecosystem.
While they serve different purposes, the best practice is to use fbclid and UTMs together.
fbclid helps Meta attribute performance within its platform, while UTMs offer visibility across other marketing channels.
When combined, they provide a more complete and accurate picture of how your campaigns are performing, both inside and outside of Meta.
Why fbclid Matters
For marketers running Meta campaigns, fbclid plays a critical role in connecting the dots between ad clicks and business outcomes. Without it, key insights into performance and customer behavior can easily be lost.
Here’s why fbclid matters:
Enables Accurate Attribution in Meta Ads Manager
fbclid allows Meta to track exactly which ad a user clicked before taking an action like completing a purchase or signing up.
This level of attribution helps marketers understand which creatives, audiences, and placements are driving real results.
Connects Click Behavior to Conversion Events and Audiences
By capturing fbclid on your website or landing page, you can feed back valuable conversion data into Meta’s platform.
This enhances event matching, strengthens reporting, and fuels more effective ad optimization.
Improves Retargeting and Lookalike Audience Quality
When fbclid is captured and tied to user behavior, Meta can better retarget warm leads and build high-quality lookalike audiences based on real post-click engagement, not just impressions or views.
Prevents Loss of Traffic Data in Analytics Platforms
Without fbclid (or with improper setup), traffic from Facebook and Instagram can show up as “direct” in tools like Google Analytics.
This muddies your data and makes it harder to attribute success to the correct channels.
In short, fbclid isn’t just a random string in your URLs, it’s the key to unlocking full-funnel visibility and driving better campaign performance on Meta.
How fbclid Works
The fbclid parameter may look like a small string of characters in your URL, but behind the scenes, it’s quietly powering some of the most important attribution and optimization features in Meta’s ad platform.
Here’s a simple breakdown of how fbclid works:
A user clicks on your Facebook or Instagram ad. When someone engages with your ad and clicks through, Meta initiates the fbclid tracking process automatically.
Meta appends a unique fbclid value to the URL. The moment the user is redirected to your landing page, Meta attaches the fbclid parameter to the end of the destination URL
Your website captures the fbclid value. Tools like Google Tag Manager, GA4, or your CRM can be set up to grab this value and store it for tracking or matching later.
The fbclid is tied to user behavior and conversions. As users browse your site, take action, or convert, that unique fbclid helps Meta understand which ad interaction led to those results, enabling better fbclid attribution and retargeting.
How to Use fbclid
To make fbclid work for you, it’s not enough to let Meta add the parameter: you need to capture it on your website and pass it into your analytics or CRM systems or valuable click-level attribution data may be lost.
Here’s how to capture and track fbclid using common tools:
Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
Google Analytics doesn’t automatically display fbclid, but you can set it up to capture and store it: use Google Analytics’ built-in ability to log URL parameters in event data, or create a custom dimension to track fbclid across user sessions.
Once captured, fbclid values can be tied to conversion events and help validate Meta Ad tracking reporting with fbclid.
💡 Pro tip: Create a Google Analytics exploration that segments users by presence of fbclid to analyze Meta-driven behavior.
Google Tag Manager (GTM)
If you use GTM, you can create a variable to pull the fbclid value from the URL and send it to GA4, your CRM, or other platforms.
First, create a URL Variable in GTM to capture fbclid. Then set up a Custom Event Tag to store the variable in GA4 or pass it to other tools. Optionally, write it to a cookie or session storage for use across pages
💡 Pro tip: This is especially helpful when users navigate beyond your landing page and you want to preserve the fbclid across sessions.
Server-Side Tracking or CRM Integration
For advanced setups, you can capture the fbclid server-side or send it directly into your CRM.
Use scripts on your landing page to extract the fbclid and associate it with a user or session. Store it in hidden form fields, database entries, or session cookies.
💡 Pro tip: Send the fbclid with conversion events to platforms like Meta, HubSpot, or Salesforce for offline event matching.
Code Snippet (for Developers or Technical Marketers)
Here’s a simple JavaScript snippet that captures fbclid and stores it in a cookie:
// Capture fbclid in URLsconst urlParams = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search);
const fbclid = urlParams.get('fbclid');
if (fbclid) {
document.cookie = `fbclid=${fbclid}; path=/; max-age=2592000`; // 30 days}
💡 Pro tip: Once in a cookie, the fbclid can be accessed on future page loads or submitted with forms.
Common Challenges with fbclid
While fbclid is a powerful tool for Meta ad attribution, it’s not always plug-and-play.
Many marketers miss out on its full benefits due to setup gaps, misunderstandings, or technical issues.
Here are four of the most common challenges:
1. Lost fbclid During Redirects
Just like UTM parameters, the fbclid can be stripped out during redirects, especially if your landing page URL passes through a link shortener, third-party service, or tracking tool.
2. Incomplete Setup in Analytics Tools
Capturing fbclid requires intentional configuration in tools like GA4, GTM, or your CRM.
If your setup doesn’t explicitly track this parameter, it won’t show up in reports, leading to underreporting of Meta ad tracking performance for fbclid.
3. Misunderstanding Its Role vs. UTMs
A common misconception is that fbclid can replace UTM parameters.
In reality, it’s not an either/or: fbclid serves a unique purpose within Meta’s ecosystem, while UTMs provide broader cross-platform tracking.
4. Privacy Concerns
Some marketers worry that fbclid might contain personally identifiable information (PII).
Fortunately, fbclid is fully anonymized: it’s just a unique identifier used for tracking a session, not a specific person.
Best Practices for Using fbclid
To get the most out of fbclid, marketers need more than just awareness. They need systems in place that consistently capture, preserve, and leverage this data for smarter fbclid attribution.
Here are four best practices to follow:
1. Preserve fbclid Through Redirects
Make sure your landing page setup, including any redirect chains, doesn’t strip fbclid in URLs.
Whether you’re using link shorteners, third-party tools, or campaign tracking layers, test for fbclid retention across every step.
2. Combine fbclid with UTM Parameters
fbclid gives you deep visibility into Meta ad performance, but it doesn’t replace UTMs.
To understand cross-channel journeys and build cohesive fbclid attribution models, you should use both fbclid and UTM tags together.
3. Audit Your Analytics and CRM Setup Regularly
Even small changes in your site structure, forms, or analytics tools can break fbclid capture.
Set a recurring check-in (monthly or quarterly) to confirm that fbclid is still being tracked correctly in GA4, GTM, or your CRM.
4. Use Tools That Unify fbclid With Other Attribution Data
Manual fbclid tracking can only take you so far.
Platforms like Northbeam help reconcile fbclid with your broader attribution stack, from Google Ads to influencer traffic, so you can measure Meta’s true impact in a multi-touch journey.
Make fbclid Work For You
The fbclid parameter may be invisible to most users, but it’s essential to marketers who want accurate, reliable Meta ad or fbclid attribution.
When properly captured and paired with UTM parameters, fbclid provides the click-level visibility needed to understand what’s actually driving conversions, and where your budget is making the biggest impact.
From improving retargeting accuracy to preventing misattributed “direct” traffic, fbclid is a small but powerful tool in your tracking toolkit.
The future may be uncertain, but one thing is not: we have more data at our fingertips than ever before.
And in this era of big data in marketing, how we market has fundamentally changed.
Sorry, Mad Men lovers: the days when marketing decisions were based entirely on intuitive assumptions or creative instincts is fading.
While creativity matters more now than ever before due to the mass proliferation of AI-generated campaigns, decisions in today’s competitive marketing environment have to be backed by cold, hard data.
This is reflected by the rise of data-driven marketing. Within this strategy, decisions must be driven first and foremost by data.
In this blog post, we’ll delve into what data-driven marketing is, why it matters, challenges and opportunities, and practical frameworks to implement data-driven marketing in your overall strategy.
What is data-driven marketing?
At its core, data-driven marketing is the approach of leveraging data to make marketing decisions and measure success.
Sounds simple, right?
But data-driven digital marketing goes beyond spreadsheets and platform data.
What we’re talking about is the distinction between setting a strategy and then using data to measure results, and looking at data at each step of the process.
With a data-driven approach, you would:
Use data to establish a complete understanding of customer behavior, preferences, and pain points
Use data to derive a strategy based on customer data points
Use data to validate and refine your initial data-backed hypothesis
Use data to measure and communicate results
Repeat
A data-driven approach might take advantage of tools like customer segmentation, personalized campaigns, predictive analytics, A/B testing, and more.
The maxim that numbers don't lie has never been more true.
When marketing strategy is based on data rather than theories, you’re more likely to set yourself and your team up for success with each and every dollar.
And rather than eliminate room for experimentation, having a data-backed strategy lets you experiment within a more controlled environment, giving you a better shot at achieving your goals.
How does data-driven marketing compare to traditional marketing?
Traditional marketing was once ruled by gut instinct and broad messaging: marketers made big bets based on limited data, hoping their campaigns would stick.
But today, with a flood of customer data at our fingertips, modern marketing is far more precise.
Here’s how data-driven marketing stacks up against traditional methods:
Data-driven digital marketing isn’t just a modern upgrade, it’s a fundamental shift in how teams plan, execute, and evaluate campaigns.
By embracing data at every step, marketers can stop guessing and start growing with confidence.
Why does data-driven marketing matter?
In today’s competitive landscape, marketing can’t afford to be a guessing game. Data-driven strategies give teams the clarity they need to focus on what works, and cut what doesn’t.
By grounding decisions in real-time data, marketers can:
Optimize ROI by allocating budget toward the channels, audiences, and creatives that actually drive revenue — not just clicks.
Personalize experiences at scale, delivering relevant content based on user behavior, preferences, and intent.
Measure success with precision, using attribution models and performance dashboards to tie every campaign to concrete outcomes.
Ultimately, data-driven marketing turns strategy into science, enabling smarter decisions, stronger results, and sustainable growth.
How is data-driven marketing used?
Data isn’t just for dashboards: it drives real decisions every day.
Here are five ways to put big data in marketing to work:
Customer segmentation → personalized campaigns
By analyzing behavior, purchase history, or engagement patterns, brands can create highly tailored messaging that resonates with specific audience segments.
Predictive analytics → demand forecasting
Machine learning models can anticipate future behavior, like when a customer is likely to purchase again, helping marketers plan inventory, timing, and spend more effectively.
Multi-touch attribution → smarter ROI tracking
Instead of giving all the credit to the last click, multi-touch models show how different channels work together, so you can allocate budget based on true performance.
Churn prediction → retention strategies
By flagging users at risk of dropping off, marketers can trigger win-back campaigns or special offers to re-engage them before it’s too late.
Data-driven A/B testing helps teams understand which images, headlines, or formats perform best, turning creative from a guess into a growth lever.
Data-driven marketing strategies across industries
While the principles of data-driven digital marketing stay consistent, the strategies look different depending on the industry.
Here’s how businesses are tailoring their approach, including data-driven marketing examples across e-commerce, B2B SaaS, Retail, Media & Publishing, and Finance & Insurance:
E-commerce
Brands use browsing behavior, purchase history, and abandoned cart data to deliver hyper-personalized product recommendations, email flows, and promotions.
B2B SaaS
Lead scoring models prioritize sales outreach based on engagement signals, helping teams focus on high-intent accounts and shorten the sales cycle.
Retail
In-store and online data is combined to create unified customer profiles, enabling loyalty programs, localized promotions, and smarter inventory planning.
Media & Publishing
Audience data informs content strategy, ad placements, and subscription offers, ensuring the right content reaches the right reader at the right time.
Finance & Insurance
Predictive analytics helps identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities, detect fraud, and customize offers based on life stage or risk profile.
No matter the vertical, one thing holds true: the more aligned your strategy is with your data, the better your outcomes will be.
How can you implement data-driven marketing?
Data-driven marketing is a cyclical process, not a one-and-done task.
To get the most value from your data, you need a structured approach that supports continuous learning and improvement.
Here’s a six-step framework to follow:
Step 1: Collect
Start by gathering first-party data from your website, CRM, email platform, and ad campaigns. Centralize it using tools like customer data platforms (CDPs) to build a unified view of your customers.
Step 2: Analyze
Use analytics tools (like Northbeam, Google Analytics, or BI platforms) to surface insights. Identify patterns in performance, behavior, and attribution that can inform smarter decisions.
Step 3: Strategize
Translate those insights into action. Adjust your targeting, messaging, and channel mix to align with what the data reveals about your most valuable audiences.
Step 4: Execute
Launch campaigns with clear hypotheses and measurable goals. Whether it's a new audience segment or a refreshed creative concept, treat execution as a testable experiment.
Step 5: Measure
Track performance in real time. Go beyond vanity metrics and measure what matters — conversions, LTV, CAC, and multi-touch attribution.
Step 6: Optimize
Use what you’ve learned to refine your approach. Iterate on campaigns, reallocate budget, and double down on what’s working. Then go back to Step 1 and do it better.
What are the benefits of data-driven marketing?
Data-driven marketing isn’t just a buzzword, it’s a smarter, more efficient way to grow.
Here’s how a data-centric approach pays off for modern marketing teams:
Optimized marketing spend
Stop wasting budget on campaigns that don’t convert.
With data-driven insights, you can focus your spend on the channels, audiences, and creatives that deliver the best return on investment.
Better personalization and targeting
Big data in marketing allows you to move beyond broad segments and craft personalized experiences that resonate.
From dynamic product recommendations to tailored email flows, personalization drives deeper engagement and higher conversions.
Improved decision-making backed by evidence
No more guesswork. If you’re wondering how to use data in marketing, lean on data-driven strategies to give you concrete evidence to support strategic decisions, whether it’s launching a new campaign, shifting budget, or testing creative variations.
Enhanced customer insights
Behavioral data reveals what your customers actually want, not just what you assume.
By understanding browsing patterns, purchase behaviors, and engagement signals, you can refine your messaging and product positioning.
Agile, real-time campaign adjustments
With the right tools, you can monitor performance in real time and pivot quickly.
Data-driven teams don’t have to wait for post-campaign reports — they adjust on the fly to maximize results.
Of course, harnessing data’s full potential comes with its own set of challenges, from data privacy concerns to the pitfalls of misinterpreting metrics.
Let’s look at the common obstacles that can trip up even the most data-driven teams so we can best learn how to use data in marketing.
What are the challenges of data-driven marketing?
While data-driven digital marketing unlocks huge opportunities, it’s not without hurdles.
Teams that dive in without a solid foundation can fall into these common traps:
Overreliance on platform-reported analytics
Relying solely on ad platforms’ metrics often paints an incomplete picture.
Without a multi-touch attribution model, it’s easy to over-credit last-click conversions and miss the bigger story of how channels work together to drive results.
Data privacy and compliance concerns
With regulations like GDPR and CCPA, marketers need to be hyper-aware of how they collect, store, and use customer data.
Mishandling sensitive information can lead to legal issues and erode customer trust.
Misinterpreting correlation as causation
Not every data trend signals a direct cause-and-effect relationship. Jumping to conclusions without proper analysis can lead to misguided strategies and wasted resources.
Human error in manual reporting
When teams rely on spreadsheets and manual data entry, mistakes are inevitable.
These errors can skew insights, misinform decisions, and slow down your ability to act on what’s working.
Despite these challenges, the future of data-driven marketing is more promising, and more powerful, than ever.
With advancements in AI, predictive analytics, and privacy-first technologies, the next wave of tools is reshaping how marketers turn data into results.
What are some future trends in data-driven marketing?
As technology evolves, so does the way marketers leverage data.
The next frontier of data-driven digital marketing is being shaped by smarter tools, stronger privacy regulations, and a shift toward predictive, proactive strategies.
Here’s what’s on the horizon:
AI and machine learning
AI is no longer a buzzword, it’s becoming the backbone of advanced marketing analytics.
Machine learning models can identify patterns at a scale no human could, enabling faster insights, automated optimizations, and even predictive content recommendations.
Marketing intelligence platforms
As data sources multiply, marketing intelligence platforms are emerging as the single source of truth.
Platforms like Northbeam integrate data across channels, visualize performance, and deliver actionable insights, helping teams align strategy, execution, and measurement in one place.
Predictive analytics for proactive decisions
Rather than reacting to past performance, marketers are starting to forecast future outcomes.
Predictive models help teams anticipate customer behavior, forecast demand, and allocate resources with greater confidence, leading to more strategic, data-backed decision-making.
Privacy-first data strategies
With third-party cookies on the decline and data privacy regulations tightening, marketers are shifting toward first-party data strategies.
Tools that respect user privacy while still delivering deep insights — like server-side tracking and consent-based data collection — will define the next era of responsible marketing.
Conclusion
Data-driven marketing isn’t about replacing creativity—it’s about giving it direction. When insight guides imagination, teams move faster, waste less, and build compounding advantage. Start with clean first-party data, align on the metrics that matter, and commit to a test-learn-optimize loop
Equip your team with an intelligence platform like Northbeam to unify data, attribute impact, and surface next steps. Most importantly, make decisions transparent and repeatable so wins can be scaled. The future will reward marketers who treat data as a product and learning as a habit.
Begin now, iterate relentlessly, and let results—not guesses—power your growth. Test boldly, measure clearly.
If you’re up-to-date on your alphabet soup, you may know that multi-touch attribution (MTA), media mix modeling (MMM) and incrementality work together to give you a full picture of your campaign performance. They all provide useful answers as you assess what’s working and what’s not — just to different types of questions.
And if you’re not as familiar with these terms, let’s talk about it. Read on for more information about MTA, MMM, and incrementality so you can understand how they work in concert to give you the information you need to make informed marketing decisions.
Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA)
MTA is major; we have an entire guide dedicated to it.
The TL;DR is this: MTA is a method of marketing attribution that accounts for all of the different touchpoints and activities in a customer’s journey — not just the first or last touch.
While first or last touch attribution gives all of the credit to a single touch on the customer journey, MTA understands that the customer’s path to a conversion isn’t linear, and aims to distribute credit (and attribution) across all relevant touchpoints.
MTA is your go-to tool for the day-to-day. It gives you attribution information on a granular level about campaign performance so you can make decisions on where to spend and adjust your budget on a given day in order to optimize for profitability.
What worked last week may not work any more; market and consumer variables are constantly shifting and making your ad performance fluctuate. MTA lets you stay on top of those shifts across all of your digital channels.
Checking out your MTA on a regular basis helps you keep your finger on the pulse so you can make regular adjustments and know what’s happening based on hourly or real-time performance data.
The cons of MTA? It’s primarily focused on digital touchpoints, so if you do a lot of traditional marketing, it may not capture attribution for all of your activities. That’s where MMM comes in.
You should use MTA if:
You want to know the contribution of each touch point to a final conversion
You want granular, real-time data
You want a go-to resource to check daily to inform your spend decisions
Media Mix Modeling (MMM)
While MTA goes deep on individual touchpoints, Media Mix Modeling (MMM) goes deep on individual channels and tactics. MMM gives you a top-down look at how each channel is performing so you can fill in the gaps of your MTA reporting.
MMM goes beyond the day-to-day to incorporate all of your past and present data as well as seasonality, market trends, and more to inform your strategy and help you allocate resources.
Rather than a tool to help you make everyday decisions, MMM can be thought of as a powerful forecasting and budgeting tool in the longer term. It helps you understand the marginal efficiency of each channel, and where you might start to see diminishing returns.
Let’s say that one of your channels is performing at an 8x ROAS (return on ad spend). With just that data point, you might scale your ads indefinitely and pour more money into that channel. But proper MMM will tell you that if you spend more than a certain amount per day there, you’ll stop seeing returns.
Both pieces of data are needed to make the best decision possible: MMM puts integral parameters around your MTA insights.
A major pro of MMM: it can give you information about both digital and traditional channels, both online and offline efforts. Not only can you see how your ads and influencers are performing, but you’ll get data about your billboards and commercials as well.
Another pro: MMM shows you the limits of what’s possible with the resources you have available — regardless of what your boss says.
Marketing teams are often given budgets that are difficult to work with. With MMM, you can input your budget and see if your goals are possible based on historical channel performance so you can set realistic goals and make your case using data.
The cons? MMM tools are advanced, and you may need support to set up or interpret your outputs. Depending on your provider, they may also take longer to run — while Northbeam provides regular MMM reports, other providers can often only deliver these insights on a quarterly basis.
Still, MMM is powerful. The best MMM tools will give you suggestions on how to shift your budget to optimize for performance based on your goals. You can do multiple MMMs by regions or marketplaces, metrics, and more. You can rework the numbers to see how your channels are performing against new customer acquisition, total revenue, or any other metric you want to measure. MMM is a flexible and dynamic way to understand your marketing attribution.
You should use MMM if:
You want to understand when you’ll start seeing diminishing returns and/or room to scale in a given channel
You want to establish and track a long-term strategy that involves a variety of different marketing channels
You want to capture offline channel performance
Incrementality
Incrementality can be thought of as a calibration tool — a sanity check. It provides a more controlled environment in which you can test and control for different variables, like spend, that may affect how your campaigns or channels are performing.
Here’s an example: let’s say that you run a subway ad and receive 5,000 new users that week. But what if 50% of those users would have signed up anyway, regardless of whether or not they saw the ad?
Incrementality can help you answer the question of organic cannibalization by better controlling for variables and measuring the actual impact of each activity on your core metrics.
While attribution matches two events, like a touch and a conversion, incrementality quantifies the relationship: what is that relationship actually worth?
But measuring incrementality can be time- and resource-intensive to do consistently. It involves a test group and a control group, and a variable you want to test for, like geography. When you compare the performance of both groups, you’ll be able to quantify the incremental lift provided by each campaign.
Because they capture a moment in time, incrementality tests get outdated quite quickly. The tests you ran in January will yield results in February or March, and by then, they may already be outdated.
And because incrementality involves a test group, you will have to turn off marketing for a subset of your audience. This could result in lower sales and marketing performance — maybe that’s worth it to gain a deeper level of understanding, but maybe it isn’t. Keep in mind that a channel has to be large enough to begin with to garner statistically significant results, so this decrease in marketing will not be insignificant.
When running an incrementality test, you also need to be hands off and let things run for weeks or months at a time. That means very little room for changes, tweaks, and adapting on the fly if you want to get clear and accurate results.
It’s important to note that MTA and MMM, when used together, can provide a similar or much higher level of detail than incrementality without the hands-off requirement. MTA can show you all the different touches that happened on the way to a conversion, and MMM can add a layer of strategy and insight about where you should funnel budget to see incremental returns.
Bonus: incrementality results can be incorporated into your MMM model; Northbeam offers this service to train your MMM on your specific and unique data set.
You should use incrementality if:
You’re worried that your paid channels are cannibalizing your organic growth
You want to improve your MMM tool by feeding it incrementality test data
Your marketing team is not in a time-sensitive or resource-sensitive phase of growth
What do we suggest?
The best marketing strategies create room for all three of the tools above at different stages of a company’s growth and maturity. The data that each tool provides is different in key ways, and they each have their own distinct pros and cons, so you can best assess which makes the most sense for your current marketing priorities.
Ever felt like you’re throwing money at ads and just hoping something sticks?
Without a clear picture of return on ad spend (ROAS), it’s hard to tell what’s working, and what’s just burning cash.
ROAS, or Return on Ad Spend, is a simple but powerful metric that shows how much revenue you earn for every dollar you spend on advertising.
Whether you're running Meta campaigns or multi-channel growth programs, ROAS helps you evaluate ad efficiency and make smarter budgeting decisions.
In this guide, we’ll break down exactly what ROAS is, how to calculate it, what a “good” ROAS looks like, and how to improve it.
We’ll also explore common mistakes marketers make when tracking ROAS, and how to avoid them.
What is ROAS, and how can you calculate it?
ROAS measures the revenue generated for every dollar spent.
It’s a straightforward metric that helps marketers understand whether their campaigns are profitable and which channels deliver the best results.
The ROAS formula is calculated simply as Revenue divided by Ad Spend:
ROAS = Revenue / Ad Spend
For example, if your Revenue is $10,000 and your Ad Spend is $2,500, your ROAS would be:
ROAS = $10,000 / $2,500 = 4.0.
In this example, your advertising ROAS is $4 in revenue for every $1 spent.
While calculating the ROAS formula is simple enough, it’s critical to ensure that you’re using the right inputs. Make sure to accurately determine your revenue during a specific period. This could include direct purchases, sign ups, or other types of conversions.
Then, make sure you’re accurately calculating ad spend. Add up all the costs associated with a given campaign, including media buys, creative production, and management fees.
Why does ROAS matter?
ROAS is one of the clearest indicators of whether your marketing dollars are actually delivering results.
Here’s why it matters:
Profitability check: ROAS shows you whether your ad spend is generating more revenue than it costs. If you’re spending $2,500 and making $10,000, that’s a 4x ROAS — and a strong sign of profitability.
Budget optimization: By comparing ROAS across different campaigns or channels, you can identify where to allocate more budget for maximum returns.
Strategic decision-making: A high ROAS indicates profitable campaigns, while a low ROAS signals the need for optimization or a re-evaluation of your strategy.
ROI proof: Tracking ROAS consistently helps you refine your approach, bring data to the conversation, and improve your overall advertising ROAS.
How and when is ROAS used?
In modern marketing, ROAS is more than a performance metric: it’s a decision-making tool.
Marketers use ROAS to evaluate campaign efficiency, shift spend to high-performing channels, and justify budget increases (or cuts) with real numbers.
Marketers use ROAS for:
Channel planning: Comparing ROAS across platforms helps teams assess which channels are truly worth the investment. Paid search might drive conversions efficiently, while paid social delivers awareness but lower ROAS.
In-flight optimization: Running Meta, Google, or TikTok ads? Marketers often monitor ROAS daily or weekly to reallocate spend in real time, turning down underperforming campaigns and doubling down on the winners.
Post-campaign analysis: After a campaign ends, ROAS is a quick way to assess whether it met revenue expectations — and whether it’s worth repeating.
What is a good ROAS benchmark?
ROAS isn’t one-size-fits-all.
What qualifies as a good ROAS benchmark depends on your industry, business model, channel, margins, and sales cycle.
Here’s how different industries approach good ROAS benchmarks — and why their acceptable ranges vary.
Understanding where your business fits on the ROAS benchmark spectrum helps you set smarter performance targets and avoid apples-to-oranges comparisons.
Whether you’re aiming for a 4x return or making strategic bets on long-term value, ROAS is most powerful when used in context.
How can you best apply ROAS?
Knowing your return on ad spend is only half the battle: the real power comes from using it to guide your ROAS marketing strategy.
Track the Full Picture
To apply ROAS effectively, you need more than just ad spend and top-line revenue. True ROAS depends on accurate tracking of:
All associated costs: including creative production, agency fees, platform commissions, and even fulfillment if relevant.
Attribution data: so you know which clicks, impressions, or channels actually contributed to a sale.
Without clean attribution and comprehensive cost tracking, your ROAS may look better (or worse) than it really is, leading to poor decisions.
Automate with the Right Tools
Manual ROAS tracking is time-consuming and prone to error, especially if you’re running campaigns across multiple platforms like Meta, Google, TikTok, and email.
That’s where tools like Northbeam come in. Northbeam automates ROAS calculation using first-party data, cross-channel attribution, and full-funnel insights — helping you see exactly which ads are driving real revenue, not just clicks.
With better visibility, you can:
Identify your most efficient campaigns
Pinpoint low-performing spend
Reinvest confidently for higher returns
What are some common ROAS mistakes and misconceptions?
ROAS is a powerful metric, but it’s only as accurate as the data behind it — and it doesn’t tell the whole story on its own.
To make smart, high-confidence decisions, avoid these common ROAS pitfalls:
Ignoring multitouch attribution
Many marketers rely on a single-touch attribution model, which gives full credit to the last ad a customer interacted with before converting.
But in reality, most customer journeys are multitouch, spanning multiple platforms and touchpoints.
If you ignore that complexity, you risk undervaluing top-of-funnel campaigns or key supporting channels.
Instead, advanced attribution models — like linear, time decay, or data-driven — offer a more holistic view.
Platforms like Northbeam make it easier to apply these models and accurately track ROAS across the full customer journey.
Over-focusing on ROAS
ROAS can show you whether an ad is generating revenue, but it doesn’t reveal whether those customers will stick around.
A campaign with a high ROAS might bring in low-quality, one-time buyers, while a campaign with lower immediate returns could be acquiring loyal, high-LTV customers.
That’s why it’s important to balance ROAS with other metrics like Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) to get a more complete picture of marketing effectiveness.
Overlooking hidden costs
If you’re only factoring in platform spend and ignoring expenses like agency fees, creative production, influencer partnerships, or software tools, your ROAS calculations may be overly optimistic.
To get a true measure of profitability, make sure you’re including all relevant costs in your formula — not just what’s visible in your ad dashboard.
Confusing ROAS vs ROI
While they’re both return metrics, ROAS only measures the revenue generated per advertising dollar spent.
ROI, on the other hand, takes into account all costs, not just ad spend, and calculates net profit.
A campaign can have a high ROAS and still lose money from an ROI perspective once fixed and variable costs are factored in.
A clear, accurate understanding of ROAS, and an understanding of the difference between ROAS vs ROI, is essential for evaluating true business impact and long-term growth potential.
How can you improve ROAS?
Once you’re tracking ROAS accurately, the next step is to improve it.
Whether you're optimizing for efficiency or scaling what already works, here are five proven strategies that can help lift your return on ad spend.
1. Refine your targeting
Use detailed audience segmentation and lookalike modeling to reach people who are more likely to convert, not just click.
Smart targeting ensures your budget is going toward the audiences with the highest potential ROI.
2. Test your creative
A/B testing headlines, visuals, calls to action, and formats across platforms can lead to meaningful gains in conversion rates and ROAS.
Even small improvements in engagement or relevance can have a big impact when scaled.
3. Monitor channel performance
Continuously compare ROAS across channels and campaigns to identify what’s working.
Shift budget toward high-performing channels and pause or restructure underperformers to prevent wasted spend.
4. Focus on post-click
If your landing pages aren’t converting, even the best campaigns won’t deliver advertising ROAS.
Streamline your pages for speed, clarity, and ease of conversion — especially on mobile, where friction can quickly kill ROAS.
5. Track performance consistently
The best way to improve ROAS is to measure it often, and act on the insights.
With platforms like Northbeam, you can monitor ROAS in real time, identify patterns across the funnel, and make data-backed decisions with confidence.
MyHD DJ Store faced difficulty identifying which marketing channels delivered the best returns, leading to inefficiencies in ad spend.
Northbeam's platform provided MyHD with accurate, actionable insights by consolidating first-party data and offering advanced attribution models.
MyHD achieved an 84% improvement in blended ROAS, a 21% reduction in customer acquisition costs, and optimized marketing efficiency.
Make ROAS work for you
ROAS, or Return on Ad Spend, is one of the most critical metrics for understanding whether your marketing is truly working.
It helps you measure campaign efficiency, optimize budget allocation, and tie revenue back to ad spend.
By calculating ROAS accurately, comparing it to industry benchmarks, and applying smart optimization tactics, you can make more confident, data-driven decisions.
But tracking ROAS manually, especially across multiple channels and touchpoints, can be time-consuming and error-prone.
Explore how Northbeam provides real-time ROAS tracking, cross-channel attribution, and actionable insights that help marketers scale what works, and cut out what doesn’t.
In this era of big data, the amount of tools that can help you surface marketing insights is nearly limitless. But not all insights are created equally, and there is a major gap when it comes to execution, a wide valley between having access to large amounts of data and being able to use it.
Part of this gap has to do with the limitations of a given data source: every platform and tool has its own way of gathering and visualizing data, so you have to be discerning when you decide which tool to go with. There's also the inherent difficulty of fully understanding a buyer’s journey — what influences what and how cause and effect can be attributed — combined with growing limits on ad platform data.
Not all marketing intelligence software navigates the gap between data and execution successfully.
Let’s cover the ways that the best marketers gather data and talk about what makes Northbeam data different.
Platform Data
Nearly all ecommerce platforms — X, Facebook, Youtube, Google, TikTok, etc. — have their own in-platform analytics suites. These suites are easy to read and access but are often catered towards individual users, not billion-dollar enterprises, and can therefore lack the sophistication needed to inform spending decisions.
If you spend a lot of your time on a given platform, native analytics suites can feel convenient, but they’re only going to give you part of the picture. What if someone saw one of your YouTube ads and later Googled your company and made a purchase? What if someone saw your product on a Pinterest board on their computer and later looked up your company’s Instagram on their phone?
This sounds obvious, but it’s not. Platform-specific analytics suites are handy and straightforward, but fail to reflect the complicated nature of the buyer’s journey. They’re also susceptible to inherent biases: Google doesn’t benefit from telling you that LinkedIn or Twitter are performing well; they want to keep your money on-platform.
For these reasons and others, great marketers know that platform data can only ever be a piece of a greater puzzle — not an end within itself.
Third Party Pixels
Third party pixels or cookies are bite-sized (pun intended) pieces of code embedded in a site to track user behavior. They provide more data than native platform analytics, and are able to give you information like someone’s email address, location, and more. Because they provide personal consumer information, there is growing vigilance surrounding their use, and consumers are more and more wary of allowing cookies as they navigate online.
While third party pixels are powerful, they can’t be consistently relied on, and their usage will be increasingly monitored and restricted over time.
Mozilla, for example, has accessible offerings that block all third party pixels by default, as does Google Chrome. Another limitation is that third party pixels only work on desktop web — not apps, and not mobile.
Third party pixels or cookies are easy to set up and gather data with, but limited in the actual data that they can gather. Like platform analytics, they are part of a greater marketing intelligence picture. Cookies are fine, but only in moderation (pun intended).
Read more about how cookie depreciation will affect marketing analytics on our blog. Spoiler: it won’t affect Northbeam’s data.
UTM Tracking
UTMs (urchin tracking modules) are custom URLs that transmit source information easily and for free. All you have to do is create a distinct URL for different ads and content to start gathering data about how much of your traffic is coming from different sources.
While UTMs are free to create and implement, the data they provide is limited. You can know which campaigns are sending traffic your way, but you are left with little understanding of the full buyer’s journey. UTMs are only available on browsers and can’t track offline conversions.
They are also easy to spot in a navigation bar, and, to be frank, unattractive. This may deter click rate, and savvy consumers may purposely avoid or even amend UTM links. UTMs also require regular, manual creation and maintenance, which can be time-intensive.
UTMs are another piece of the marketing intelligence puzzle. What they lack, like the other data sources above, is a holistic understanding that the buyer’s journey is multi-touch, multi-channel, and more complex than a single click and conversion — at least for most types of purchases. That’s where marketing intelligence platforms come in.
Marketing Intelligence
Today there are more channels than ever before. Pre-digital modes like print, radio, TV, mail, outdoor, and experiential marketing are still around, while new digital contenders like TikTok and YouTube and dozens of others have gained and maintained prominence in today’s marketing landscape.
More channels equals more data. We’re talking about near-infinite amounts of data points that need to come together to help you understand what’s working, what’s not, and what you can do better to improve your marketing strategy. Northbeam alone processes over 300 terabytes of data in a single day — that’s billions of data points — through its machine learning models.
Marketing intelligence platforms aggregate data across channels and visualize it in a way that is not just intuitive but actionable. They help close the gap between insights and execution, and bring disparate parts of your marketing mix together to form a bigger picture that tells a story. These platforms acknowledge the wider buyer’s journey and try to piece the puzzle together for you — saving you hours and eliminating human error.
That being said, they are not immune from error. Each marketing intelligence platform has its own unique algorithms and formulas for understanding and representing attribution to different channels. With infinite data points at play, even minor differences in accuracy between providers can result in millions of dollars lost or gained.
And many marketing intelligence platforms draw data directly from platforms themselves, leaving them open to volatility if these platforms have service issues, interruptions, or changes in their own algorithms. Data could be there today and gone tomorrow, leaving some marketing intelligence providers scrambling to keep up.
That’s why it's crucially important that you understand how each marketing intelligence software works so you can decide what makes the most sense for you and your company.
What makes Northbeam's data different?
Northbeam uses proprietary machine learning models to generate first-party multi-touch attribution data. This data is more accurate, more actionable, and more insightful than any amalgamation of in-platform or third-party data you could get as a marketer. With this data, you can run experiments faster, attribute ad results more accurately, and compete more efficiently in an expensive performance marketing environment.
This isn't just all your ad platform data collected in one place: it's new data, polished with machine learning. Northbeam’s in-house PhDs built its proprietary machine learning model in 2019 and have been fine-tuning and improving it ever since, training it on massive amounts of data every day to improve its performance over time.
While some marketing intelligence platforms succeed in providing actionable insights and making connections between touchpoints, this data is often retroactive — a week or even a month old. Making decisions based on yesterday’s data is fine, but it’s not great, and today’s marketer wants to be great. This is where Northbeam stands out.
With first-party data, you can attribute conversion to ads in near-real-time. Northbeam’s machine learning models allow it to not just present but predict how various customer touch points will play out in the future, letting you run simulations and automatically shift spending in informed ways in order to succeed.
It's also future-proof: Northbeam doesn’t rely on third party pixels, protecting you from volatility, bugs, and the ever-changing compliance landscape. A new iOS update or algorithm change doesn’t affect your data, and neither would the deprecation of cookies altogether.
Unlike other marketing intelligence solutions, Northbeam’s machine learning models are built with privacy and security in mind, keeping data anonymized and aggregated so you can be GDPR compliant today instead of worrying about it in the future.
The best part is that Northbeam’s machine learning model gets better over time. As it learns your unique data and channel performance, its predictions become more fine-tuned, delivering more value and accuracy with use.
“You can get the most up-to-date insights based on what you’re trying to understand, whether it’s revenue, spend, or attribution. We get you the depth of the information you’re looking for as quickly as possible,” said Steven Yampolsky, Head of Data Engineering at Northbeam.
“We go to a great depth to ensure that our data is as accurate as it can be. There’s a high push for accuracy to make sure we’re not biased and we’re using all the information we have to the best fidelity possible. That’s what makes Northbeam’s data different.”
But you don’t have to be a machine learning expert like Steven to use Northbeam. Our software is built with marketers in mind, with easy-to-use and customizable dashboards to get you the right data at the right time so you can turn insight into action.
Questions to Ask When You're Shopping for Marketing Intelligence Software:
As you’re choosing the marketing analytics platform that works best for you and your organization, ask the following questions so you can ensure you’re getting the best bang for your buck:
How real-time is your platform’s data? How often is it updated? Can you forecast?
How robust is your platform’s algorithm for calculating attribution and touches?
How accurate is your attribution model? What is your margin of error?
How resilient is your data when it comes to social media platform bugs and issues?
How future-proof is your data when it comes to changes in the compliance and privacy landscape?
How secure is your data when it comes to encryption and compliance regulations?
You’ve done your research, compared your options, and made the decision to switch to Northbeam — congratulations! In our reasonably biased opinion, you’re on the right path.
But, onboarding onto a new platform can take a minute. Let’s talk through what you can expect when switching to Northbeam — there may be some surprises, but only the good kind.
The TL;DR is this: Northbeam uses its own proprietary machine learning models to generate first-party attribution data that is more accurate than traditional platform or third party data.
If you’re used to getting data directly from platforms, third party pixels, UTM tracking, or even other marketing intelligence platforms that have their own algorithms, your data will look a little different when you migrate to Northbeam.
But we’re scrupulous about our data and the AI behind it — if you’re curious, you can read more about how our AI works.
Another major benefit of switching to Northbeam: because we don’t rely on third party pixels, your data is future-proofed. Algorithm or operating system updates such as the changes we saw Apple make to iOS within the last few years won’t affect the accuracy of our data, and neither will the deprecation of cookies.
Our model gets better over time as it learns your various channels and data points, so you can also expect accuracy and insight improvements as the tool learns you (and you learn the tool).
Ad Performance
Your ad performance may look different in Northbeam — in fact, it probably should. Ad performance differences are expected as you move to a more accurate platform. These differences come from Northbeam’s attribution model, attribution window, and how we conceptualize the customer journey.
Northbeam’s attribution model and attribution window are different from legacy models that platforms like Meta, Google, Pinterest, and others use. This creates a difference in how revenue is allocated to different channels, and will result in your performance looking different across campaigns.
Whereas individual platforms lean towards taking credit for conversions, Northbeam takes into account the entire customer journey to look at every touch that resulted in a conversion, not just the last or first touch.
Northbeam’s multi-touch attribution (MTA) model divides credit between touchpoints to give you a holistic picture of what is really driving sales. You can read more about our MTA models here.
Differences in Total Revenue
When comparing Northbeam’s Total Revenue and Orders to your internal source of truth (like a Shopify Dashboard) it’s very common to see differences in the data. Each platform has a slightly different revenue calculation.
Want to make sure that shipping, taxes, and/or refunds are accounted for in your total revenue? Our team can make adjustments so you see the data you need to see to make informed decisions.
Some technical tips:
Check to make sure you are in the right accounting mode (more below)
Check to make sure your filters are set correctly based on what you want to include and exclude in your total revenue calculation
Check to make sure Northbeam is set to the same timezone as your internal order table
Accounting Modes
Northbeam has two accounting modes for looking at your data: Cash Snapshot and Accrual Performance. Each accounting mode has a different way of allocating revenue and transactional credit, so they’re important to understand when you switch to Northbeam.
In the Cash Snapshot mode, revenue and transactional credit are given when the transaction occurs, or when an order is placed. This is useful for understanding the money that comes in on any given day — aka, cash flow.
Note that if you’re in Cash Snapshot mode, your return on ad spend (ROAS) metric will be shown as marketing efficiency ratio (MER). This is a semantic difference and the two metrics can be used similarly. MER can be most accurately described as a blended ROAS.
In the Accrual Performance mode, revenue and transactional credit are given when the contributory marketing touchpoints occur. Contributory marketing touchpoints include any interaction that results in a website visit, such as clicks from an ad, direct visits, or clicks from an influencer link.
Accrual Performance is mainly used to understand the direct return of your marketing dollars and the full impact of marketing channels on your business. It is more popular among Northbeam users because it gives credit to each touch and lets you get an accurate assessment of ad performance.
TL;DR: Use Cash Snapshot mode to understand on which days revenue was created, and use Accrual Performance to understand which touchpoints contributed to that final revenue.
What are all these new metrics?
If you’re coming from in-platform analytics, there may be some metrics on Northbeam that you’ve never seen before. While you don’t have to take full advantage of each and every data point that Northbeam serves up, it’s useful to have a cursory understanding of the different numbers you have at your disposal.
Here are some of the big ones:
% of New Visits
This metric shows you the percentage of visits to your site that come from new versus returning customers. You may be able to see this number on other platforms, but Northbeam gives you some added functionality.
Whereas you may be able to see % of New Visits on a UTM basis or broadly across your website with other tools, Northbeam lets you see it for each campaign or even each unique ad. You can also use Northbeam to see your revenue per new visit at different levels of granularity: revenue per new visit per channel, revenue per new visit per campaign, etcetera. There are loads of ways to serve up this data in a way that helps you make decisions.
New Customer %
What percentage of orders come from new versus recurring customers? This is a great metric for understanding how effectively different channels are driving new customers.
Returning customers are cheaper and easier to acquire, so platforms are often incentivized to include them in campaigns in order to skew conversions upwards. Even if you target a campaign entirely at new customer acquisition, there will typically be some leakage. Some channels do a much better job of targeting new users than others, and traditional ad platforms don’t show you this data.
New Customer % is a way to look under the hood and find out which channel campaigns are actually serving your acquisition goals — and which ones are relying on returning customers to drive performance.
First Time Customer Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
How well are your ads bringing in new customers? First Time Customer ROAS removes returning customers from your ROAS calculation so you can see how your ads are performing in terms of new customer acquisition only.
First Time Customer ROAS also adds useful color to New Customer %. It takes that New Customer % and puts dollars and cents behind it so you can make informed spend decisions based on real and targeted ROI.
Lifetime Value (LTV) ROAS
While many platforms offer ad attribution windows from 1-day to 7-days, they cannot show you the fully realized value of your ads on a longer attribution window without heavy modeling.
How is the ad you launched two weeks ago doing? Thirty days ago? Three months ago? An LTV attribution window gives you complete information on the full impact of your ads, and Northbeam can even bridge the gap if a given user changes devices or phone numbers during that period.
LTV ROAS gives ROAS an indefinite attribution window to see the effects of your campaign and how long those effects last; it shows you the lifetime value of your marketing campaigns and efforts without time constraints.
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) Lift
ROAS Lift takes your LTV ROAS and divides it by your ROAS. But what does this mean?
Let’s say your 1-day ROAS for an ad is 3x, meaning that you generated three times what you spent on ads. If you were to broaden that attribution window to look at the entire lifetime of an ad (LTV), perhaps that ROAS goes up to 4.5x as it gains more conversions over time.
ROAS Lift would then be calculated as 4.5 / 3 = 1.5x. Your ROAS “lifts” by 1.5x when you look at it from an lifetime attribution perspective.
ROAS Lift shows any efficacy that might be missed on top-of-funnel channels like TikTok when looking at 1-day or shorter term ROAS. ROAS Lift can help you validate your brand plays by showing how ROAS improves over time beyond initial measurements — and help you make tactical adjustments if your upper funnel media isn’t seeing a growing impact over time.
Ecommerce Conversion Rate (ECR)
Everyone should be familiar with the concept of a conversion rate, but Northbeam’s ECR metric is a little bit different. Because we can hook up to your Shopify and add a layer of MTA, conversion rate can be broken down by channel, by ad and campaign, and even by new versus returning customers.
Is your conversion rate good because it’s all repeat customers? Is it lower than expected but still acceptable given its high percentage of new customers?
Like the other metrics on this list, ECR unlocks critical context that marketing decision makers aren’t used to having at their disposal with other tools.
In the dynamic world of digital marketing, understanding customer behavior online is paramount. Pixel tracking is a crucial technology for sophisticated marketers that enables them to unlock detailed insights about users and measure their campaign performance with ease.
How do pixels work?
Pixels, or “tracking pixels,” are tiny, often-invisible images or pieces of code embedded on a webpage or email. When a user visits a website or opens an email, the pixel sends a signal back to the server. This signal, or “ping,” carries data about the user’s interaction, such as the time of their visit, the pages they viewed, and any specific actions they took.
How are pixels different from cookies?
There are a lot of ways to glean user information. While tracking pixels, first party cookies, and third party cookies all serve similar purposes, they do so in different ways. Understanding these differences is crucial for marketers who want to leverage the right tools in the right way to maintain compliance and gather the data they need.
Use this table below to differentiate between tracking pixels, first party cookies, and third party cookies.
Why use tracking pixels?
Pixel tracking offers several vital benefits to marketers, including but not limited to:
Performance measurement - by tracking user actions, like email opens, clicks, and time-on-page, marketers can measure the effectiveness of their campaigns with high precision.
Audience segmentation - data from tracking pixels can help create detailed user profiles and segment a given audience based on behavior. This enables more personalized and targeted marketing efforts
Pixels also have various use cases when it comes to digital marketing. Some of the big ones are:
Website analytics - use pixels to understand how users navigate a website, which pages they visit, and how much time they spend on each page
Ad campaigns - use pixels to measure the performance of display ads, social media ads, and other paid campaigns to optimize spend and improve ROI
Email marketing - use pixels to track open rates, click-through rates, and user engagement with your email content
E-commerce - user pixels to monitor how users interact with your products and website to refine your sales strategies. Pixels can surface browsing patterns, add-to-cart actions, and other significant clicks
What is the Northbeam Pixel?
Northbeam takes advantage of pixels and pixel tracking to generate actionable insights and near-real-time information about user behavior.
Like pixels in general, the Northbeam Pixel is a snippet of code that allows Northbeam to collect important behavioral information about your website visitors. This information then feeds into Northbeam’s backend device graphic, allowing us to track customer journeys from site visit to purchase, along with all the other marketing touchpoints in between.
As digital marketing technologies continue to evolve, pixel tracking is expected to become even more sophisticated. Technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning will enhance our ability to predict user behavior and personalize marketing efforts in unprecedented ways. It’s key to stay ahead of privacy concerns and regulations to understand how they will affect pixel data.
With its advanced features and ease-of-use, the Northbeam Pixel represents the next generation of tracking technologies, offering enhanced accuracy, comprehensive data collection, and near-real-time reporting so marketers can optimize their strategies and drive better results.
A customer might first discover your brand through a social ad, read a blog post days later, click a retargeting email, and finally convert after a branded search.
If you rely on single-touch attribution, giving 100% of the credit to either the first or last click, you miss the bigger picture.
That’s where Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) comes in.
By distributing credit across every touchpoint, MTA reveals the true value of each channel in driving conversions.
Instead of guessing which interactions matter most, you gain a holistic, data-driven view of the entire funnel.
In this guide, we’ll break down what multi-touch attribution is, why MTA is critical in modern marketing, the different models you can use, and how to implement them effectively.
You’ll also see how advanced attribution platforms like Northbeam help solve the challenges that often limit other solutions.
What Is Multi-Touch Attribution?
Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) is a marketing measurement method that assigns credit for a conversion across every touchpoint a customer interacts with along their journey. rather than giving 100% of the credit to the first or last click.
Wondering how multi-touch attribution works? At its core, MTA is designed to answer a simple but critical question: Which marketing channels and interactions actually contribute to a sale?
Instead of oversimplifying performance by rewarding only one step, MTA distributes credit proportionally across multiple touchpoints, such as an initial social ad, an email reminder, a retargeting click, and a branded search, to give marketers a more accurate view of what’s driving results.
The core purpose of MTA is to uncover the true influence of each channel in moving prospects down the funnel.
This helps teams optimize spend, refine strategy, and understand how upper-funnel activities (like awareness campaigns) work together with lower-funnel drivers (like paid search or direct visits) to generate conversions.
Why MTA Matters for Marketing
Today’s buyer journeys rarely follow a straight line.
A customer might discover your brand through a TikTok ad, research products via a blog post, sign up for a newsletter, and only weeks later click a retargeting ad before finally purchasing.
If you’re using a single-touch model, all of that complexity gets reduced to one moment: either the very first click or the very last.
The shortcomings of single-touch models include:
Skewed insights: Last-click attribution tends to overvalue lower-funnel channels like search or retargeting, while first-click attribution may inflate the role of early awareness channels.
Misallocated budgets: If only one touchpoint receives full credit, marketers risk over-investing in the wrong channels and undervaluing others that actually play a critical supporting role.
Incomplete customer understanding: Single-touch models can’t show how channels interact across the funnel, making it harder to identify which strategies truly drive momentum toward conversion.
The benefits of multi-touch attribution models are:
Holistic performance measurement: By distributing credit across multiple touchpoints, MTA captures the real contribution of each channel in the path to purchase.
Smarter resource allocation: With a clearer sense of which campaigns build awareness, nurture interest, and close deals, marketers can confidently adjust budgets to maximize ROI.
Stronger customer journeys: MTA highlights the interplay between channels (e.g., how paid social might spark interest that email later converts) so teams can design more effective cross-channel strategies.
Here’s how first-touch, last-touch, and multi-touch attribution models would show credit differently for the same sale:
Consider the following customer journey:
A customer first discovers your brand through a Google Search ad
They browse your products on Amazon but don’t buy anything
They see a TikTok ad that reminds them of your product later
They open a discount email and click into your website
They make a direct purchase on your website
Here’s how different attribution models would assign credit for the same purchase:
In short, MTA matters because it acknowledges marketing for what it really is: a multi-step, multi-channel collaboration.
Types of Multi-Touch Attribution Models
Not all multi-touch attribution (MTA) models are created equal. Each framework takes a different approach to distributing credit across touchpoints.
Choosing the right one depends on your goals, data maturity, and the complexity of your customer journeys.
Here are the most common MTA models, with their advantages, drawbacks, and ideal scenarios:
Linear Attribution
Definition: Credit is divided equally across every touchpoint in the customer journey.
Pros: Simple to understand and implement; ensures every channel gets recognition.
Cons: Over-simplifies performance by treating all interactions as equally influential.
Best For: Brands just starting with MTA, or when you want a “baseline” view of how channels contribute together.
Time Decay Attribution
Definition: Touchpoints closer to the conversion get more credit, while earlier interactions receive less.
Pros: Reflects the reality that later-stage actions (like a retargeting click) often have a stronger influence on conversion.
Best For: Shorter sales cycles or campaigns where recency is a reliable indicator of influence.
U-Shaped Attribution (Position-Based)
Definition: A large portion of credit goes to the first and last touchpoints, with the remainder split among the middle touches.
Pros: Balances the importance of both awareness (first click) and conversion (last click).
Cons: Middle touches get minimal recognition, even if they played a critical role in nurturing.
Best For: Journeys where discovery and conversion are most important milestones, but you still want to capture some mid-funnel activity.
W-Shaped Attribution
Definition: Similar to U-Shaped, but adds significant credit to a key mid-funnel milestone (such as a form fill or product page view), alongside the first and last touches.
Pros: Recognizes three critical stages: awareness, lead creation, and conversion.
Cons: Still assumes a fixed distribution that may not reflect reality for every business.
Best For: B2B or high-consideration purchases with clear mid-funnel handoffs, such as lead qualification or demo requests.
Algorithmic / Data-Driven Attribution
Definition: Uses machine learning to dynamically assign credit based on the actual contribution of each touchpoint, leveraging historical and real-time data.
Pros: Most accurate and customizable; adapts as customer behavior changes.
Cons: Requires significant data volume and advanced technology; harder to explain to stakeholders.
Best For: Mature marketing teams with robust data pipelines, complex journeys, and the need for precision.
In practice, no single model is universally “best.”
Many brands start with simpler rules-based models (like Linear or U-Shaped) and evolve toward data-driven approaches as their data capabilities grow.
Single-Touch vs. MTA vs. MMM
Marketers often treat attribution as an “either/or” decision, but in reality, different methods serve different purposes.
Single-Touch Attribution
What it does: Assigns all credit to the first or last touchpoint.
Why it’s valuable: Simple to implement, easy to explain to stakeholders, and can provide a quick snapshot of which channels most often open or close conversions.
Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA)
What it does: Distributes credit across multiple touchpoints to reveal the interplay between channels.
Why it’s valuable: Offers granular, customer-level insights into what actually drives conversions.
Media Mix Modeling (MMM)
What it does: Uses aggregated, historical data to measure the overall contribution of each channel to sales.
Why it’s valuable: Provides a big-picture view of long-term channel effectiveness, including offline and walled-garden channels where user-level data isn’t available.
How Single-Touch, MTA, and MMM Work Together
MTA is best for tactical optimization: reallocating budget across campaigns and channels in near real time.
MMM is best for strategic planning: understanding how investments shape growth over months or quarters.
Single-touch can still be useful as a quick gut-check, but shouldn’t be the only lens you use.
In other words: MTA gives you the microscope, MMM gives you the telescope, and single-touch still has a place as a simple directional compass.
The strongest marketers use all three to see clearly at every level of decision-making.
MTA Challenges and Considerations
While Multi-Touch Attribution can provide unmatched clarity into customer journeys, it’s not without hurdles.
To get reliable insights, marketers need to be aware of the three most common challenges:
1. Data gaps due to privacy restrictions
Regulations like GDPR and CCPA, plus platform policies such as Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT), limit the availability of user-level data.
This makes it harder to connect every touchpoint and can leave blind spots in attribution models.
2. Cross-device attribution issues
Customers rarely stay on a single device: they might click an ad on mobile, research on a laptop, and convert later on a tablet.
Without strong identity resolution, these multi-device journeys can look like separate users, distorting credit assignment.
3. Model selection pitfalls
No model is perfect. Choosing the wrong one for your business can either overcomplicate analysis or lead to misleading conclusions.
For example, relying on time-decay in a long B2B sales cycle may undervalue top-of-funnel touches that actually drive momentum.
The key takeaway: MTA delivers immense value, but its effectiveness depends on high-quality data, thoughtful model selection, and the right technology to close gaps.
How to Implement MTA Effectively
Getting Multi-Touch Attribution right isn’t just about picking a model, it’s about building the right foundation and using the right tools.
Here are the four core steps to make MTA successful:
1. Set clear goals
Define what you want to learn: Are you optimizing budget allocation? Testing new channels? Improving ROI visibility?
Specific objectives ensure your attribution framework delivers actionable insights.
2. Ensure data integrity
Clean, consistent, and complete data is the lifeblood of MTA.
Make sure you’re capturing touchpoints across all channels, including web, email, paid, organic, and offline interactions.
3. Choose the right platform
Attribution is too complex to manage manually. Advanced platforms like Northbeam bring automation, accuracy, and scale to the process.
Unlike generic analytics tools, Northbeam connects performance across the entire funnel, unifies cross-channel data, and adapts to the privacy-first future.
4. Validate and refine
No model is “set and forget.” Regularly compare attribution insights with business outcomes to ensure accuracy.
Iterate as your customer journey evolves; what works for one campaign or season may not apply to the next.
With clear objectives, clean data, and the right technology, MTA becomes more than a reporting tool: it becomes a growth engine.
Making Multi-Touch Attribution Work for You
In a world where customer journeys span dozens of channels and devices, accurate attribution is no longer optional, it’s essential.
Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) provides the clarity that single-touch models lack, ensuring every stage of the funnel gets the recognition it deserves.
The right model depends on your goals:
Linear for simplicity
Time Decay for recency
U- and W-Shaped for milestone-driven journeys
Algorithmic approaches for precision at scale.
What matters most is choosing strategically and evolving as your marketing matures.
With a thoughtful approach, and advanced platforms like Northbeam to streamline the process, MTA becomes more than a measurement tool. It becomes the foundation for smarter decisions, stronger customer experiences, and more efficient growth.
In today’s privacy-first, multi-channel marketing landscape, the ability to confidently connect spend to results is more important, and more challenging, than ever.
Marketers are tasked with allocating budgets across a growing range of channels, from search and social to TV, out-of-home, and beyond, all while navigating shrinking access to user-level data.
Media Mix Modeling (MMM) has long been a go-to method for answering the big questions: Which channels are driving growth? How should we shift spend to maximize ROI?
But what is Media Mix Modeling in 2025? By analyzing historical performance data at an aggregated level, MMM provides a clear, unbiased view of how each piece of the marketing puzzle contributes to overall outcomes.
But the rules have changed. Traditional MMM offers clarity, yet modern challenges demand smarter, more adaptive models that can keep pace with shifting market dynamics and deliver actionable guidance in real time.
In this Media Mix Modeling guide, we’ll explore the fundamentals of MMM, why it remains a vital tool in the marketer’s measurement toolkit, and how next-generation, machine learning-powered MMM is reshaping the way brands plan, measure, and optimize their media mixes.
What Is Media Mix Modeling?
Media Mix Modeling (MMM) is a statistical approach used to estimate the impact of different marketing channels on overall sales or other business outcomes.
Instead of looking at individual customer actions, MMM analyzes historical data, such as advertising spend, sales performance, and external factors like seasonality or economic trends, to determine how each channel contributes to results.
Think of it as taking the big-picture view.
Whereas granular attribution methods (like Multi-Touch Attribution, or MTA) track individual user paths across channels, MMM works from the top down, using aggregated data to identify broad patterns and long-term channel effectiveness.
This makes it especially valuable when privacy regulations, walled gardens, or offline channels make user-level tracking difficult or impossible.
In recent years, the concept has evolved: next-generation MMM leverages machine learning and adaptive algorithms to move beyond static, quarterly models.
These modern approaches can account for non-linear relationships between spend and results, detect diminishing returns, and update recommendations as new data comes in.
By combining robust statistical foundations with real-time adaptability, next-gen Media Mix Modeling in 2025 guides marketers to make smarter, faster budget decisions across every channel in their mix.
MMM vs Other Attribution Models
While MMM methodology focuses on the big-picture impact of each marketing channel, Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) digs into the granular details of individual customer journeys.
Both approaches aim to answer the same fundamental question — what’s driving results? — but they do so in very different ways.
MMM is ideal for capturing the value of channels where user-level tracking is limited or impossible, such as TV, radio, print, or even some walled-garden platforms.
It’s also better suited for long-term strategic planning, helping you forecast ROI and allocate budgets across the full marketing mix.
MTA, on the other hand, is most effective when you have access to detailed, user-level data from digital channels.
It allows you to see the specific touchpoints (ads, emails, clicks) a customer interacted with before converting, making it valuable for short-term campaign optimization.
Many sophisticated marketing teams use MMM and MTA together: MTA for tactical, in-flight adjustments and MMM for overarching strategy and cross-channel budget planning.
How Media Mix Modeling Works
At its core, Media Mix Modeling is about turning historical performance data into actionable insights.
The process generally follows these five steps:
1. Gather Historical Data
The MMM methodology begins by collecting aggregated spend and outcome data across all marketing channels, both online and offline.
This often includes:
Media spend by channel (e.g., TV, paid search, display, social, OOH)
Business outcomes (e.g., sales revenue, leads, signups)
External variables like seasonality, holidays, competitor activity, and economic indicators
2. Fit a Statistical or Machine Learning Model
Traditionally, MMM uses regression analysis to identify correlations between marketing investments and business results.
Modern MMM platforms also incorporate machine learning algorithms to capture more complex, non-linear relationships, such as diminishing returns when spend reaches saturation in a given channel.
3. Adjust for Seasonality and Externalities
The model accounts for predictable seasonal patterns (like holiday spikes) and one-off external events (like supply chain disruptions or viral trends) so these factors don’t get mistaken for marketing impact.
4. Analyze Interactions Between Channels
MMM also evaluates interaction effects, for example, how TV ads might boost the performance of paid search, or how brand campaigns influence conversion-focused channels.
5. Forecast and Recommend
Once calibrated, the model can simulate different spend scenarios, forecast the likely impact on business outcomes, and recommend budget reallocations to improve ROI.
In modern practice, next-gen MMM platforms repeat this process frequently, sometimes weekly, so marketers aren’t relying on outdated quarterly or annual models.
Why MMM Is Essential
In today’s rapidly shifting marketing landscape, Media Mix Modeling remains one of the most resilient measurement tools available to marketers.
While many attribution methods have been disrupted by privacy regulations, platform data restrictions, and the decline of third-party cookies, MMM continues to deliver reliable, actionable insights.
Below are four major reasons why MMM is essential to modern marketers:
MMM is Resilient in a Privacy-First Era
Because MMM relies on aggregated spend and outcome data (not user-level tracking) it’s largely unaffected by signal loss from cookie deprecation, iOS privacy updates, or walled garden policies.
This makes it a future-proof choice for marketers navigating growing data limitations.
MMM Provides Holistic, Cross-Channel Coverage
MMM looks at the entire marketing ecosystem, including channels that are notoriously hard to measure at the individual level.
Whether it’s digital platforms like paid search and social, or offline investments in TV, radio, print, and out-of-home (OOH), MMM provides a unified view of performance across the full mix.
MMM Enables Strategic Budgeting & Planning
Beyond measuring past performance, MMM helps marketing leaders forecast ROI, plan annual or quarterly budgets, and determine the optimal allocation of spend across channels.
By modeling different “what-if” scenarios, teams can make informed decisions that balance efficiency and growth.
MMM Provides Long-Term Impact Measurement
Unlike short-term attribution tools, the MMM methodology captures the lagged effects of marketing, such as a brand awareness campaign that boosts conversions weeks later.
This gives marketers a more accurate picture of a channel’s true value over time.
When executed well, MMM doesn’t just tell you what worked in the past — it gives you a roadmap for where to invest next.
The Next Evolution: Next-Gen MMM with Machine Learning
Traditional Media Mix Modeling has always been powerful, but it was built for a slower era of marketing, where quarterly or annual updates were enough to guide budget decisions.
In today’s fast-moving environment, those static models can quickly become outdated.
Modern MMM platforms are changing the game by integrating machine learning (ML) into the process. These next-generation models go beyond simple regression analysis to capture the complexity of modern marketing dynamics.
Key advantages of ML-driven Media Mix Modeling in 2025 include:
Continuous Adaptation: Instead of waiting months for a model refresh, ML-based MMM updates frequently (sometimes weekly) to incorporate the latest performance data. This ensures recommendations reflect the most current market conditions.
Non-Linear Interactions & Diminishing Returns: Machine learning can detect and model nuanced relationships between channels. For example, it can quantify how TV campaigns amplify search performance, or when increased spend in a channel starts yielding smaller incremental gains.
Near-Real-Time Forecasts & Automated Recommendations: Advanced MMM platforms can simulate multiple budget scenarios on demand, delivering rapid, data-backed guidance for reallocation. Some even automate the process by feeding recommendations directly into campaign management tools.
An example of this evolution is Northbeam’s MMM+, a machine learning-powered model that retrains weekly, accounts for non-linear effects, and delivers actionable budget rebalancing suggestions in near real time.
This blend of statistical rigor and adaptive intelligence allows marketers to shift from reactive measurement to proactive, always-on optimization.
In short: Smarter MMM benefits from the speed and sophistication of machine learning to give marketing leaders an edge, making it possible to adjust strategy as quickly as the market changes.
Implementing Smarter MMM: A Step-by-Step Guide
A successful Media Mix Modeling initiative requires both solid data foundations and a disciplined approach to analysis.
Here’s how to get started:
1. Assemble Rich Historical Data
Collect several months (ideally years) of aggregated data on:
Marketing spend by channel (digital and offline)
Business outcomes such as revenue, conversions, or leads
External variables like seasonality, holidays, competitor activity, and macroeconomic trends
2. Choose the Right Modeling Approach
Select the statistical framework that best fits your needs:
Linear regression for a straightforward, interpretable model
Bayesian modeling for incorporating prior knowledge and uncertainty estimates
Machine learning-based MMM for adaptive, complex relationship modeling
3. Validate and Iterate
Run diagnostics to ensure your model is robust.
Check for overfitting, assess predictive accuracy, and test different variable combinations. Refine your approach based on performance.
4. Translate Insights into Budgets and Forecasts
Use the model’s findings to guide budget allocation, forecast channel performance, and run “what-if” simulations.
Prioritize reallocations that deliver the highest incremental ROI.
5. Leverage Advanced Capabilities
Modern MMM platforms can generate real-time forecasts and provide automated budget system guidance, allowing you to make faster, data-backed decisions without waiting for quarterly reviews.
💡 Pro Tip: Revisit your model regularly. Newer ML-powered MMM solutions, like MMM+, retrain weekly for sharper accuracy and more relevant recommendations.
MMM Best Practices & Emerging Trends
Whether you’re implementing MMM for the first time or upgrading to a more advanced platform, these best practices will help you get the most MMM benefits from your investment and prepare you for what’s next.
Our top five MMM best practices are:
1. Prioritize Adaptability
Markets move fast. Choose a platform that supports frequent model updates so your insights reflect the most recent conditions.
Weekly or even rolling updates ensure your budget decisions are always based on fresh, relevant data.
2. Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration
MMM benefits are best seen when marketing, finance, and data operations are aligned.
Marketing teams bring campaign knowledge, finance ensures budgetary alignment, and data teams maintain the integrity of the underlying datasets.
This collaboration helps ensure the model’s recommendations are both actionable and strategically sound.
3. Explore Scenario Modeling
Smarter MMM platforms allow you to simulate different budget allocation strategies before you commit spend.
Scenario modeling lets you test potential changes, forecast results, and identify the mix that delivers the best ROI.
4. Leverage AI-Driven Dose Response Curves
Dose-response curves model how incremental spend in a given channel impacts performance, helping you pinpoint the “sweet spot” before diminishing returns kick in.
AI-powered curves make these insights more precise and adaptable to shifting conditions.
5. Keep an Eye on Server-Side MMM
As privacy regulations tighten, server-side MMM is emerging as a powerful alternative.
By processing data securely on the server, marketers can integrate more channels, maintain compliance, and future-proof their measurement framework.
The future of MMM is agile, collaborative, and deeply integrated with AI, enabling marketers to pivot faster and plan smarter than ever before.
MMM Benefits Start Now
For decades, Media Mix Modeling has been a cornerstone of marketing measurement, and it’s not going anywhere. What’s changing is how it’s done.
Advances in machine learning have transformed MMM from a static, quarterly exercise into an agile, always-on decision engine that adapts as fast as the market moves.
By combining MMM’s holistic, privacy-resilient view with the adaptability of next-gen models, marketing leaders can make sharper budget decisions, capture the full value of every channel, and confidently plan for the future.
Marketing return on investment (ROI) is a crucial metric to understand your marketing performance. This guide will cover what it is, how to calculate it, what to consider, and how to improve your ROI if it's not performing as you’d hoped.
Put simply, ROI measures the return generated from marketing activities relative to the amount of money spent. Calculating and understanding the ROI from all of your different marketing efforts can give you a great picture of how you’re performing — and help make sure you’re getting the best bang for your buck.
What is marketing ROI?
Marketing ROI is the profit or loss generated by different marketing activities. It is a critical component of understanding performance, and can help support profitability for your organization. It can enable you to make decisions about which campaigns to invest in and which to turn off, and support you as you make the case for budget for activities that really move the needle.
A high ROI indicates that a marketing campaign is generating a significant return compared to its cost, while a low or negative ROI suggests that it may be time to go back to the drawing board.
By calculating and analyzing your ROI, your team can more accurately allocate budget, measure performance, optimize strategy, and communicate its performance and needs with stakeholders.
How to calculate marketing ROI
You can calculate marketing ROI with a straightforward formula:
Marketing ROI = Profit from marketing / marketing costs
So if your LinkedIn ad campaign cost $1,000 and it generated $2,500 in revenue on your website, your ROI would be calculated as:
Marketing ROI = 2,500 / 1,000
Marketing ROI = 2.5
Some people prefer to express marketing ROI as a percentage. The formula would be the same except you would multiply the output by 100 and your marketing ROI would equal 250%.
A good marketing ROI varies depending on the industry, product, and type of campaign. You should work with your team to set a benchmark for ROI over time and try to improve it as you progress. For reference, a marketing ROI of 5:1 (meaning you earn $5 for every $1 you spend) is considered a solid rule of thumb.
What to consider when calculating ROI
It’s important to note that ROI changes depending on your time frame. Perhaps your LinkedIn ad generated $2,500 in its first day, but on a two-week timeframe it generated closer to $7,500. Your 14-day ROI would then be 7.5x your initial spend — that’s great!
ROI can also vary depending on how you define marketing costs. You should include direct spend in the denominator, but you can also include things like software and tool costs, personnel salaries, and more. This could be helpful if you are calculating ROI not on a campaign level but on a macro level, across all your campaigns for a given time period.
For example, If you wanted to know the ROI of everything you did last quarter or last year, you may decide that including salaries and tools will give you the most accurate picture.
Finally, attribution can be tricky with ROI. How do you know if someone clicked on your LinkedIn ad after they saw your Google ad first? How do you know which campaign to attribute marketing revenue to?
To complicate the picture, different platforms may take sole ownership of conversions when, in reality, a confluence of factors, impressions, and touches ultimately leads to a purchase. Tools like multi-touch attribution (MTA) can help with attribution questions like this.
When calculating your marketing ROI, it’s important to keep in mind timeframe, attribution issues, and any relevant marketing costs to get the clearest picture of performance.
How to improve your marketing ROI
If your marketing ROI isn’t where you want it to be, there are a number of interventions that can help you get back on track.
1. First, start by setting clear objectives. Your marketing ROI may be below the goal ratio of 5:1, but perhaps it is standard for your industry, product, or channel. Get a holistic picture of performance and set objectives based on your historicals — not numbers you read online. Use your current ROI to set a reasonable and attainable goal for the near future.
2. Consider using advanced analytics and marketing intelligence tools to track and analyze campaign performance so your ROI isn’t skewed by platform analytics or incomplete attribution data.
3. Focus on high-ROI channels — identify the channels that consistently deliver high ROI for your marketing efforts and allocate more budget to those channels.
4. Test and optimize your lower-performing channels to see if you can improve your ROI through small, consistent, and creative iterations.
5. Try to improve your customer targeting and refine your target audience. Effective customer targeting reduces wasted spend and increases the likelihood that leads will convert to customers as a result of your marketing efforts. Strong data and marketing intelligence platforms can help you refine your targeting.
6. Optimize your conversion paths. Leads are typically taken to a page when they click on your ads, so ensure that page is optimized for conversions. A seamless user experience and clear call-to-action (CTA) can significantly improve the success of your marketing campaigns — and your ROI.
How to think about ROI
Marketing ROI is a vital metric for any strong marketing team. It enables you to fully understand the impact of each marketing dollar and make informed decisions about spend. Use the definitions, formulas, considerations, and strategies for ROI improvement in this guide to help you get a firm grasp on ROI concepts so you can use them to your advantage and improve your overall marketing effectiveness.
In a rapidly-evolving marketing landscape, staying focused on the efficiency and success of your investments is key to maximizing returns and improving your performance.
If you haven’t heard of AppLovin yet, it’s time to crawl out from under that rock. Long known in the mobile gaming world, AppLovin is now breaking into direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising — and early adopters are seeing impressive results.
With a massive user base, fresh ad formats, and a self-service platform in beta, AppLovin is quickly becoming one of the most exciting new channels in performance marketing. And it’s not just hype — top brands are reporting Meta-like results at a fraction of the cost.
So what exactly is AppLovin, and why is it working so well for ecommerce brands? Let’s break it down.
A new player in the DTC ad game
AppLovin is a mobile ad network originally built for monetizing mobile games and apps. Its network reaches 1.4 billion users — on par with platforms like TikTok — and has traditionally been used to promote other games. But that’s changing fast.
AppLovin is now opening its doors to ecommerce advertisers, offering a suite of performance-driven tools, ad placements, and a robust algorithm that seems tailor-made for DTC brands.
Why AppLovin works for ecommerce
The psychology is different — in a good way
Mobile gamers aren’t doomscrolling — they’re engaged, focused, and relaxed. When someone beats a high score or clears a level, they’re in a positive emotional state — and that’s when your ad shows up. You’re inserting your brand into a dopamine-rich context, not between two stressful news stories or a chaotic social feed.
This makes a huge difference. Ads feel less like interruptions and more like surprises. That novelty drives higher engagement — and better performance.
The reach is broad
Americans now play more mobile games than they watch cable TV. Over 200 million adults in the U.S. play mobile games weekly, and AppLovin’s network gives you access to all of them. That’s a massive opportunity for building frequency and brand awareness outside the saturated social ad ecosystem.
The ad formats are fresh, but familiar
AppLovin’s ad placements support vertical video and static creatives, and because the context is so different from social, you can often re-use top-performing Meta or TikTok assets without major changes. That’s rare in emerging channels — and it means lower creative lift and faster testing.
The tech is built for performance marketers
From the algorithm to the onboarding process, AppLovin feels like it was built for DTC. Their team has already put together an ecommerce wiki, and their roadmap is aggressively focused on delivering what performance marketers actually need: scale, efficiency, and data transparency.
How to add AppLovin to your marketing mix
AppLovin isn’t a replacement for your core channels — but it’s a powerful complement that can help you reach new audiences and diversify your acquisition strategy.
Here's how to get started:
Start With What You’ve Got
Repurpose your best vertical video or static creatives from Meta, TikTok, or YouTube Shorts. Lean into hook-driven content and test simple iterations to find what resonates.
Track Everything
AppLovin opens up a brand-new slice of time in the customer journey — users playing games. When you track AppLovin touchpoints through Northbeam, you’ll get a complete view of how these ads contribute to conversions across platforms. Whether someone sees your ad in a game and converts via branded search three days later, or after getting hit with a Meta retargeting ad, Northbeam helps you connect the dots.
Think Frequency + Novelty
Your goal isn’t just conversion — it’s attention. AppLovin gives you a way to layer on impressions in a high-engagement setting, helping your brand break through in a fragmented landscape.
The Bull Case for AppLovin
Performance marketers are always chasing the next edge — and, as of April 2025, AppLovin may be it. It combines:
High reach
Fresh context
Low creative lift
Affordable CPMs
Early-mover advantage
And when paired with a measurement platform like Northbeam, it becomes even more powerful. You get full visibility into how AppLovin is contributing to your performance across the funnel — so you can scale with confidence, not guesswork.
Northbeam has been called everything in the book: a marketing analytics platform, an MTA tool, an attribution platform, an ecommerce analytics platform, a data tool, and about a million other phrases. While none of these titles are untrue, we prefer the term “marketing intelligence” to capture our breadth of features and functionalities
As the marketing landscape shifts and grows, a new need arises for platforms that will synthesize multiple data points and sources together to derive not just information but intelligence: actionable insights. These platforms are catching on with sophisticated marketers that are tired of ever-expanding spreadsheets and platform analytics.
But what exactly is marketing intelligence?
Marketing intelligence defined
The phrase “marketing intelligence” refers to a robust and comprehensive system that gathers, processes, and analyzes all the data relevant to your marketing activities. These platforms then use that data to provide intelligence to help you make informed decisions and optimize your marketing strategy.
The key components of a marketing intelligence platform are as follows:
Data collection and integration
Analytics and reporting
Attribution modeling
Real-time monitoring
Customer insights
Optimization recommendations
Data collection and integration
Marketing intelligence platforms should ideally be able to integrate with all of your data sources so you can view information on all of your campaigns in one place. They aggregate data across social media, email campaigns, ads, website analytics, e-commerce platforms, and beyond to provide you with a unified picture of performance and a holistic view of your marketing activity.
Analytics and reporting
Marketing intelligence platforms provide tools to not just ingest this data but view it in a productive and actionable way. Proper analytics and reporting help you understand the effectiveness of different channels, campaigns, and strategies so you can adjust accordingly in real-time.
The most sophisticated platforms will also offer a layer of customizability so you can see the data you want to see how you want to see it, and create unique reports for different teams and teammates across your organization depending on their needs.
Attribution modeling
Marketing intelligence platforms should offer powerful attribution modeling beyond first- and last-touch. Tools like multi-touch attribution (MTA), media mix modeling (MMM), incrementality, and others contribute to the full picture of attribution so you can understand what is driving successful outcomes, and just as importantly, what isn’t.
Real-time monitoring
Customer preferences and behavior shift so quickly that it’s critical to get the data you need now, not next month. The best marketing intelligence platforms can process and display data on a near-real-time basis, making sure that you’re always up to speed on progress and performance so you can make the best decisions in the moment, when it matters.
Customer insights
Tailored customer insights help you understand the who, what, when, where, how, and why of your customer behavior. Detailed analytics can show you where your customers are coming from and every touch they make along their way to a purchase. They’ll let you break down performance by new and returning customers, and about a million other ways too, depending on what you want to know.
Optimization recommendations
Look for a marketing intelligence platform that doesn’t just ingest and surface data, but shows you exactly what to do with it. These platforms should have a seamless user experience and an intuitive way of surfacing insights that makes sure that the right action is the clearest path forward. Whether that’s with in-platform recommendations, an expert account manager at your side, or both, you should feel supported in making the most of your data for powerful decision-making. The most mature platforms will help you do that.
Learn more about marketing intelligence
While many platforms exist today that will help you do more with your marketing data, not all of them can be accurately classified as marketing intelligence platforms. While the category is new, the functionality is anything but: marketing intelligence aims to provide you with the best data so you can make the best decisions with ease.
In today’s competitive landscape, marketers need more than intuition to succeed. Tracking the right marketing metrics is crucial in order to make more informed decisions, optimize campaigns, and drive sustainable growth.
But with so many metrics available, it can be overwhelming to know where to focus.
This guide will break down the top six marketing metrics you should prioritize for long-term success — and how Northbeam can help you track and leverage these insights effectively.
Metric #1: Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer over the entire duration of their relationship.
CLV is critical for understanding the long-term profitability of your customers. By focusing on increasing CLV, businesses can improve customer retention, enhance customer experience, and allocate resources more effectively.
To calculate CLV, you’ll need to account for the average purchase value, purchase frequency, and customer lifespan. Platforms like Northbeam simplify this process by analyzing customer data and providing actionable insights to maximize lifetime value.
CLV in action: An e-commerce brand identifies that high-value customers tend to purchase accessory items within three months of their initial purchase. By implementing a targeted email campaign with accessory recommendations, the brand increases repeat purchases and boosts CLV by 15%.
Metric #2: Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) measures the revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising.
ROAS is a key indicator of campaign performance and efficiency. It helps marketers identify which channels and campaigns deliver the highest returns, ensuring that ad spend is allocated strategically.
To calculate ROAS, divide the revenue generated by an ad campaign by the cost of that campaign. Northbeam’s attribution capabilities provide a clear view of ROAS across channels, enabling you to optimize ad spend in real-time.
ROAS in action: A direct-to-consumer skincare brand identifies that TikTok ads yield a higher ROAS than Google Ads. By reallocating 20% of their budget to TikTok campaigns, they achieve a 25% overall increase in revenue from paid media.
Metric #3: Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER)
Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) is the ratio of total revenue to total marketing spend.
MER provides a high-level view of how efficiently your marketing efforts drive revenue. Unlike ROAS, which focuses on individual campaigns, MER gives a holistic perspective, making it particularly useful for evaluating overall marketing performance.
To calculate MER, divide total revenue by total marketing spend. Use tools like Northbeam to monitor this ratio and identify opportunities to optimize your marketing mix.
MER in action: A subscription box company notices that MER decreases during months with high email engagement. They focus on improving email frequency and content quality, boosting overall MER by 10%.
Metric #4: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the cost of acquiring a new customer through marketing and sales efforts.
CAC is essential for assessing the sustainability of your growth strategy. By keeping CAC low relative to CLV, businesses can ensure long-term profitability.
To calculate CAC, divide the total cost of marketing and sales by the number of new customers acquired. Northbeam’s advanced analytics help identify areas where CAC can be reduced, such as optimizing ad campaigns or improving targeting.
CAC in action: A fitness apparel brand finds that ads targeting lookalike audiences on Facebook generate lower CAC than other campaigns. By doubling down on these audiences, the brand reduces CAC by 20% over three months.
Metric #5: Conversion Rate (CVR)
Conversion Rate (CR) is the percentage of users who take a desired action, such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter.
CR is a direct indicator of how well your marketing efforts are turning prospects into customers. Higher conversion rates mean better ROI for your campaigns.
Calculate CR by dividing the number of conversions by the total number of visitors and multiplying by 100. With Northbeam, you can track conversion rates across channels and campaigns to pinpoint areas for improvement.
CR in action: A SaaS company identifies a low CR on its pricing page. Testing a simplified pricing table and adding testimonials increase the conversion rate by 12%.
Metric #6: New vs. Returning Customers
This metric compares the ratio of first-time buyers to repeat customers over a given period.
Understanding the balance between new and returning customers helps businesses optimize acquisition strategies while nurturing loyalty for sustainable growth.
Use tools like Northbeam to segment your audience and monitor the performance of campaigns to acquire new customers versus retaining existing ones.
New vs. Returning Customers in Action: A home decor brand tracks a dip in returning customers through Northbeam. They launch a loyalty program offering discounts on second purchases, increasing the returning customer rate by 25% within a quarter.
Achieve marketing success with these top metrics
Tracking these metrics consistently is key to achieving long-term marketing success. By focusing on metrics like CLV, ROAS, MER, CAC, conversion rates, and new vs. returning customers, businesses can make data-driven decisions that enhance performance and profitability.
Northbeam’s advanced analytics and attribution tools make it easy to track and optimize these metrics, providing a comprehensive view of your marketing performance. Request a demo and discover how Northbeam can empower your business for long-term success.
Incrementality is one of those marketing buzzwords that gets thrown around a lot, but ask five marketers what it means, and you’ll get five different answers.
For some, it’s synonymous with lift measurement. For others, it’s a vague concept bundled in with attribution.
But incrementality isn’t just jargon.
It’s a rigorous, experiment-driven methodology that helps marketers answer a critical question: Did this campaign actually drive results, or would they have happened anyway?
In an era where privacy regulations, cookie deprecation, and platform data restrictions are eroding traditional attribution models, incrementality has emerged as a must-have measurement tool.
It cuts through the noise, isolates true campaign impact, and empowers marketers to make smarter, data-backed decisions.
In this guide, we’ll define what incrementality really is, explore how incrementality tests work, discuss their applications and challenges, and explain how incrementality fits alongside attribution models like Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) and Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) for a holistic measurement strategy.
What Is Incrementality?
Incrementality is the measure of the additional impact, or "lift," that a marketing activity has on a desired outcome, beyond what would have happened without it.
In other words, it answers the critical question: Did this campaign actually drive more conversions, or would those sales have happened anyway?
Unlike traditional attribution models, which often rely on tracking clicks and views to assign credit, incrementality seeks to establish causality, not just correlation.
It does this by comparing the performance of a treatment group (exposed to the marketing effort) against a control group (not exposed to the marketing effort) in order to isolate the true effect of the campaign.
For example, if a paid social campaign generates 1,000 purchases, but the control group, which wasn’t shown the ads, still produces 800 purchases, the incremental lift is only 200 purchases.
That’s the portion of impact you can confidently attribute to the campaign.
This causal measurement approach allows marketers to separate “would-have-happened-anyway” actions from genuine campaign-driven outcomes, providing a clearer, more accurate picture of marketing effectiveness.
How Incrementality Works
Now that we’ve covered what incrementality is, let’s talk about how it works.
At its core, incrementality analysis is a form of experimentation that borrows directly from the scientific method.
It’s a structured way to answer: Did my marketing effort cause a measurable lift in results?
The process follows a simple but rigorous framework:
Hypothesis: Define a clear hypothesis, such as “Running Meta ads will increase conversions by 10% compared to no ads.”
Test Design: Split your audience or regions into treatment (exposed to the marketing effort) and control (not exposed) groups.
Measure Outcomes: Track performance across both groups without making mid-test changes.
Conclude Impact: Analyze the difference in outcomes to determine the true lift (the “incrementality”) caused by your campaign.
Common Types of Incrementality Experiments
There are various types of causal marketing experiments that measure incrementality, including:
Randomized Control Trials (RCTs): The gold standard of experimentation, where individuals are randomly assigned to treatment or control groups. Most often used in digital campaigns like Meta Ads.
Holdout Tests: A portion of the audience is “held out” from seeing specific ads to serve as the control. For instance, holding out 10% of your audience from a Google Ads campaign.
Geo-Testing: Geographically splitting markets into treatment and control groups. This method is popular for offline media like TV or radio, where randomizing individuals isn’t feasible.
These controlled, causal marketing experiments are critical for distinguishing causality from coincidence, providing marketers with reliable, actionable insights into what’s truly moving the needle.
Why Incrementality Matters in Modern Marketing
Attribution models like Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) have long been the go-to for measuring marketing performance.
These models attempt to track every touchpoint a customer interacts with — clicks, views, and engagements — to assign credit for conversions.
But in today’s privacy-conscious world, attribution is becoming less reliable (if you don’t use Northbeam, that is).
The deprecation of third-party cookies, iOS 14’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) updates, and other privacy regulations have significantly reduced marketers’ ability to track individual user behavior across platforms.
As visibility fades, attribution models often fall back on shaky assumptions, leading to over-attribution of conversions to the last-clicked channel or missing data altogether.
That’s where incrementality steps in.
Unlike attribution, which correlates touchpoints with outcomes, incrementality isolates causality.
It doesn’t rely on user-level tracking to infer which ad drove a sale. Instead, it measures the actual lift generated by marketing efforts through controlled experiments.
This makes it an essential tool for:
Proving ROI in a post-cookie world: With deterministic tracking on the decline, incrementality analysis offers a privacy-safe way to demonstrate true campaign effectiveness.
Budget justification: CMOs and marketing teams can use incrementality results to confidently defend their budgets, showing exactly how much impact campaigns are driving beyond organic or baseline performance.
Smarter budget allocation and channel testing: Incrementality experiments help identify which channels, creatives, and campaigns deliver real business value, informing future spend and optimization strategies.
In an era where marketing measurement is growing more opaque, incrementality offers clarity.
It empowers marketers to cut through the noise of vanity metrics and focus on what truly matters: driving incremental business growth.
Incrementality Challenges and Considerations
While incrementality testing is a powerful measurement tool, it’s not without its challenges. Running a clean, reliable test requires careful planning, resources, and a strong understanding of statistical principles.
Here are some key considerations:
1. Sample Size and Statistical Significance
To detect true lift, incrementality tests need a large enough sample size to ensure statistically significant results.
Small audiences or short test durations can lead to inconclusive findings, where observed differences might just be random noise.
For brands with lower conversion volumes, achieving statistical power may require longer test periods or broader audience targeting.
2. Spillover Effects
In a real-world environment, it’s difficult to perfectly isolate treatment and control groups.
A customer in the control group might hear about a promotion from a friend or encounter an ad indirectly through organic channels.
These spillover effects can blur the lines between exposed and unexposed groups, diluting the measured lift and complicating interpretation.
3. Operational Disruptions
Incrementality tests demand strict control over campaign variables.
Once a test begins, mid-test changes, such as tweaking budgets, creatives, or targeting, can compromise the experiment’s validity.
For many fast-moving marketing teams, this “no changes allowed” rule can be operationally challenging, requiring discipline and buy-in from stakeholders.
4. Expertise Required for Test Design and Analysis
Incrementality testing isn’t a “set-it-and-forget-it” exercise.
Designing a robust test framework, managing control variables, and interpreting the results require a level of statistical and analytical expertise.
Missteps in setup or analysis can lead to flawed conclusions, undermining the very clarity incrementality is meant to provide.
But despite these challenges, the payoff is worth it for many marketers. With the right planning and tools, incrementality tests can deliver insights that provide an honest and actionable view of marketing impact.
Incrementality vs MMM vs MTA
Incrementality testing isn’t the only way to measure marketing impact, but it solves for gaps that other methods may leave behind.
To understand where incrementality fits, it’s important to compare it with Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) and Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA): two of the most common measurement approaches.
Why Best-in-Class Marketers Combine All Three
No single measurement method is perfect on its own.
MTA provides immediate, granular insights into digital performance but struggles with data gaps in a privacy-first world.
MMM offers a comprehensive, long-term view of how all marketing and external factors influence business outcomes but lacks real-time agility.
Incrementality fills in the blanks by establishing causality for specific campaigns or channels, delivering mid-term insights that neither MMM nor MTA can reliably provide alone.
How to Get Started with Incrementality Testing
Ready to measure the true impact of your marketing efforts?
Start by selecting channels where spend is significant and results are ambiguous.
Paid media platforms like Meta Ads, Google Ads, and TV advertising are ideal candidates because they often have measurable outcomes but suffer from attribution noise.
Focus on campaigns where you need to justify budget or validate their true contribution to conversions.
Step 2: Design a Control/Treatment Framework
Decide how you’ll split your audience into treatment (exposed to the campaign) and control (not exposed) groups.
There are two primary approaches:
Audience-Based Holdouts: Randomly exclude a portion of your target audience from seeing the ads (ideal for digital platforms).
Geo-Testing: Divide geographical regions into treatment and control groups (commonly used for offline media like TV or radio).
Ensure the groups are comparable in terms of demographics, historical performance, and potential exposure to avoid skewed results.
Step 3: Run the Test Long Enough to Reach Statistical Significance
Patience is key.
Incrementality tests require sufficient sample sizes to produce reliable insights. The duration of the test depends on factors like audience size, conversion rates, and desired confidence levels.
Avoid making any mid-test changes to budgets, creatives, or targeting, as this can invalidate results.
Step 4: Analyze Findings and Apply Them to Strategy
Once the test concludes, compare performance between the treatment and control groups to calculate the incremental lift.
These insights should directly inform:
Budget allocations (increase investment in high-lift channels)
Campaign optimization (refine strategies that underperform in lift)
Strategic planning (understand true ROI for future initiatives)
Incrementality testing doesn’t have to be daunting. Platforms like Northbeam streamline the entire process by integrating incrementality insights with your ongoing attribution models.
This allows you to continuously measure true campaign lift while maintaining a comprehensive view of customer journeys across channels.
Measure What Matters
In a marketing landscape where attribution is becoming less reliable and measurement gaps are widening, incrementality testing offers a clear path forward.
By focusing on causality, not just correlation, incrementality in marketing isolates the true impact of your campaigns, cutting through the noise of superficial metrics and incomplete tracking data.
While Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) and Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) play essential roles in a robust measurement strategy, incrementality fills a critical gap.
Best-in-class marketers are combining all three to build a measurement framework that’s resilient, data-driven, and future-proof.
Today’s customer journeys are anything but straightforward.
A shopper might discover your brand on TikTok, research on Google, compare on desktop, and finally purchase through an email offer on their phone, all within a single week.
With so many channels, devices, and touchpoints in play, it’s no wonder marketers struggle to connect the dots.
That’s where customer journey mapping comes in.
What is customer journey mapping? At its core, it is the practice of visualizing and analyzing how customers move through the stages of awareness, consideration, purchase, and beyond.
Done well, it transforms scattered interactions into a clear, data-driven picture that helps marketers improve ROI and customer experience at the same time.
In this guide, we’ll cover:
What customer journey mapping is and why it matters
The core components every map should include
Practical examples of how marketers use journey maps
A step-by-step process for building your own
Common pitfalls and how to avoid them
Tactics to optimize your map over time
In this guide to journey mapping for marketers, you’ll learn how to turn messy, multi-channel customer paths into an actionable framework that aligns teams, reduces friction, and drives growth.
Definition & Why It Matters
Customer journey mapping is a visual, data-informed representation of how a customer persona moves through the stages and touchpoints needed to achieve a goal.
That goal could be making a purchase, subscribing to a service, becoming a loyal advocate, or something else relevant to your business.
Instead of thinking about marketing as a set of disconnected campaigns, journey mapping gives you a holistic picture of how real people experience your brand.
Why does this matter? Because journeys are rarely linear. Customers bounce between channels, devices, and content types before making a decision.
A good journey map helps you:
Reveal friction points and “moments that matter.” Pinpoint where customers drop off, hesitate, or need more reassurance.
Align teams across functions. Marketing, product, sales, and customer support all get on the same page about what customers actually experience.
Inform smarter content and media strategies. Match the right message and channel to the right stage of the journey.
Boost conversion and retention. By removing friction and doubling down on high-impact moments, you naturally increase ROI, customer lifetime value (CLV), and long-term loyalty.
There’s also a direct financial benefit: journey maps guide budgeting and prioritization.
Instead of spreading spend evenly or chasing the loudest channel, you can see exactly which stages and touchpoints drive the most value, and which ones aren’t worth continued investment.
How Customer Journey Mapping is Used
Customer journey maps aren’t just pretty visuals, they’re practical tools that marketers can use to make smarter, more targeted decisions every day.
When you can see the journey laid out, it becomes much easier to match the right message, offer, or channel to the exact stage a customer is in.
Here are a few of the most common applications:
Campaign Sequencing
Use the customer journey map to align messaging with stage-specific needs.
For example, focus on credibility and education during awareness, then shift to urgency or differentiation during consideration and purchase.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Roadmap
Identify the high-friction steps that cause the biggest drop-offs.
By prioritizing tests where customers get stuck, you maximize the return on optimization efforts.
Lifecycle Marketing
Design onboarding, activation, retention, and win-back campaigns that address the full customer lifecycle, not just acquisition.
Channel Orchestration
Assign the right channels to each stage.
Paid social might be ideal for early awareness, while email, SMS, or loyalty programs are better suited for retention and advocacy.
To make this more concrete, here are two quick examples:
eCommerce brand:
A customer might see a UGC ad
Click through to the product detail page (PDP)
Add to cart
Checkout
Receive post-purchase education emails
Eventually leave a review or referral
Subscription service:
A prospect discovers the brand via an influencer
Signs up for a free trial
Receives a guided onboarding sequence
Hits a paywall
Receives churn-prevention messaging
Later reactivates after canceling
In both cases, journey maps make it clear where marketers should invest resources, what messages will resonate, and how to keep customers moving forward.
Core Components of an Effective Customer Journey Map
A strong customer journey map balances structure with insight. Here are the core components to include in your customer journey map:
Personal and goal: Start by defining who you’re mapping and what success looks like. Is it a first-time shopper making a purchase? A subscriber activating their account? A repeat customer advocating for your brand? Narrowing the scope ensures the map stays actionable.
Stages: Break the journey into key phases: awareness, consideration, purchase, onboarding, and retention/advocacy. These stages give your map structure and help everyone speak the same language when discussing customer behavior.
Touchpoints and channels: List all the interactions across owned (website, app, email), paid (ads, sponsorships), and earned (reviews, referrals) channels. Don’t forget offline moments if they matter to your brand.
Customer lens: Capture the human side of the journey: the jobs-to-be-done, common questions, emotions, objections, and triggers at each stage. This context is often what separates a useful map from a surface-level one.
Friction and opportunities: Identify where customers drop off, get stuck, or lose interest. Just as importantly, highlight the opportunities where the right content or offer could move them forward more smoothly.
Ownership and KPIs: Assign responsibility for each stage or touchpoint. Who’s accountable for improving product page-to-cart conversion? Who owns retention emails? Tie each area to measurable KPIs so insights translate into action.
Together, these components transform a journey map from a static diagram into a living playbook for growth and CX.
How to Create a Customer Journey Map
A customer journey map is only as good as the process behind it.
The goal isn’t to produce a beautiful diagram: it’s to build a tool that reflects real customer behavior and sparks action across your team.
Here’s how to map the customer journey:
1. Define Scope, Persona, and Success Metrics
Start small. Pick one persona and one primary journey (for example: a first-time customer completing their first purchase).
Decide what success looks like (conversion, activation, or repeat engagement) so the map has a clear focus.
2. Gather Data from Multiple Sources
Start quantitative: Web and app analytics, attribution data, funnel conversion rates, time between steps, support tags.
Then move on to the qualitative: Surveys, interviews, session replays, customer support tickets, sales notes, or on-site polls.
Combining hard numbers with customer voice ensures your map captures both what’s happening and why.
3. List Stages and Touchpoints
Break the journey into its phases (awareness, consideration, purchase, onboarding, retention/advocacy) and add the touchpoints within each.
Don’t forget micro-conversions like viewing a product detail page, adding to cart, or opening an email.
4. Add Customer Context
For every stage, note the customer’s motivations, anxieties, and questions.
Highlight the “moments that matter” where reassurance, education, or incentives can make the difference between drop-off and progress.
5. Document Friction and Hypotheses
Call out where customers abandon the journey or get stuck.
Then propose testable ideas for fixing the problem; for instance, simplifying checkout steps or adding social proof to product pages.
6. Assign Owners and KPIs
Make sure every stage has a clear owner and measurable metric. This ensures insights don’t die on the page.
7. Validate with Stakeholders
Share the draft map with marketing, product, customer support, and even sales or finance.
Cross-functional input strengthens the map and helps with buy-in when it’s time to act.
8. Implement and Iterate
Treat the map as a living document.
Run experiments to address friction, track results, and update the map quarterly as your product and market evolve.
Common Mistakes and Misconceptions
Customer journey mapping for marketers is powerful, but only if it’s done right.
Many teams fall into the same traps, which can leave them with a pretty diagram that gathers dust instead of driving results.
Here are the most common mistakes to avoid:
Lack of Data
Building a map based on hunches or assumptions is a recipe for misalignment.
Real insights come from pairing analytics with the customer’s own voice through surveys, interviews, and support feedback.
Over-Complexity
If your map has so many touchpoints, arrows, and annotations that no one can read it, it won’t get used. Keep it focused and simple enough to be actionable.
Clicks-Only
A journey isn’t just a series of digital interactions.
Ignoring customer emotions, objections, or even offline moments leaves huge blind spots.
Static Artifact
A map that never gets updated quickly becomes irrelevant.
Journeys evolve as your product, channels, and customer behaviors change. Your map should too.
No Ownership or KPIs
Without assigning responsibility and measurable goals, the insights stay theoretical.
Every stage should have a clear owner and metric to track progress.
The takeaway: a good journey map is grounded in data, human-centered, simple to use, and always evolving.
How to Improve or Optimize Your Customer Journey Map
The best way to strengthen your journey map is to tackle the common pitfalls head-on.
Here’s how to turn each mistake into an opportunity for improvement:
Instrument the Map
Instead of guessing, ground your map in reality.
Overlay metrics like conversion rates between stages, average time to progress, drop-off hotspots, and lifetime value (LTV) by path.
This makes your map a data-powered decision tool.
Start Small, Go Deep
Avoid overwhelming the team with an unreadable tangle of touchpoints.
Begin with one persona and one primary journey. Once you’ve proven value, like boosting first-time purchases or cutting churn, expand gradually.
Test Surgically, Beyond Clicks
Journeys aren’t just a series of clicks.
Use experiments and A/B tests to address customer motivations, anxieties, and objections at key stages.
Feed the results back into the map so it reflects both behavior and emotion.
Operationalize Your Map
A map that never changes is quickly outdated.
Build a cadence to review metrics and refresh the map quarterly, and tie updates directly into your marketing or product roadmap so it stays active and relevant.
Prioritize Actions by Impact
Assign clear owners and focus first on the friction points with the biggest revenue stakes.
When responsibility and KPIs are in place, insights move from theory to measurable progress.
And underpinning all of this is reliable data.
Tools like Northbeam provide cross-channel attribution and performance insights, helping you validate paths, quantify stage impact, and track improvements over time.
From Map to Momentum
Customer journey mapping takes what often feels like a fuzzy, unpredictable experience and turns it into a clear, prioritized plan for growth.
By visualizing the stages customers move through, and layering in real data, ownership, and KPIs, marketers can move beyond guesswork to make decisions that improve both ROI and customer experience.
The best advice is to start small: build an initial map for one persona, validate it with data, and refine it through iteration.
From there, you can expand to more journeys and continue optimizing, using the map as a living tool that guides strategy across teams.
How to Navigate the Surge in Digital Ad Costs with YouTube Ads + Northbeam
Digital media is more expensive than ever. Meta’s rising Cost per 1,000 impressions (CPMs) alongside the skyrocketing cost per click (CPC) of Google Search, Shopping, and Performance Max (PMAX) are creating challenges for many advertisers.
Plus, since Meta is often positioned as an awareness and consideration channel as part of holistic marketing strategies, the rising costs are sending advertisers in search of cheaper “higher-funnel” media with similar (or better) performance.
Enter YouTube Ads.
YouTube advertising inventory can be purchased through Google Ads as “Video” ads. While Media buying teams are often intrigued about buying YouTube inventory, they rarely understand how to think about YouTube and measure its impact.
To be a better YouTube advertiser, you need to understand four things:
YouTube users rarely click on ads
Although you buy YouTube inventory with Google Ads, you can't think about YouTube through a traditional click-based lens like with Search and Shopping.
Clicks from YouTube tend to be a bonus side-effect of advertising, and shouldn’t be one of the primary key performance indicators (KPIs) considered when running YouTube campaigns.
The problem is that most digital advertising platforms are designed to measure media performance based on user click behavior. Without clicks, significant attribution is lost in campaign reporting.
Instead of clicks, your goal with YouTube is to generate the most engaged impressions and views for the lowest possible cost.
Since, when someone is on YouTube and sees an ad, they're likely already watching a video they chose to watch. The ad is interrupting their intended experience, which was to stay on YouTube and watch their content.
The ads you serve them need to be designed around this experience and the user's expectation. They probably have little desire to click on anything unless it's another YouTube video. So, expecting them to click on your ad will set yourself up to be disappointed and ultimately, unsuccessful.
When using Google Ads for reporting, Impressions, Views, View Through Rate (VTR), Cost per View (CPV) are some of the KPIs you should be referencing.
You can't rely solely on KPIs inside Google Ads
YouTube Ads are difficult to track within Google Ads using metrics like Conversions and ROAS. If you rely on these types of metrics to guide your media buying decisions, you’re probably leaving a ton of money on the table.
Utilising Northbeam is a no-brainer. The long lookback windows alongside one-day view attribution and proprietary modelling allows advertisers to see and understand far more revenue attributed to YouTube than most other sources.
You also get a central source of truth for your Media Efficiency Ratio (MER) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) metrics, since Northbeam uses your store’s revenue as an anchor to compare against all of your ad spend.
There’s a few other things to look at while scaling your YouTube campaigns.
▪ GA4: A free, useful tool for analyzing on-site behavioral reporting. Although you likely won’t get much in the way of revenue attribution for YouTube from GA4.
▪ Post-Purchase Surveys: As customers "How did you first hear about us?" directly on the order confirmation page, and list all of your marketing channels as options. This is a measure of customer-perspective marketing channel influence.
▪ Lift Measurement: Google surveys users on YouTube for statistically significant lift measurement. These can be expensive and should probably be your last choice.
▪ Search Lift Studies: With the help of your Google rep, you can identify measurable lift from Search, correlated to your YouTube Ads campaigns.
▪ Google Search Console: Branded search term data changes. If your YouTube campaigns are getting your brand to stick in peoples’ minds, they’ll inevitably go to Google and search for your brand.
▪Google Trends: Branded search term and category data changes (see real example below):
▪ Geo Study: One control location, one test location. Measure the difference in branded searches, traffic, and other signals that indicate users are being influenced by your YouTube Ads.
▪ MER/Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): These should improve over time as more people, having become aware of your brand, start purchasing.
▪ Email/Short Messaging Service (SMS) Platform: Monitor opt ins. Typically, email and SMS opt ins will increase with more relevant traffic, which comes from YouTube mostly in the form of branded search.
Impression Frequency is a key component
Users probably won’t remember your brand or product if they see your ads only once or twice. It takes time for your message to stick inside people’s minds. If you're targeting the right audience with the right message, aim for an average impression frequency per user over a seven day period between four and six (measured within Google Ads).
That means you want every user to see your ads at least four to six times per week. User engagement tends to rise with higher frequencies, up to a point.
Try testing Ad Sequence campaigns for ensuring the same users are exposed to several different ads at a high frequency.
Creative quality needs to be high
Your ads won't perform if creatives aren't good enough. You can tweak the settings in Google Ads a million different ways, but your creatives are what make or break a campaign.
Here are some tips to getting YouTube Ad creatives right:
➡ Hook your viewers in the first three seconds
➡ Test running ads 30 seconds or longer
➡ Use audio and voice overs whenever possible
➡ Test different videos in different aspect ratios (square, vertical and horizontal)
➡ Use your brand prominently (logos, colours, messaging throughout)
➡ Use a call to action at the end of the video
➡ Use different videos to walk users through all steps of the customer journey:
Brand feature video (introduce your brand to viewers in a memorable and engaging way)
Product-focused video (features, benefits, product demo)
Social proof video (customer UGC is great for this)
Offer video (showcase your offer and why viewers should buy from you)
YouTube is not just another advertising channel; it's a strategic asset that, when used correctly, can significantly reduce costs while expanding reach. By focusing on engagement metrics, integrating advanced tools, and producing standout creatives, you can leverage YouTube to its fullest potential.
This Blog was written by contributing guest writer Craig Graham. Check him out below:
You don’t need me to tell you that AI is a game changer. Just as the Industrial Revolution reshaped the way we worked in the 18th and 19th centuries, the emergence of artificial intelligence moves us into a new era. AI represents a paradigm shift in the way we interact with machines and process data, promising to upend industries, economies, and our daily lives. Rapid advancements in AI technology have already begun to change the way businesses operate, with automation and machine learning algorithms (more on these later) streamlining manual processes and augmenting our existing capabilities.
As marketers, AI offers us unparalleled opportunities for innovation. From personalized customer experiences and ultra-targeted advertising campaigns to predictive analytics and campaign automation, AI empowers us to unlock new channels for growth. In this guide, we’ll go over what artificial intelligence is, including the most crucial concepts you’ll need to know as a modern marketer in 2024 and beyond.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
Broadly defined, artificial intelligence (AI) is a field of computer science that focuses on creating systems and machines that can perform tasks and solve problems that would typically require human intelligence. Such tasks can range from recognizing patterns, making predictions, learning from experiences, and even understanding languages. At its core, AI aims to recreate synthetic, human-like intelligence in machines. This generally involves developing algorithms and models that enable computers to perceive their environment, reason about it, and make decisions accordingly. Digital assistants (Siri, Alexa), GPS guidance apps, self-driving vehicles, and generative AI tools (such as Open AI’s ChatGPT) are just a few examples of how artificial intelligence has changed the way we live and interact with machines in our daily lives.
Since AI aims to provide machines with human-like capabilities, it has the potential to help us save significant amounts of time by filling in for tasks that we’re not ideally suited for. Unlike humans, AI can sift and sort through large amounts of data to identify patterns that may have been missed by the human eye, automate otherwise tedious and manual tasks, and even mimic our language patterns (chatbots and LLMs). This has helped us tackle complex problems previously thought to be impossible due to the vast amounts of processing power required to solve them, such as using machine learning models to examine tissue samples and identify abnormalities at the cellular level, assisting pathologists in diagnosing diseases more quickly and accurately. In the financial sector, AI and ML algorithms have been invaluable in detecting fraudulent and criminal transactions by analyzing patterns and anomalies in large datasets to ensure the security of transactions. AI has even been used to identify suspicious betting patterns in the NBA, leading to a lifetime ban of a former player.
AI is generally split into two broad categories: weak AI and strong AI. Weak (or narrow) AI refers to AI that automates specific tasks. Although it can outperform humans, this is only true for the specific thing it was designed for such as recognizing patterns. Almost all of the AI systems that exist today are examples of weak AI, including marketing automation platforms, chatbots, and social media algorithms. Strong AI, or sometimes referred to as artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a type of AI which possesses human-like intelligence and adaptability, solving problems it’s never been trained for. When we see dystopian sci-fi films warning us of AI (Skynet anyone?), we often see strong AI that has pushed past human intelligence into a type of superintelligence. It’s important to note AGI is mostly hypothetical at this point, and it’s unclear whether we can ever create it because AGI would require machines to have consciousness and self-awareness, far beyond our current technological abilities.
Machine Learning: Continuous Improvement
The main approach to building AI systems is through machine learning: a subset of AI that focuses on developing techniques that enable machines to learn from large amounts of data by identifying relationships and patterns in the data. A ML algorithm uses various statistical techniques to “learn” to get progressively better at a task without having to be explicitly programmed for that task. The algorithm uses historical data as an input (such as previous marketing spend) to predict new output values (future expected sales revenue). ML uses a few different types of “learning” techniques including supervised learning (expected output for the input is known due to labeled data sets), unsupervised learning (expected outputs are unknown due to unlabeled data sets), and reinforcement learning (algorithms learn by interacting with an environment and receiving positive or negative feedback). As marketers, there are four types of machine learning methods that we should be aware of.
Neural Networks, the most popular way of conducting machine learning, are a series of algorithms that process data by mimicking the structure of the human brain. Neural networks consist of layers of interconnected nodes that analyze and pass information between each other by working together to decipher large datasets. They generally have an input layer which receives the raw data, followed by several layers which each apply some sort of data transformation before passing the result to the subsequent layer. After making its way through these processing layers, a final layer will produce the network’s output which could be a classification or some type of prediction. By adjusting the strength of connections between these nodes and layers, neural networks learn to recognize complex patterns within data, make predictions based on new inputs (that it has never seen before), and even learn from mistakes.
Deep learning refers to a type of multi-layered neural network that uses a large number of hidden layers (think dozens or even hundreds) that process input data to capture increasingly abstract features of that data to identify complex patterns. The “deep” in deep learning refers to the number of layers in the neural network - the more layers, the “deeper” the network. This makes deep neural networks well-suited for certain narrow AI tasks such as recognizing images, understanding human speech, and translating between different languages. As marketers, there are two key applications of deep learning and neural networks that you should know about:
Computer vision involves the automatic extraction, analysis, and interpretation of useful information from media formats such as images and videos. Deep learning has significantly advanced this field with the development of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are specifically designed for processing grid-like data by detecting spatial hierarchies and features like edges, textures, and objects. Computer vision can help digital marketers in several ways:
Content Management: Computer vision can automatically tag creative assets, for instance categorizing by product lines, making it easier to find, store and retrieve visual assets related to specific products.
Content Creation: GenAI (much more on this in the next section) can create realistic images from textual descriptions, convert sketches into photos, or even generate high-quality artwork. Instead of having to pay for expensive photo shoots, marketers can now generate or modify visual assets with the click of a button.
Customer Engagement: New technologies such as visual search allows customers to search for products using images instead of text. Platforms such as Pinterest and Google Lens enable users to find similar items, thereby enhancing the shopping experience and driving incremental revenue. Augmented reality (AR) can also be used to allow customers to visualize products in different environments, which is particularly useful in certain segments such as fashion and home decor where an initial trial is crucial before making a purchase.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) focuses on the interaction between computers and human language, enabling machines to understand and even generate human language. Deep learning models, especially transformers (ChatGPT stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer), have pushed the boundaries of what is possible in NLP. Marketers already know that deep learning models like ChatGPT can create blog posts, product descriptions, social media copy, but here are a few other relevant use cases powered by NLP:
Chatbots and Virtual assistants: AI-powered chatbots can handle customer queries in real-time, providing instant support and improving the customer experience without needing to hire a large human team. These systems use NLP to process, understand, and generate responses to customer inquiries, freeing up human agents for more complex tasks. A good example would be the various chatbots used by major airlines, or the pop-up chatbots found on SaaS and eCommerce websites.
Sentiment Analysis: NLP can pick up on public sentiment and gauge how customers are responding to marketing activities. This includes analyzing customer reviews, social media posts, and other forms of feedback to figure out how to respond appropriately. This generally involves tracking the ratio of positive and negative sentiments so marketers can respond to customer concerns promptly.
GenAI: Fear for your job?
Let’s talk about the most hyped form of AI: Generative AI. GenAI is a broad label describing any type of AI that can produce text, images, video or audio clips by learning from training data and generating new, unique outputs that mimic the statistical properties of the training data. GenAI uses NLP and machine learning to create this new content, but it differs from other ML applications because its purpose is to produce wholly new things as opposed to simply recognizing and classifying data like other narrow AI (search algorithms for example). Two prominent types of generative models power most of the tools we use today:
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs): a class of models designed to generate synthetic data that closely mimics real data. Introduced in 2014, GANs consist of two main components: a generator neural network that generates new data samples, and a discriminator neural network that evaluates the authenticity of the generated data. The training process is “adversarial” because these two neural networks are asked to play each other in game-like scenarios until the discriminator can no longer reliably tell the difference between real data and synthetic data produced by the generator.
Transformer-Based Models: Most people think of ChatGPT when they think of GenAI, which is a transformer-based model that uses an attention mechanism to weigh the importance of different words in a sentence. These models undergo a two-phase training process: in pre-training, the model is given a massive amount of text data to learn language patterns, grammar, and so on. During this phase, the model learns how to predict the next word in a sentence, given the words already preceding it for context. Afterwards, the model is fine-tuned on a smaller dataset to specialize in specific tasks such as text summarization, translation, or answering questions.
GenAI has the capability to significantly enhance marketing operations and strategies by allowing marketers to create personalized content at scale, improve customer engagement, streamline processes, amongst countless other use cases. Personalization and customization of content have become table stakes in an increasingly digital media landscape; generative AI offers us an avenue to quickly and easily produce large amounts of content to meet this demand for authentic experiences. Consider the immensely successful “Share a Coke” campaign: Coke found an ingenious way to create personalization for the masses, but it was a massive creative and logistical endeavor to design and produce hundreds of different cans. With GenAI, we can produce similar results without hiring multiple agencies and partners to pull it off. For example, Carvana used GenAI to generate 1 million+ unique videos that reminded customers of the day they met their Carvana vehicles. The marketing team realized that people often have special bonds with their cars, so they used machine learning models to collect basic data such as the car’s model, color, year, purchase data, and location - enriched with cultural events around that time and place to create bespoke “joyrides” to commemorate and celebrate that bond. The best part? It took less than half a workday to process and create all the videos. With GenAI, companies without the resources of Coca-Cola can pull off these types of campaigns within a reasonable amount of time and tighter budget constraints.
Brands and companies across different sectors have taken notice and are using GenAI to improve and increase customer engagement. Spotify is piloting AI-driven voice translation by providing additional languages for top podcasts, all in the podcaster’s voice. The technology leverage’s OpenAI’s voice generation to match the original speaker’s style, making for a more natural listening experience than traditional dubbing so Spotify is able to bridge language barriers and cater to international markets far more effectively than before. This is a step above the mundane chatbots and virtual assistants that have begun to dot the eCommerce landscape, but even these are seeing an evolution. Recent developments in multi-modal AI will further expand what AI chatbots can do to solve customer problems. Imagine a customer submitting a photo of a faulty product and the AI chatbot quickly and accurately providing a resolution based on previous customer service interactions fed into machine learning models. Furthermore, these bots are available 24/7 and can handle large numbers of inquiries simultaneously, offering immediate assistance which reduces wait times and improves customer satisfaction with your brand.
Arguably the most valuable aspect of GenAI for marketers is the potential to enhance creativity and the quality of our output while also reducing the cost of cognition to produce that work. This transformative technology spans across a wide variety of tasks: GenAI is already assisting marketers with crafting blog posts, analyzing consumer feedback, and designing new ad concepts for A/B tests. For creatives, the brainstorming process can be made much easier with GenAI by feeding a basic prompt to get a wide range of ideas. AI can suggest numerous variations on marketing activations, copy, taglines, all from a given theme or concept. Anyone who has experienced creative or writing blocks knows how invaluable it can be able to expand the pool of ideas quickly. Overcoming this “first-mile” problem of finally putting the proverbial pen to paper has caught the attention of major advertisers, as the CEO of WPP recently noted that GenAI can bring up to 10-20 times savings.
As marketers, we should be excited for the potential of GenAI to augment our own creative capabilities. Interestingly enough, a growing number of workers are instead concerned: a recent Forrester survey found that 36% of workers were worried about losing their jobs to AI and automation within the next 10 years. In our opinion, it’s still too early to worry about AI replacing us as knowledge workers. AI is still too prone to errors and generating false information, commonly referred to as “hallucinations.” You may have heard of the 2023 court case Mata v Avianca, in which attorneys submitted a brief researched using ChatGPT that unfortunately contained multiple fake extracts and case citations in a New York court. The lawyers were unaware that ChatGPT can hallucinate and failed to check that all the extracts and cases actually existed, and consequences were swift. The court dismissed the case, sanctioned the lawyers and fined their firm for acting in bad faith. Until GenAI can get to the point of becoming indistinguishable from real human output without errors, we’ll all unfortunately still have to answer emails and check Slack.
Final Takeaways
Whether we like it or not, AI will be top of mind for many marketing leaders for the next few years. With the ability to streamline processes, personalize customer experiences, and generative innovative content, AI offers marketers exciting opportunities for growth and efficiency. GenAI will become even more of a force multiplier in the future, so our best advice is to become comfortable and adept with these tools. Despite concerns about job security, the current capabilities of AI serve more as an optimizer rather than true replacement for human ingenuity and creativity. The next generation of marketers will be very skilled at partnering with machines; make sure you don’t get left behind. It’s crucial to stay informed about advancements and integrate these tools into your workflows and teams.
The Super Bowl isn’t just a championship game—it’s the annual Hunger Games of advertising, where brands throw obscene amounts of money at consumer eyeballs, hoping for a few seconds of undivided attention. In this gladiator pit of marketing, the landscape of digital advertising is constantly shifting, and Northbeam has taken a deep dive into the trends shaping ad spend, auction costs, and campaign performance in the lead-up to the big game.
And because we love a good comparison, we’re putting Super Bowl advertising head-to-head with Black Friday & Cyber Monday (BFCM), the so-called "Ecommerce Super Bowl," to see how the two stack up. The insights we’ve uncovered will help brands sharpen their strategies so they can get more bang for their marketing buck—or at least avoid lighting their ad budgets on fire.
The State of Marketing Before Super Bowl 2025
All data and insights presented in this report are derived from Northbeam users and brands, providing a real-time pulse on how top advertisers approached this year's Super Bowl marketing landscape.
Before the Super Bowl weekend arrived, the digital marketing landscape was already shifting in ways that would impact advertiser strategies. TikTok, once a dominant force, faced a setback as looming ban threats led to a dip in its Super Bowl ad spend share. This opened the door for YouTube, which overtook TikTok to become the third-largest advertising platform for the event, trailing only behind Meta and Google. Meanwhile, AppLovin emerged as a surprising new contender, capturing around 3% of total ad spend—just behind YouTube (3.8%) and TikTok (3.3%).
Despite the ongoing debate and hype surrounding X (formerly Twitter), advertiser interest remained stagnant. The platform held onto a modest 0.13% share of total Super Bowl week spend, showing no notable year-over-year change.
On a broader scale, advertisers collectively increased their Super Bowl week budgets by approximately 7% compared to the previous year. Interestingly, despite the higher spend, overall efficiency remained stable, posting only a modest 0.8% improvement YoY.
The Ebb and Flow of Super Bowl Ad Spend
Like clockwork, Super Bowl ad costs start creeping up the Thursday before game day, peaking over the weekend before mysteriously dropping on Sunday itself. It’s as if advertisers get cold feet at the finish line, giving those who hold out an unexpected pricing advantage. For some context, here is what spend looked like across channels in 2024:
Despite the last-minute cost fluctuation, brands report that their best ad performance tends to happen in the days leading up to the game rather than on Super Bowl Sunday itself. This makes sense—by the time the game rolls around, consumers are more focused on buffalo wings and touchdown dances than clicking on ads.
Interestingly, the Food & Beverage sector leads the charge in Super Bowl ad spend, with the biggest daily jump occurring from Friday to Saturday. However, by Sunday, the increase slows down—perhaps because everyone is already fully stocked with chips and beer, and no amount of last-minute marketing is going to change that.
Traditional media is still kicking, though digital dominates. In 2024, TV placements accounted for almost 5% of the total media mix, while Connected TV (CTV) placements barely scratched 0.5%. Despite the ongoing digital revolution, traditional TV remains a go-to for brands looking for that "big moment"—even if most viewers are on their phones tweeting about the commercials instead of actually watching them.
How Brands Allocated Their Budgets Across Platforms
When it comes to ad spend distribution, Facebook and Google are still the cool kids at the lunch table, eating up over 74% of total spend. Meanwhile, traditional TV, hanging on by a thread, makes up just over 4%, proving that while old habits die hard, they do eventually fade.
Influencer marketing is gaining traction, but it’s still playing in the kiddie pool with under 2% of total ad spend. However, the data shows a small but notable increase in influencer marketing investments as game day approaches, suggesting that brands are warming up to the idea of leveraging social media stars for last-minute hype.
The Cost of Visibility: Auction Price Trends
The closer we get to Super Bowl Sunday, the more advertisers have to pay for the privilege of appearing in front of consumers who are already drowning in ads. Most platforms see a predictable surge in CPMs leading up to the weekend, but here’s the twist: YouTube and Snapchat actually experience slight declines in auction costs over the weekend.
Why? Likely because more inventory becomes available, meaning brands willing to pivot to these platforms could snatch up some last-minute deals while their competitors shell out premium rates elsewhere. Meanwhile, Google and Facebook remain the Fort Knox of digital advertising—consistently expensive, but still where most brands are putting their money.
Super Bowl vs. BFCM: Which Offers Better Returns?
If Super Bowl advertising is the high-stakes poker game of marketing, BFCM is the full-blown shopping apocalypse. BFCM’s spending behavior is defined by an all-out buying frenzy, with ad efficiency peaking as eager consumers throw money at their screens. In contrast, Super Bowl advertising is more of a slow burn, with spending and efficiency spread out more evenly over the week.
Check out the tail on this chart for BFCM 2024:
Most brands see their biggest spend jump between Friday and Saturday of Super Bowl week, whereas BFCM experiences a steady, methodical build-up. Efficiency is also a key differentiator—BFCM’s shopping-driven engagement results in immediate ROI, whereas Super Bowl ad impact tends to be more drawn out, potentially influencing consumer behavior over a longer period.
How to Measure the Impact of Super Bowl Ads
What Should We Be Benchmarking?
Measuring the success of a Super Bowl ad campaign isn’t as simple as checking a few vanity metrics. Brands should take a two-pronged approach: comparing Period over Period (to assess performance changes leading up to and during Super Bowl week) and Year over Year (YoY) (to determine long-term trends and growth compared to previous Super Bowls).
Understanding Super Bowl Week Success
At the end of the day, business success is the ultimate metric. Revenue, traffic, and on-site efficiency will provide the clearest picture of whether the Super Bowl ad spend actually moved the needle. However, peeling back the layers reveals deeper insights:
Marketing Efficiency
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Both blended and first-time customer-specific ROAS should be analyzed to determine the financial return on Super Bowl campaigns.
Cost to Acquire a Customer (CPA / CAC): A major benchmark in determining efficiency shifts due to Super Bowl-specific messaging and offers.
Conversion Rate (ECR) & Revenue per Visit: These metrics show if users are just browsing or if they are actually making purchases.
Creative Performance & Engagement
Not all ads are created equal—some flop, some go viral, and others just generate steady engagement. Evaluating creative success means looking at:
Cost per Click (CPC) & Cost per Mille (CPM): Are we paying more per click/impression compared to pre-Super Bowl periods?
Cost per New Visit (CPNV) & New Visit %: Did the campaign bring in new customers or just re-engage the usual audience?
Click-Through Rate (CTR) & Cost per Engagement: A strong creative piece will increase these numbers, proving the messaging resonated with consumers.
The Invisible Lift: Organic & Direct Traffic Impact
Super Bowl ads—especially on traditional formats like TV and out-of-home—aren’t always trackable through direct clicks. But that doesn’t mean they don’t work. Brands should analyze:
Direct Traffic & Organic Search Traffic: Did the Super Bowl campaign boost unprompted brand searches and direct visits?
Organic Social Traffic: If users discuss, share, or tag the brand after seeing the ad, that’s a win—even if it’s not directly attributable.
New Customer %: What portion of total sales came from first-time buyers influenced by Super Bowl exposure?
Multi-Touch Attribution: The Full Customer Journey
Looking at only first-click or last-click data gives an incomplete picture. A combination of First-Touch (to assess new journey starts) and Multi-Touch Attribution (to understand how ads assisted conversion) provides a more accurate measurement of true campaign impact.
Measuring Brand Search Lift & Omni-Channel Impact
When Super Bowl campaigns succeed, consumers tend to Google the brand name more. Tracking changes in:
Total Search Impression Volume (paid and organic)
Paid Brand Search Impression Share
Additionally, Super Bowl ads can have a halo effect across other sales channels, including Amazon and third-party marketplaces. Brands should analyze whether there’s a correlation between increased spend on direct channels and spikes in these external platforms.
The Long Tail Effect: Tracking Performance Beyond the Super Bowl
Finally, brands shouldn’t expect their Super Bowl efforts to disappear once Monday rolls around. Depending on the business model, the impact of Super Bowl marketing can extend for weeks or even months. Monitoring efficiency beyond the immediate timeframe will ensure brands truly understand the long-term value of their investment.
Lessons for Brands: How to Maximize Super Bowl Advertising Impact
So, what’s the playbook for brands looking to maximize their Super Bowl ad dollars? First, don’t just blindly dump your entire budget into game-day ads. The data shows that efficiency often peaks before the Super Bowl itself, meaning early spend could yield better results. If you must advertise over the weekend, platforms like YouTube and Snapchat may offer an unexpected cost advantage.
Secondly, while traditional TV still has its place, it’s no longer the undisputed king of Super Bowl advertising. With Connected TV gaining traction, brands should be thinking about how to leverage emerging digital formats rather than relying on the same old playbook.
Finally, remember that Super Bowl advertising is a marathon, not a sprint. Instead of going all-in for one day of expensive exposure, consider how your campaign can build anticipation before the game and keep momentum going afterward. At the end of the day, a well-planned strategy will always outperform a last-minute Hail Mary.
Super Bowl advertising might be a high-stakes game, but with the right data-driven approach, brands can ensure they’re making smart plays that lead to real results—no halftime show required.
This number isn’t adjusted to account for all the new merchants Shopify has onboarded this year, so that volume increase could be driven by brands new to the platform. Therefore this isn’t the most useful benchmark.
Salesforce reports 5% online sales growth year over year across the BFCM season, with Friday and Saturday as the strongest days. Cyber Monday was the weakest day, with only 3% year over year growth. (Is Cyber Monday dead? I asked my mom if she did any Cyber Monday shopping, and she complained that I don’t call her enough. So the verdict is still out, but performance this year doesn’t look great.)
MasterCard’s Spendingpulse gave an assessment that most experts seem to agree with: ecommerce sales on Black Friday increased 8.5% year over year, while in-store sales only increased 1.1%.
The experts are suggesting most brands would see between a 1% and 8.5% year over year increase in revenue. But is it that simple? Let's look at the numbers from the "Cyber 5", the five days from thanksgiving to Cyber Monday.
“Cyber 5” Growth Benchmarks
We looked at petabytes of ecommerce data and calculated percentile ranks of company performance based on year over year changes in revenue and first-time transactions (one of our favorite acquisition measures.) If your brand saw greater than a 3.7% increase in revenue and a 1.8% increase in first-time transactions across the Cyber 5, congratulations - you are at least in the 50th percentile of ecommerce businesses.
So, by these measures, if you did better than 5% increases in revenue year over year, you beat the worldwide average.
Don’t listen to “build in public” schmucks on X - use this chart to evaluate how you actually did this year, compared to everybody else.
Black Friday Cyber Monday Performance Benchmarks
Here’s charts showing ad performance metrics, comparing this year’s Cyber 5 versus last year’s.
Notable changes:
Facebook’s increasing share of budget is having brutal effects on clickthrough rate, cost per click, return on ad spend and customer acquisition costs. Performance marketers trust Facebook for conversions. Under intense pressure in a low-consumer-confidence environment, it’s no surprise budgets are consolidating to a trusted source of conversions.
What is surprising is the stunning almost 20% drop in clickthroughs. Although conversions technically increased, double-digit increases in CAC and double-digit reductions in ROAS probably nullify any conversion gains we saw on Facebook this year. No wonder TikTok is fighting for improved conversion tracking - we’re reaching critical Facebook mass.
TikTok budgets pulled back by 13% year over year. Although this is still one of our favorite growth platforms, the metrics don’t look good. 10% CPM increases, 12% CPCs, -12% conversion rate.
While this looks bad, I place blame on the advertisers themselves. Many still have no damn clue how to make a good TikTok ad, and these people are pulling down the averages with mountains of wasted spend.
Return on ad spend is down everywhere. This is just how it is. These ad platforms demand increasing profits from their advertising businesses. The profit motive drives these platforms to continually push up the prices of their placements. We will never see cheaper advertising than what we are experiencing at this moment. These data support that efficiency in your ad spend, via smart attribution and omnichannel experimentation, is the only way to win.
Industry performance during the Cyber 5.
Now the good stuff. Here’s two charts showing year over year changes, day by day, during the Cyber 5, broken down by industry, featuring blended revenue and first time transactions. Read ‘em and weep.
Some highlights:
Home & Garden took a dump. What happened you guys? I have a guess: growth of U.S. home ownership is tanking. No need to buy gardening gloves when you live on a seventh-floor walkup.
Beauty & Personal Care is slaying. These are typically the smartest Cyber 5 brands in the game. I bet Jones Road Beauty outperformed this by a significant amount. By these measures, most beauty brands using Northbeam likely ended up in the 75th percentile and above for growth.
It’s a good year for self improvement. Interestingly, both Health & Wellness and Sporting Goods & Fitness industries saw better first time transaction increases than they did blended revenue growth year over year. Is this driven by reduced prices? Lower AOV products? The new year will tell.
What about our white paper predictions on the Cyber 5?
Prediction: regardless of economic indicators, consumers are anxious about money and are likely to spend less than usual.
Result: false. Sure, we did spend more as a nation, but there’s some sketchy indicators. “Buy now, pay later” is up 47% year over year, and Cyber Monday is apparently irrelevant. We’re comfortable saying this weren’t as good as they could be.
Prediction: This will be the most fiscally expensive, creatively challenging, and competitively crowded performance advertising market we’ve ever seen.
Result: 100% true. Just look at those metrics above. Ads are more expensive or less efficient by double digits on like every channel.
Prediction: Cyber 5 sales will kick off the first week in November but consumer behavior won’t spike until around the 20th of November.
Result: true. I’ll do you one better: the data suggests that conversion rates spike on both Fridays in November prior to the holiday. Both 2022 and 2023 charts show as much. Plus, the upwards growth in conversion rate - our proxy for consumer buying interest - began to rise at the same pace after the 6th of November. This gives some weight to the “run sales early” argument, but the volume still pales in comparison to Black Friday itself.
Verdict: we were pretty damn close on most of our assessments. Next time we’ll be even more niche and focused in our predictions. I’m feeling lucky.
The Breakdown:
Here’s what you should know:
Year over year growth was not equal across all industries. The widely shared “8.5%” year over year growth number you see reported everywhere is an aggregate of many industries. Our reporting shows that growth is uneven - don’t measure your performance against numbers that aren’t relevant to your industry.
You should be studying what beauty and personal care brands did on Black Friday to attract repeat purchasers. Look at the year over year revenue growth numbers in the charts above, they’re killing it. These strategies often include smart early emailing campaigns and gift with purchase. Bonus data: Beauty and Personal Care saw their year over year blended revenue increase 39.7% in October. They’re doing something right.
Cyber Monday is losing power, so stop planning around it. Even looking at brands who did well during the Cyber 5, several of them saw their lowest year over year growth on Monday. As ALL shopping begins to pivot online, a day dedicated to it seems redundant. Also, it’s easier to apply discount codes and specific offers to online orders.
Thanksgiving is a decent day for sales, actually. We’re always so focused on Friday, but in several industries, Thanksgiving was the best day for sales. Maybe all your customers weren’t in food comas after all. Make Thanksgiving a part of your Cyber 5 media buy.
Black Friday shopping sucks and people care less about it - can you create excitement again. When was the last time you were legitimately excited to do holiday shopping? Long gone are the fistfights over Furbies we used to see in the early aughts. But are we right to point the finger at consumers? Black Friday discounts used to be steep enough to inspire violence. These days marketers are expecting 200% year over year gains on a 15% discount offered on a product bundle that’s pointless for customers but convenient for the 3PL. We’ve lost our Christmas spirit.
Next year’s Cyber 5 will be even worse. We’ll be in the immediate aftermath of the most consequential American election of a generation and the stifling ad spending that comes with it. Consumer confidence is set to drop, not improve. Not to mention CPMs continue to rise in price. There’s no relief coming, so don’t plan for it. Plan instead to be smart and efficient now.
Final comments
This isn’t the Cyber 5 we deserved, but it’s the one we got. Performance was divided across industry and creative lines. Brands who use proper attribution outperformed everybody else. Creative remains king - the brands with quality, authentic ads won while the “60% off!!!” screamers yelled into a void. This Cyber 5 defined what our algorithm-driven future will look like, so we hope you were paying attention.
Celebrity Chef Gordon Ramsay swears by HexClad for a reason.
This patented cookware is a hybrid of your favorite kitchen staples, combining the superpowers of stainless steel, cast iron, and nonstick into convenient and high-power cookware.
Founded in 2013, HexClad quickly grew its following with celebrities like Halle Berry, Oprah Winfrey, and Cameron Diaz singing its praises. In 2021, Gordon Ramsay invested in HexClad and became its lead global ambassador and spokesperson, leading to a record-breaking year for the company.
But maintaining meteoric growth year-over-year isn’t an easy task, which makes the subsequent years even more of a feat for the HexClad marketing team.
We sat down with Cameron Bush, Director of Growth Marketing at Hexclad to learn how Northbeam helps their marketing team not only get efficient but stay efficient.
Looking for a partner, not a provider
HexClad’s marketing team tried a lot of tools over the years to get the information they needed.
“It was a patchwork solution of Google Analytics, in-platform metrics, and static sheets that the marketing team was updating,” Cameron said. “And then we did trials with different marketing intelligence software; I often joke that most MTAs are just re-papered Google Analytics,” Cameron said.
Adding Northbeam to HexClad’s tech stack wasn’t just putting a new SaaS tool in the portfolio — it was a paradigm shift for the team.
“Switching to Northbeam was a pivotal moment in our switch to focusing on the top of the funnel because we finally had the confidence that we were able to measure it,” Cameron said. “The language of the team really matched the language we speak as far as what growth looks like, and we knew the data science rigor was there.”
Cameron found that finding the right MTA tool, as opposed to the heavy lift of building one yourself, is crucial to doing your best work. Having a strong partner in Northbeam is what sets a team like HexClad apart from the competition.
“Some vendors know a lot about what they know, whether that's math or data science or whatever it is, but they don’t know how to turn it into marketing a product and speak our language in that way. And that was something that Northbeam cracked the code on early on," Cameron said. "We’ve tried all kinds of agencies, vendors, and softwares and Northbeam were the ones that really knew what we were doing as a growth marketing operation.”
The predictive modeling of Northbeam’s MMM+ tool is mirrored by the tactics of the Data Science team. Their deep well of expertise and hands-on approach provides additional insight into precisely how to leverage your data into more efficient spending, whether you know what to look for or not.
“Week to week, when I hop on a call with the team, they always have a new sheet that they’re walking me through and I think: I didn’t even know how to ask you for this, but you’ve already created it,” Cameron said.
“That kind of proactivity has been so helpful… Northbeam has been an integral building partner for the entire HexClad operation.”
Maturity brings a much harder battle
After two years in a row of 150% growth, HexClad remains bullish but realistic about the road ahead.
“Once we hit maturity and all the big changes we’ve made over the last few years panned out, we had to change gears and iterate and it became an exponential process of improvement,” Cameron said. “Once you hit that steady state it’s a much, much harder battle.”
“MMM has been a huge jumping off point. I wouldn’t know where to begin each month to decide what we spend on which days and why, and then set benchmarks for each of those in MTA. It’s all a huge puzzle that we’re putting together with a very lean team.”
“This is the year where a lot of those inklings and decisions and difficult marketing tests that have been pushed down the road are all coming to a head, and Northbeam has been a partner in that," Cameron said. "Trying to decide where to spend that next dollar is always our daily battle, and Northbeam is the only place we go to make that decision.”
Having a reliable system in place that accurately measures and predicts your spending is crucial when scaling year-over-year. Whether your goals are to maintain ambitious growth metrics like HexClad, or even when ramping your efforts down.
Cameron agrees: “We’ve tested hundreds and hundreds of pieces of creative over the last six months… and Northbeam has not steered us wrong yet.”
The metrics that make it happen
Let’s get into the weeds: which metrics does HexClad’s marketing team check daily?
“My obsessive metric is going to be ROAS, of course, but I love seeing first time versus returning customer ROAS. Not a lot of platforms give us that kind of visibility. We set a lot of our acquisition budgeting based on our first time customer orders, first time order value, and first time CAC, and then we can subtract the returning customer ROAS piece and credit retention for doing that,” Cameron said.
“That increase in returning customers year-over-year was directly measurable for us. Our email opt-in rates actually fell, but the conversion rates on those people that opted in increased massively because we were giving offers for second-time orders.”
“That’s something we’re looking to change now: we’re going to go back towards acquisition offers as well. Those flows, they just convert so well,” Cameron said.
“We watch our data rigorously every single day and we do huge creative testing exercises at the top of the funnel. A big part of measuring that is MMM. We wouldn’t have faithfully put 70% of our budget into Meta if we didn’t have some serious data to support that.”
“Once it proved itself week in and week out we were able to confidently scale and make projections that we genuinely believed in," Cameron said.
"And I think that’s not something that most growing direct-to-consumer businesses, particularly at this scale, are able to accomplish. Because it’s terrifying, you know, spending millions in a week.”
It’s unwise to continually increase your ad spend over time when you cannot effectively measure your return on investment. Northbeam provides the benchmarks you need to know if spending money is worth it; especially when your growth is at 150% and your ad spend is in the millions.
Like Cameron said: “you can’t spend those millions if you don’t absolutely know that you’re going to be able to pay for them at the end of the month.”
HexClad scaled their ad spend by 100% in 2022 and another 100% in 2023, improving their MER both times.
“We’ve done a lot of work with the Northbeam team to get us to this place, and it hasn’t failed yet, so we’re going to keep doing it.”
In an industry that is constantly evolving with new tools, legal privacy crackdowns, and SaaS snake oil salesmen coming out of the woodwork, it’s hard to know which tools will actually provide a significant value add.
“Moving to MMM+ is going to be massive for how we operate every day… all the product development that is going on to show us things like the half-life of a dollar is some of the coolest work I’ve ever seen. I didn’t know it could be done,” Cameron said.
“This year we’re looking for 50-60% growth; we’re taking it easy,” Cameron said. “We’re looking at both Shopify and Amazon sales because that spillover is massive; if you chart paid media spend against Amazon revenue, it really grows when we start pushing the top of the funnel. And the majority of our revenue that’s coming out of Amazon is coming from direct search.”
People know HexClad — their addressable market has been, well, addressed. This is a position that any brand would love to be in.
“We’re in this new phase of realizing that we have a top-of-funnel beast and a ton of awareness that we’re really grateful to have because I don’t think a lot of brands are able to get to that well-measured top-of-funnel scale that actually ends up supporting the business,” Cameron said.
“We’ve been very, very lucky to have been profitable for the last three or four years, and to be able to use that profit to continue growing has been just incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it," Cameron said.
“We love being on the cutting edge of our industry, but also on the cutting edge with the software we use. Northbeam is helping us move into the direction we need to be going; it’s a marketing best practice bellwether.”
“If you would have asked me two years ago, I would’ve said the growth we’ve seen wouldn’t be possible… but it is, and it requires a really awesome partner. We’re grateful to the Northbeam team for that.”
Have you or a loved one recently been inundated with messages about incrementality? Can’t figure out if this is the latest fad or a legitimate evolution in analytics? In today’s fast-paced and data-driven marketing landscape, staying ahead of the curve is essential for success. In a sea of buzzwords and trends, incrementality has emerged as a contender with significant implications for marketing strategy and performance measurement. In this article, we’ll cover what exactly this purported “silver bullet” is, and what marketers need to know.
Section 1: What is incrementality?
Incrementality refers to the measure of the additional (or incremental) lift that a marketing initiative provides compared to baseline expectations. In other words, incrementality seeks to answer the question of “what additional value did my marketing activities contribute beyond what would have occurred naturally?”
Incrementality helps answer this question by comparing the performance of those who were exposed to marketing campaigns (treatment group) with a similar cohort that did not see those same campaigns (control group). By measuring the difference in outcomes between the two, we can determine the additional value generated by the campaign.
You’ll notice this is essentially describing the scientific method; like scientific experimentation, incrementality analysis begins with hypothesis testing, where marketers conduct randomized experiments to isolate the incremental impact of campaigns. This emphasis on empirical evidence is why incrementality is so revered: of all the popular analytical methodologies employed by marketers, incrementality is the only one that establishes a causal relationship as opposed to simply explaining the correlation between the independent and dependent variables.
These experiments can take many forms, but they all generally involve some way of randomly selecting users into a treatment or control group. A geographic experiment, for example, would segment the country into similar pockets and then randomly assign them to a treatment and control group. This is also called a holdout test since we’re withholding marketing exposure from a portion of the target audience.
Section 2: How is incrementality used?
Since we can rely on incrementality to establish a causal relationship, it’s often a great tool to validate results or justify marketing spend. Unlike other common marketing analytics tools that mostly conduct correlational analysis, this gives our data more credibility. The next time your finance department asks why they should keep spending dollars on a marketing initiative, you can simply refer to the results of your latest incrementality experiments with confidence. Without the marketing spend that you’re counting on, the company would be leaving money on the table. This really helps change the message from looking at marketing as an expense, and more as an investment.
Incrementality is commonly used for budget allocation purposes because we can run various types of randomized experiments on our top channels and campaigns to test if those marketing dollars are truly driving new revenue instead of cannibalizing existing sales. Not sure if Facebook Display is actually driving positive results for your business? Design an incrementality test and find out. Repeat the process for your top channels and let those results help you decide how to divvy up your marketing spend. Tactically, incrementality is also well-suited for channels that your team doesn’t have much experience with. Let’s say your team wants to spend more on a new channel, but you’re not sure if additional spend will generate the necessary ROI. If we run a pilot and conduct incrementality analysis on the results, we can extrapolate and forecast what a scale up would look like.
Section 3: What are some challenges of incrementality?
While incrementality testing is a powerful tool for measuring the true impact of marketing efforts, there are some challenges and limitations you should be aware of.
Since incrementality involves experiments, a big challenge is ensuring the sample size is sufficiently large enough so that our results are statistically significant. Small sample sizes can lead to low statistical power, making it difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from the results.
It’s impossible to remove all of the “noise” surrounding a marketing campaign so an omitted or hidden variable could dramatically skew your results. Did you hire more sales reps while the campaign was running? Did you increase more communication with the system so more sales occurred? When you randomly assigned treatment and control groups, were there hidden mechanisms that prevented true randomization such as inherent biases in the selection process? Remember that incrementality attempts to show causation, which means your chances of getting a bad read increase if there are important omitted variables. Incrementality also struggles to account for spillover effects (marketing efforts often impact individuals who were not directly exposed to the campaign, through word of mouth and other means) which are particularly important in digital marketing where these cross-channel interactions are more common.
Incrementality is not a low maintenance, set it and forget it, type of tool. To get the most out of this technique requires a skilled marketing team that has a larger strategy and framework (in the form of a learning agenda or testing plan) that will guide what to test, when to test it, and most importantly, how to interpret those results and make actionable decisions off those insights.
Note that incrementality experiments generally run for weeks not days, during which we cannot make changes to our campaigns because it will impact results. That means no swapping out of creative, A/B testing, or introducing any other variables while experiments are running. This is not ideal for larger channels because it requires us to disrupt our business as usual operations to accommodate a statistical technique.
Section 4: Incrementality vs. other popular analytics methods
Before the digital advertising schism moved us away from traditional advertising channels like linear TV, MMM was the primary form of media measurement because it doesn’t rely on granular data. MMM excels at capturing older channels and the longer-term impact on revenue by leveraging historical data (both media and macroeconomic data) to predict future sales based on past behavior. However, MMM is very expensive to spin up and often takes months to deploy with a reporting lag after each quarter to update the model, so other methodologies sprang up to make up for these deficiencies.
MTA came next with the rise of digital media, along with detailed user tracking which gave marketers more granularity in terms of insights. By leveraging this richer user data to track customer journeys, MTA was far better adapted for the complex and cross-channel landscape and is the most bottoms-up approach as it collects data at the individual level and then aggregates this to create a model. However, with the rise of consumer privacy regulations, MTA may become less effective in the future if user-level tracking goes completely away (still looks to be sometime in the future given Google recently delayed cookie deprecation again) so marketers began to turn to incrementality experimentation.
You’ll notice that none of these methodologies are silver bullets; each have their own distinct advantages and disadvantages. The truth is that the best marketing teams leverage some combination (or all) of these 3 to guide their decision making because this can make up for individual weaknesses. Incrementality is simply the latest in a long line of measurement methods that marketers are using to try and gain an edge. Although the promise of finding causal relationships is tantalizing, the challenge of setting up experiments correctly keeps many companies from effectively using incrementality. If your audiences somehow overlap, your segment sizes are off, or a number of other possibilities somehow skew your results, you’re using incorrect data to make very impactful decisions (potentially for the worse).
If you want to learn more about the MTA, MMM and how they compare to incrementality, we wrote this awesome deep dive that goes into much more depth on what MTA and MMM are, and also provides a detailed comparison of the three. Click here to check that out.
Think the holiday season and peak shopping time is over after Christmas? Think again. You know we're all about arbitrage here at Northbeam.
If you’re a savvy advertiser, you’re probably already familiar with Q5 (the “hidden” quarter) and have been actively squeezing more performance "juice" out of the proverbial holiday promotional season lemon. In fact, both Meta and TikTok are vocal about encouraging more brands to increase spend in Q5 to capitalize on opportunities.
The good news is, even if you’ve never heard of Q5, it’s not too late to take advantage of this unique selling time. In this guide, we’ll give you our take on Q5, why you should care about it, and how you can make the best use of Q5 with your campaigns.
What is Q5?
Ask a couple of marketers what Q5 is and you’ll likely get slightly different responses. At Northbeam, our definition of Q5 is the period from late December to early-to-mid January. The fifth quarter is that hazy period between Christmas and the proper start of the New Year where the days blend together as people relax and unwind with family and loved ones. Most brands are replenishing BFCM investments and reducing campaign budgets across the board with (at best) only top performers active.
This is when most marketers take their vacations after the absolute gauntlet of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas sales. While the competition is taking a break before Q1, this relatively quiet time in the year can help propel you past the competition if you’re well prepared.
Why is Q5 important?
It can seem counterintuitive to keep spending during “down” time, but there are several good reasons why brands should consider Q5 as part of the holiday season:
Since most marketers will be slowing down after Christmas, there’s naturally going to be less competition in ad auctions.
This not only means fewer promotions and other advertisers to compete against, but also considerably lower ad costs vs. peak holiday CPMs. Adweek estimates that Meta CPMs were 28% lower during Q5 YoY, with ad fees in the last week of December at least 12% cheaper than previous weeks.
This is a great way to get the most bang for your buck, or get an even larger share of voice with the same amount of spend.
Engagement on social media and digital devices remains high as people relax and spend time at home during the holidays.
Not only are people using their devices to disconnect more, but new devices that were gifted are also coming online. Usage peaks around Christmas and stays elevated all the way through early January for these reasons.
According to Snapchat, although engagement is highest on Christmas day, a surge of app downloads follow. 81% of TikTok users expect to spend the same amount of time or more on the app in Q5, and during the week after Christmas, TikTok views actually increased +24% vs the Q4 average. This means that even though ad costs are lower, customer engagement is in the same ballpark as more expensive weeks.
Shopping intent also remains high after peak holiday sales are over.
Survey data shows that 92% of customers intend to keep shopping into Q5 as people exchange and return unwanted gifts for something they actually want. According to the National Retail Foundation, 70% of customers this year expect to shop in the week after Christmas, driven by continuing sales.
Gift cards are often used during this time to take advantage of ongoing sales, which explains why shopping behavior during Q5 shifts from gifting to more personal buying (which is better aligned with most brand messaging) as we approach New Years resolutions season.
In summary, not only is there less noise in the market from other ads and sales, but you’ll also enjoy high customer engagement and shopping intent at a healthy discount. Not a bad time to think about efficient customer acquisition.
Take advantage of Q5 with these strategies
Because of the dynamic of lower CPMs with high engagement, there’s an opportunity to get a discount on ads and unlock some incremental revenue at the same time. Let’s discuss a few scenarios that are perfect for Q5.
People begin shifting from buying gifts to purchasing for themselves after Christmas and as we approach New Years.
We start thinking about resolutions and unsurprisingly “New Year New Me” brands generally see an uptick in conversions and performance at this time. If your brand is in the health & wellness, fitness, financial management, or other similar spaces tied to New Years Resolutions, you’re missing out by not taking advantage of cheaper ad fees at a time when people are actively looking for your products.
We’re advising our "New Year New Me" clients to double down and aggressively pursue revenue goals this Q5; you should, too.
Seasonally relevant and consumable stock-up brands also do well during this time.
Winter clothing & accessories, ski & snowboard, beauty & skincare are just some examples of verticals that should seriously consider ramping up or at least extending spend through early-to-mid January. One of our best clients is a beauty brand powerhouse that has consistently made smart choices around their Q5 media mix and budget allocation.
In 2022, they actually spent 6% more in Q5 than the prior month, but efficiency metrics like ROAS (+2%) and CPA (-5%) were healthy due to high device usage and shopping intent. Best of all, revenue from Q5 was +8% higher vs. the traditional Q4 period which included Black Friday/Cyber Monday.
Q5 is a great time to run awareness plays and retargeting campaigns because A/B testing will cost even less than usual.
Get a leg up on Q1 by using this period to start on your learning agenda to test creative, audiences, channels, copy, and so on. Ideally you’d want to have a large diversity of creative running not only to narrow down on themes that work, but also to start building up your pipeline for the rest of the year.
Brands can use this time to begin filling the top of their funnels for 2024 while their competition is asleep at the wheel, especially smaller brands who have the rare opportunity to outbid larger advertisers (those brands will largely have exhausted spend by this point and are in planning mode for next year). Be bold when others are fearful.
Finally, Q5 is perfect for liquidating excess inventory or older SKUs.
We’d advise switching up the offer from your previous holiday promos and launching new creative to avoid customer fatigue. Make it clear this is a sale specifically for Q5 that will only run for a limited time to generate a sense of urgency.
How leading brands use Northbeam to tackle Q5
We surveyed our power customers on the ways they use Northbeam in Q5. Here are a few of our favorites:
A big advantage of having infinite lookback windows is that customers acquired in Q5 will stay in your funnel even if their purchase intent comes later.
Unlike most other attribution solutions that have a limited lookback window (usually 7 days), Northbeam allows you to target all of the people in your pipeline regardless of when conversion actually happens. For example, let’s say your client is a swimsuit and summer essentials brand who traditionally has ignored Q5 in their media plan.
Using Northbeam, cohorts recruited or acquired during Q5 at a lower cost thanks to decreased CPMs can be integrated into the funnel once the high-selling season starts in spring and summer. With a shorter attribution window, those Q5 customers would get lost in the shuffle even if they were likely to convert down the line. Make sure you don’t miss out on revenue with shaky attribution modeling.
Using the Customer LTV tab, you can track the average value of customers acquired during Q5 vs BFCM or any other time in the year. Let your own data tell you whether Q5 is a good time to increase spend or not.
Although Q5 offers lower CPMs, this can easily be offset with worse efficiency or conversion rates. To carefully monitor and manage your ROI, you need a single source of truth that you can rely on to make budget allocation decisions.
What’s the good of doubling down on a campaign if your data is faulty and you weren’t investing in a winner to begin with?
Top brands including The Ridge, Hexclad, and Jones Road Beauty trust Northbeam’s expertise in attribution and customer journey analysis to capitalize and get even more value out of Q5 because they trust the accuracy and integrity of the data and modeling.
Bonus: Northbeam is a retention tool and value add for marketing agencies
With platform-reported data and GA4, Digital Marketing Agency partners often view Q5 as the season of churn as clients invest a majority of their available budget into BFCM and the holiday season before going dark. Northbeam can help agencies with retention efforts by building on the momentum from Q5 and applying learnings into their larger 2024 strategy.
We asked a few of our best partners on how they’re advising clients on Q5:
Sol8: “Take advantage of the low CPMs on the Google TV network, optimizing for reach targeted to TB screens. At a time where there is a large amount of time off for families, you can leverage all the Google Ads audience targeting to multiply your viewership to multiple people in a household. The best part? It’s 81% cheaper than the CPMs on Hulu.”
Blaze Digital: “Q5 is the time to push as ad costs plummet after the Christmas holiday. Really effective promotions tend to be 'end of year clear out sale.' This is also a big time to push the use of gift cards.”
Embrace E-Commerce: "From an Amazon marketing perspective, leverage the Q5 period as a strategic opportunity that extends beyond low CPMs and CPCs. Its about comprehensive preparation and seizing a competitive advantage over other brands."
So should your brand or clients keep some cash on the sidelines for Q5 this year? If any of the above strategies or tactics resonate with you, reach out to us and we'll give you our take on whether or not it makes sense for your marketing team.
The marketing measurement playbook is being rewritten.
As third-party cookies vanish and privacy regulations tighten, the traditional deterministic tracking methods that once gave marketers clarity are becoming less reliable.
Identifiers are disappearing, cross-device journeys are harder to stitch together, and walled gardens are closing off visibility.
That doesn’t mean measurement is dead: it means marketers need new tools.
Enter probabilistic attribution vs deterministic attribution: two complementary approaches that, when used together, provide a clear path forward in the cookieless future of marketing measurement.
Deterministic models give precision where user data is available, while probabilistic models fill the inevitable gaps with statistically reliable insights.
Blending the two creates a hybrid attribution strategy that balances accuracy with coverage, helping brands continue to measure performance and allocate budgets confidently.
Defining Deterministic and Probabilistic Attribution
Both deterministic and probabilistic attribution models aim to answer the same question: which marketing touchpoints deserve credit for a conversion?
But they approach it in very different ways:
Deterministic Attribution
Deterministic attribution relies on exact matches between a user’s actions and their identity, often through login credentials, user IDs, or hashed email addresses.
It gives you pixel-level precision: if a logged-in customer clicks an ad and makes a purchase, you can confidently connect the dots.
Strengths:
Highly accurate, especially when backed by robust first-party data like CRM integrations or loyalty programs.
Limitations:
As third-party cookies vanish and privacy regulations tighten, deterministic tracking loses visibility outside of walled gardens and logged-in environments.
Data gaps widen when identifiers aren’t available.
Probabilistic Attribution
Probabilistic attribution takes a different route.
Instead of requiring a perfect identifier, it uses statistical modeling and machine learning to infer the most likely conversion path.
Signals such as device type, location, time of day, and referrer can be combined to estimate user journeys with a high degree of confidence.
Strengths:
Provides coverage when deterministic data isn’t available, bridges fragmented journeys across devices and channels.
Adapts well to privacy-first environments.
Limitations:
While sophisticated, it’s not a 100% exact match.
Results are modeled probabilities, not certainties.
In short, deterministic attribution models provide precision, while probabilistic attribution provides coverage.
Why Both Deterministic and Probabilistic Approaches Are Vital Today
As third-party cookies disappear and privacy regulations tighten, marketers can no longer rely on a single attribution method.
Deterministic tracking, once the gold standard, is now limited by shrinking visibility outside of logged-in environments and walled gardens like Facebook or TikTok.
Even with strong first-party data, deterministic models can only capture part of the story, leaving blind spots in the customer journey.
This is where probabilistic attribution becomes essential.
By modeling likely paths with aggregate-level signals, probabilistic methods fill in the missing context:
Estimating conversions where IDs aren’t available.
Reconstructing fragmented, cross-device journeys.
Extending visibility into channels where deterministic tracking breaks down.
Combine probabilistic and deterministic approaches to get the best of both worlds:
Deterministic provides precision where identifiers exist.
Probabilistic provides coverage where they don’t.
The result is a more complete, privacy-compliant measurement framework.
Instead of choosing one approach, forward-thinking marketers blend the two: using deterministic attribution models as the anchor for accuracy, and probabilistic attribution to ensure no piece of the funnel goes unseen.
When to Use Deterministic vs Probabilistic Approaches
Each model shines in different contexts, and together, they create a stronger foundation for marketing measurement.
When to Use a Deterministic Approach
Deterministic models are most effective when you have reliable identifiers and consented data.
Common scenarios include:
Logged-in users on apps or websites (e.g., loyalty members, subscribers).
CRM or CDP integrations that tie ad interactions directly to customer profiles.
Environments where cookies or hashed identifiers remain accessible.
In these cases, deterministic attribution models ensure high-confidence matches between ad exposure and conversion, making it ideal for measuring retention campaigns, subscription funnels, or personalized remarketing.
When to Use a Probabilistic Approach
Probabilistic models excel when deterministic tracking breaks down. They’re particularly valuable in situations such as:
Tracking disruptions: Cookie loss, ad blockers, or iOS privacy updates.
Cross-device journeys: Customers moving between mobile, desktop, and connected TV.
Regulatory environments: Where consent is limited or explicit IDs can’t be stored.
Here, probabilistic modeling allows marketers to maintain visibility into conversion paths without overstepping privacy boundaries.
Why Blending is the Smartest Approach
The strongest attribution strategies use deterministic data as the anchor for accuracy, then layer probabilistic models on top to fill in the gaps.
This hybrid mindset ensures both confidence and coverage, creating a resilient measurement system in a world of cookieless attribution.
Northbeam’s Hybrid Attribution Capabilities
While most attribution frameworks lean heavily on one method or the other, Northbeam is designed from the ground up to integrate both deterministic and probabilistic attribution.
This hybrid approach gives marketers precision where identifiers are available and reliable insights where data would otherwise disappear.
Clicks + Deterministic Views (C+DV)
One standout capability is Northbeam’s CDV model, which blends click data with view-through signals.
Instead of relying solely on last-click or impression-based rules, C+DV merges these inputs into a unified dataset that can confirm when an ad truly influenced a conversion.
For example, on platforms like TikTok and Snapchat, where many conversions happen after a view rather than a click, C+DV enables marketers to measure real view-through impact without inflating results.
This closes a major gap left by traditional deterministic tracking, which often undercounts conversions when users don’t interact directly with an ad.
Probabilistic Modeling for the Cookieless Attribution Era
Alongside deterministic anchors like CDV, Northbeam applies probabilistic attribution models to infer the likely paths of anonymous or cross-device users.
By using aggregate-level signals, these models expand coverage while maintaining compliance with privacy regulations.
The Hybrid Advantage
By combining deterministic insights with the advantages of probabilistic attribution, Northbeam solves the “real-funnel tracking” challenge:
Coverage: Probabilistic models ensure visibility across fragmented, cookieless attribution environments.
Confidence: The hybrid view enables marketers to make high-stakes budget decisions with both accuracy and breadth.
This dual-layered system means that even as cookies vanish, Northbeam customers retain a clear, data-backed picture of performance from impression to conversion.
Implementation Guide
Understanding the theory is one thing; implementing it in your day-to-day measurement strategy is another.
Here’s a step-by-step guide for marketers who want future-proof attribution strategies for privacy-first environments:
1. Audit Your Current Tracking Setup
Begin by identifying gaps in your existing measurement framework.
Where are cookies or platform-level limitations creating blind spots? Which channels are you over- or under-counting due to incomplete attribution?
2. Strengthen Your First-Party Data Capture
Prioritize collecting and organizing consented, first-party data wherever possible.
Tactics include encouraging account creation, building loyalty programs, and syncing CRM/CDP systems.
This data forms the backbone of deterministic attribution.
3. Anchor Reporting with Deterministic Models
Use deterministic attribution wherever you have reliable identifiers, such as logged-in users or CRM-connected campaigns.
This provides a high-confidence foundation for reporting.
4. Layer in Probabilistic Models to Fill the Gaps
For channels or journeys where identifiers aren’t available, supplement with probabilistic attribution models.
This ensures you don’t lose visibility into anonymous, cross-device, or walled garden conversions.
5. Continuously Validate and Optimize
Hybrid attribution isn’t a “set it and forget it” process.
Regularly compare deterministic and probabilistic outcomes, run lift tests, and refine models as your data environment evolves.
Following these steps helps you build a measurement system that is both resilient and adaptable, balancing accuracy with the flexibility to handle data disruptions.
The Cookieless Future of Marketing Measurement
As cookies disappear and privacy restrictions intensify, no single attribution method can provide the complete picture.
Deterministic attribution offers the precision marketers need when identifiers are available, while probabilistic attribution models ensure coverage where deterministic models fall short.
Relying on just one leaves gaps; blending the two creates a measurement strategy that is both accurate and resilient.
The result is clear visibility into performance, confident budget allocation, and the ability to keep growing with bullet-proof attribution strategies in privacy-first environments.
Marketers who embrace this hybrid approach today will be best positioned to adapt, compete, and win in tomorrow’s cookieless landscape.
I don’t know about you, but every year I resolve to cut sugar out of my diet only to find myself ordering gourmet cookies online by early February (at the latest). This year I’ll have no choice: Google recently confirmed their plan to completely deprecate third-party cookies by the second half of 2024 is on track.
Beginning in Q1, 1% of Chrome users will migrate to the new Privacy Sandbox ecosystem and have third-party cookies disabled. Google says this will give developers and advertisers enough time to learn the new environment and prepare for a cookieless future that will dramatically alter the internet landscape.
So fellow practitioners, what do we make of this? Is this the end of digital marketing as we know it, or the continuation of a trend in privacy concerns that Apple accelerated with the release of iOS14?
And more importantly: how is third-party cookie deprecation going to affect Northbeam data?Short answer: it won't.
What is "Cookie Deprecation?"
If this is the first time you’ve heard about Cookie Deprecation, let’s briefly discuss what cookies are and why they’re important for digital marketing.
Cookies 101: Cookies are small text files that help identify individual users on the web. There are cookies on every website you visit which are then stored on your computer’s web browser. They were first introduced in 1994 to allow people shopping online to store items in a virtual shopping cart; a functionality that we now take for granted as eCommerce marketers.
These are first-party cookies: cookies that belong to the owner of the website to help improve the user experience and collect anaytical information on customer behavior. Since they belong to the owner, these cookies are not at risk of being disabled by Google or any other browser provider.
Third-Party Cookies function the same as a FPC, but belong to someone else who mainly uses the cookie to track activity across the web for online advertising. These tracking (and problematic for privacy) cookies facilitate much of modern marketing by allowing external parties to create user profiles and target ads based on their individual behavior.
So why are they being banned? Shortly after their introduction, advertisers began using them to track user data including interests, demographics, location, often without the consent of everyday consumers. Shady practices such as “zombie” cookies that were difficult to delete eventually led to increased regulation such as the now ubiquitous consent pop-ups.
However, it was the ad tech giants who were the biggest culprits as evidenced by the Cambridge Analytica incident and subsequent repeated revelations of further violations.
In the mid- 2010s, data privacy gained more momentum as popular browsers including Apple’s Safari and Mozilla Firefox started taking these concerns more seriously and curbed the use of third-party cookies before eventually banning them altogether. Google’s move is notable however because 63% of global web traffic flows through Chrome.
Third-party cookies were already unreliable before, but the move to Privacy Sandbox will be their final death knell.
What are the implications?
Although we’ve been preparing for a cookieless future for a while, many marketers still rely on third-party cookies to understand consumer behavior such as purchases, interests, affinities, and browsing behavior. Insider reports that 78% of marketers still use cookies for ad buys, meaning most of us are in for a rude awakening very soon.
Let’s explore the effects of disabling third-party cookies on various platforms and strategies.
User tracking and targeting will be significantly hampered so any campaigns that rely on third-party cookies will see a drop in performance. Certain tactics such as behavioral targeting, retargeting (incl. cross-device tracking), and audience extension will all be dramatically less reliable once Chrome completely disables third-party cookies.
User profiles won’t be as detailed so targeting will lose some personalization, and the ability to build lookalike audiences with third-party data will no longer be possible. Frequency capping will also be affected due to the inability to accurately determine how many times an ad has been served to a specific profile. This only emphasizes the importance of leaning into a first-party data strategy as quickly as possible.
The big ad tech platforms rely on a mix of first and third-party cookies to target and serve ads. Post iOS14.5, marketers have already seen a drop in the efficacy of campaigns and precision in targeting, leading to fewer dollars being spent in social and digital. Facebook estimated a $10B loss in revenue in 2022 from Apple’s privacy changes; imagine how much more they stand to lose once Google phases out third-party cookies altogether.
Programmatic advertising may also see a drop in performance due to auctions relying heavily on targeting data. Expect these platforms to respond with more first-party products that rely on walled garden data (probably with a price premium) to keep your ad dollars in their ecosystem and circumvent some effects of cookie deprecation.
Measurement: Generally, multi-touch attribution is currently handled by a third-party cookie on a brand site associating a conversion event with an impression from third-party cookie on a publisher site. Without third-party cookies, marketers will need some sort of other identifier to attribute revenue to campaigns.
However there are already plenty of tools such as cohort analysis, segment analysis and media mix modeling (MMM) that can help you better understand performance without needing third-party cookies. In other environments such as CTV, cookies have never existed yet several analytical tools exist for attribution.
Probabilistic modeling and AI/ML are already speeding up this transition away from cookies; we think marketers will (as they always have) figure something out. Some even think attribution will significantly improve due to the high levels of bot activity in third-party data: a decline in fraudulent clicks and impressions should boost data integrity in general.
How will cookie deprecation affect Northbeam?
Short answer: it won't. We've run internal holdout tests where we've experimented with removing cookies from our modeling and 98% of our data was unaffected.
If you're using Northbeam for your ad attribution, cookie deprecation will not affect your reporting.
In our (humble) opinion, a cookieless future is another reason for marketers to move from targeting-led strategies to creative-led strategies. We’ve been preparing for the cancellation of third-party cookies since the beginning of Northbeam: many of our strategies post iOS14.5 were created to emphasize first-party data because we knew eventually that would be the only data we could rely on.
"Years ago, when we were starting Northbeam, we knew this was coming. Google's been telling us for years they were going to do away with cookies," said Austin Harrison, CEO and Co-founder of Northbeam. "So preparing for that future has been our mission. It's not just about cookies, it's about advertising more effectively in a more privacy-minded era. That's what we're about."
First and foremost, we don’t rely exclusively on third-party cookies in our attribution modeling.The core of Northbeam's MTA tracking solution uses a first-party cookie from your website, which is exempt from Google's third-party cookie deprecation plans.
We leverage only first-party data to resolve customer identities and expect to see minimal if any effect for our customers and clients because Chrome’s upcoming changes will not affect our pixel’s functionality. The first-party data we create has so many touchpoints that third-party cookies are just a tiny drop in the bucket of our overall attribution models.
Our collection and user stitching heuristics are designed for a cookieless future. It’s the reason why our customers (such as The Ridge) trusted us for their attribution needs: Northbeam is a future-proof solution in your marketing stack that will evolve to handle the changing environment.
That’s why we introduced MMM+ and are continuing to push out new features and updates. The Google announcement is mostly significant because of the scale of web traffic handled rather than the actual changes being implemented.
Although Northbeam brands won’t be affected by Google’s cookie ban, will yours? Reach out to us, we’re always happy to give you our take.
Meta’s sensitivity category restrictions can disrupt how marketers track and optimize their campaigns.
By assigning certain industries to “sensitive” categories, Meta now limits access to lower-funnel events and restricts how much conversion data can be shared. That means fewer optimization levers, less visibility into what’s driving sales, and more risk of wasted ad spend.
In this guide, we’ll break down what the Meta sensitivity category restrictions are, which industries are most affected, and why these changes matter for ecommerce.
More importantly, we’ll share practical strategies for adapting to these rules, and show how tools like Northbeam can help you maintain clarity and performance even when platform signals are cut off.
What Are the Meta Sensitivity Category Restrictions?
Meta has a sensitivity category system that classifies certain industries as “restricted.”
When a brand falls into one of these categories, Meta limits how much tracking and optimization data it can access through tools like the Pixel and Conversions API (CAPI).
Not all restrictions are the same.
Some categories face full restrictions, which remove the ability to optimize campaigns toward key lower-funnel events like purchases.
Others receive partial restrictions, where you can still run campaigns but may lose access to certain targeting options or event types (for example, optimizing for “Add to Cart” but not for “Purchase”).
In short, these rules change how advertisers in sensitive verticals can track, measure, and optimize performance, forcing them to adapt their strategy and measurement approach.
Which Industries Are Impacted?
Not every advertiser feels the effects of the Meta sensitivity category restrictions in the same way. The restrictions are focused on industries deemed more sensitive due to Meta’s privacy restrictions in ecommerce as well as ethical and regulatory concerns.
Meta’s sensitive categories include:
Health & Wellness: especially products tied to specific conditions or treatments, which raise privacy considerations.
Financial Services: from credit cards to investment platforms, where regulations around targeting are already strict.
Sexual Wellness: products in this space are often flagged as sensitive content.
Gambling and Alcohol: heavily regulated industries where ad targeting is tightly controlled.
In addition, lifestyle brands with adjacent offerings (like supplements, skincare, or certain subscription services) may find themselves flagged under Meta’s sensitive categories even if they don’t directly sell restricted products.
The challenge doesn’t stop there.
Misclassification risk is real: if Meta assigns your brand to a restricted category by mistake, you could lose access to critical optimization events, misreport campaign performance, or waste budget targeting the wrong audience.
This makes it essential for advertisers to regularly monitor their category status and act quickly if misclassified as one of Meta’s sensitive categories.
Why This Matters for Ecommerce
For ecommerce advertisers, the Meta sensitivity category restrictions aren’t just a policy change, they represent a fundamental disruption to performance visibility.
Signal Loss
When Meta restricts lower-funnel events like purchases, advertisers lose the ability to clearly attribute sales or feed back accurate data into Meta’s optimization engine.
That means the algorithm has less context to find high-value customers.
Budget Waste
With less precise targeting and optimization, brands risk spending more to reach less qualified audiences, driving up customer acquisition costs.
Inaccurate Reporting
If a campaign is misclassified, performance data may underrepresent conversions or misstate return on ad spend, making it harder to evaluate channel efficiency.
Bigger Than iOS 14?
Many advertisers compare these Meta ad restrictions in 2025 to Apple’s iOS 14 privacy updates, which cut off large portions of signal from Meta campaigns.
But sensitivity restrictions can hit even harder, removing optimization paths altogether rather than simply limiting attribution windows.
In short, the new rules could have direct bottom-line consequences if brands don’t proactively adjust how they measure and optimize campaigns.
The good news: there are clear steps brands can take to adapt, and even find new opportunities in the process.
How to Adapt Your Strategy
Meta’s sensitivity restrictions don’t have to mean a performance collapse. The key is adjusting your playbook to maintain visibility, efficiency, and control.
Here are five steps ecommerce brands can take right now:
1. Audit & Appeal Category Assignments
Start by checking your account’s classification in Meta Events Manager.
If you’ve been placed into a sensitive category incorrectly, you can submit an appeal with supporting documentation.
Staying on top of this ensures you don’t lose optimization capabilities due to an error in Meta’s system.
2. Adjust Optimization Goals
If full purchase optimization is no longer available, shift to higher-funnel events like ViewContent, Landing Page Views, or Add to Cart.
While these aren’t as close to revenue, they still provide the algorithm with valuable signals to identify interested users and keep campaigns moving forward.
3. Diversify Channels
Avoid over-reliance on Meta by building a more balanced channel mix.
Consider open-web campaigns, search ads, retail media networks, or influencer partnerships.
Spreading spend across multiple platforms not only reduces risk but also helps uncover new sources of incremental growth.
4. Strengthen First-Party Data
Invest in building durable, owned audiences through email, SMS, and CRM systems.
These first-party data assets are immune to platform restrictions and can be used to power both remarketing campaigns and lookalike audiences with greater control.
5. Use Third-Party Attribution & MMM
When platform signals are restricted, third-party solutions like Northbeam provide a unified view of performance.
By combining modeled conversions, cross-channel insights, and methodologies like incrementality testing and media mix modeling (MMM), you can maintain budget efficiency and accurately measure channel lift, even without full Meta data.
Northbeam’s Role in Navigating Restrictions
When platform signals break down, analytics clarity becomes more important than ever. That’s where Northbeam comes in.
Northbeam provides advanced attribution and measurement tools designed to connect fragmented platform data into a unified, accurate view of performance.
Even when Meta limits purchase optimization or pixel events, Northbeam’s modeling capabilities allow brands to track conversions with confidence.
Walled garden advertising has long dominated the digital advertising ecosystem, giving marketers access to vast audiences and powerful targeting capabilities.
But the cracks are starting to show.
As costs rise and transparency shrinks, brands are increasingly frustrated by the data silos in walled gardens that make it difficult to measure performance across platforms.
Limited visibility, higher CPMs, and attribution blind spots are leaving marketers questioning whether the trade-offs are worth it.
In this guide, we’ll cover the walled garden definition, explain why its dominance is shifting, and share strategies for thriving in a future that blends both closed platforms and the open web.
What Is a Walled Garden?
A walled garden in advertising refers to a closed ecosystem where a single platform controls nearly every aspect of the advertising experience: from data access and audience targeting to ad inventory and reporting.
Google, Meta, and Amazon are the most recognizable examples today, each offering vast user bases and tightly integrated ad tools.
The walled garden definition itself comes from the telecom industry of the 1990s, when companies like AOL or early mobile carriers created “closed” environments that kept users inside their own networks.
While the internet eventually opened up, the same model re-emerged in ad tech: large platforms built self-contained systems that give marketers access to powerful audiences but restrict what happens outside their walls.
Put simply, walled gardens in ad tech offer scale and precision, but the trade-off is limited transparency and minimal control for advertisers.
Why Walled Gardens Rose to Power
Walled gardens didn’t dominate digital advertising by accident. They offered a combination of scale, precision, and ease that marketers found hard to resist.
Advantages of a walled garden in advertising include:
Scale: Billions of active users across Google, Meta, and Amazon mean advertisers can reach massive audiences without leaving a single platform.
Advanced targeting: Rich first-party data enables hyper-specific targeting based on demographics, interests, and behaviors.
Integrated tools: From campaign management to creative optimization, walled gardens bundle everything in one place.
User-rich environments: Platforms keep users highly engaged, giving advertisers more opportunities to connect.
For advertisers, these features translated into simplicity and performance.
Instead of juggling multiple platforms or struggling with fragmented data, brands could log into one dashboard, run campaigns, and quickly see results.
The promise of reach plus measurable ROI helped cement walled gardens as the default advertising choice for much of the past decade.
The Challenges of Walled Gardens in Marketing
But for all their benefits, walled gardens come with significant drawbacks that are becoming harder for marketers to ignore.
Limited transparency: Platforms restrict access to granular reporting and limit data export, making it difficult to fully validate performance through walled garden data restrictions.
Attribution gaps: Because data doesn’t leave the ecosystem, advertisers can’t see the complete customer journey across multiple platforms.
Rising costs: As competition intensifies, CPMs climb, and brands have little leverage to negotiate better terms.
Competitive silos: Advertisers end up competing for the same audiences inside the same closed environments, driving up costs further.
The Pros and Cons of Walled Gardens
To better understand why walled gardens are both attractive and problematic, it helps to weigh their benefits against their limitations.
The same features that once made them indispensable — scale, targeting, and simplicity — now come with trade-offs in cost, transparency, and control.
Closed systems may still deliver strong short-term results, but these challenges leave many marketers searching for more open, transparent alternatives to walled gardens.
Moving Beyond Walled Gardens
The dominance of walled gardens is no longer absolute. Across the industry, there’s growing momentum toward a more open and interoperable advertising ecosystem.
Push for Interoperability
As data silos become more frustrating for marketers, the industry is pushing for interoperability: the ability to connect and analyze data across multiple platforms.
By stitching together fragmented insights, advertisers gain a more holistic view of performance and can make smarter budget decisions.
This shift is powered by new analytics tools and cross-platform integrations designed to break down barriers that walled gardens created.
Rise of Retail Media and Programmatic Exchanges
Retail media networks and programmatic open exchanges are emerging as powerful alternatives to walled gardens like Google and Meta.
Retailers like Walmart and Target are monetizing their shopper data, offering highly targeted ad opportunities with built-in purchase intent.
At the same time, programmatic exchanges provide transparency and flexibility, allowing brands to diversify spend beyond the big three platforms.
Regulatory Pressure
Governments and regulators are increasingly focused on consumer privacy, data transparency, and portability.
Frameworks like GDPR and CCPA, along with proposed legislation worldwide, push back against the opacity of walled gardens.
These pressures are forcing ad platforms to adapt, creating openings for more transparent and accountable advertising models.
Evolving Marketer Needs
Modern marketers can no longer rely on a single platform to measure success.
Instead, they need holistic measurement across channels that captures how every touchpoint — from search and social to email and retail media — contributes to the customer journey.
As expectations shift, advertisers are demanding tools that deliver cross-platform visibility and actionable insights.
Taken together, these shifts signal a clear reality: marketers can no longer rely on walled gardens alone.
To succeed in this new landscape, they need to start moving beyond walled gardens and developing strategies that blend the scale of closed platforms with the transparency and flexibility of the open web.
How Marketers Can Thrive Beyond Walled Gardens
The end of walled garden dominance doesn’t mean marketers are left without powerful tools. It simply requires a smarter, more connected approach.
By blending closed-platform advantages with open-web opportunities, brands can build resilience and long-term growth.
Embrace Cross-Platform Measurement
The first step to breaking free from walled garden limitations is to unify performance data across channels.
Cross-platform measurement allows marketers to see how campaigns on Google, Meta, Amazon, and the open web interact to drive conversions, rather than viewing each in isolation.
With a consolidated perspective, advertisers can optimize spend with confidence.
Collecting and organizing customer data directly — through email lists, loyalty programs, or on-site behavior — provides independence from platform restrictions.
A strong first-party foundation ensures that brands maintain control and can activate insights wherever they choose to advertise.
Leverage Incrementality Testing and MMM
Relying solely on platform-reported attribution risks overstating impact.
Incrementality testing and media mix modeling (MMM) offer alternative ways to measure true lift across campaigns.
By layering these approaches, marketers can validate whether spend is actually driving outcomes, enabling smarter budget reallocation across both closed and open ecosystems.
Adopt Integrated Tech Solutions
Finally, thriving in a fragmented landscape requires technology that connects the dots.
Tools like Northbeam integrate walled garden performance with open-web data, giving marketers a single source of truth.
This unified view not only improves transparency but also makes it easier to allocate budgets dynamically based on what’s really working.
In short, success beyond walled gardens in ad tech comes down to balance: using the scale of closed ecosystems while unlocking the transparency and flexibility of open web advertising.
Northbeam’s Role in the Open Measurement Future
Navigating the shift beyond walled gardens requires more than just strategy; it demands the right technology.
Northbeam delivers industry-leading analytics that connect performance data from both walled gardens and the open web.
Instead of relying on platform-reported metrics in isolation, brands can access a single, unified view that reveals the full customer journey across channels.
This makes it possible to see what’s truly driving revenue, and where budget can be better allocated.
Northbeam enables marketers to understand the complete impact of their campaigns by delivering industry-leading analytics and privacy-first design
Equally important, Northbeam’s platform is built with a privacy-first design. Marketers gain actionable, transparent insights without sacrificing compliance or user trust.
By balancing precision with accountability, Northbeam empowers brands to make decisions with confidence in a post-walled-garden world.
Conclusion
Walled gardens have shaped the past decade of digital advertising, offering scale, targeting, and efficiency that made them nearly irresistible. But as costs rise and transparency erodes, their limitations are becoming impossible to ignore. The future of advertising won’t be about choosing between closed platforms and the open web — it will be about finding the right balance between the two.
Marketers who embrace cross-platform measurement, invest in first-party data, and adopt advanced testing methodologies will be better positioned to thrive in this evolving landscape. Technology partners like Northbeam make this possible, providing a unified view of performance across both walled gardens and open ecosystems while upholding privacy and trust.
Ultimately, the winners in the post-walled-garden era will be the brands that prioritize transparency, flexibility, and accountability — leveraging the best of both worlds to drive sustainable growth.
Sky-high expectations combined with post-pandemic economic austerity measures and the ever-changing marketing landscape have led to the ousting of many a CMO.
The average tenure of a CMO in 2021 and 2022 was 40 months, the lowest it's been in a decade, and less than half the average tenure of a CEO, which is 85 months.
FastCompany summarizes the curse placed on the modern CMO:
“CMOs enter an organization that they perhaps don’t fully understand, and before they have the chance to find their footing, are tasked with meeting ambitious deadlines or targets. They are, in essence, set up to fail. And so, after a couple of years, they leave, only for the cycle to restart.”
You don't have to fall into this trap. Whether you're a CMO (or aspiring to be) there are ways to secure both your position and the success of your team.
At Northbeam, we work with hundreds of marketing leaders. We've seen what behaviors separate high-performing CMOs from those at-risk.
We spoke with Bryan Bumgardner, Director of Growth Marketing at Northbeam and Luca Taormina, Sr. Partner Manager at Northbeam to put together 5 tactical tips on how to do a radically excellent job as a CMO.
1. Understand the modern marketing landscape
The past twenty years have seen a veritable explosion of new marketing channels, strategies, and perspectives. An old playbook — even a two-year-old playbook — simply won’t work anymore. CMOs that bring the same strategy from one company to another are bound to come up against issues.
In November 2007, Facebook enabled brands to serve targeted ads to their potential customers, completely changing the marketing game and giving rise to true performance marketing.
In April 2021, Apple launched the iOS 14.5 update and drastically reduced the ability to track individual parameters, kneecapping an entire generation of growth marketers who were used to the "old way."
The landscape threatens to shift again as Google completely deprecates cookies this year. It’s difficult to keep up.
“We’re sitting in this really awkward time in which those media buyers-turned-CMOs that don’t have pre-2007 experience — suddenly the tool they were using is no longer as actionable as it once was,” said Luca.
Today’s CMO has to espouse a creative vision for the brand, while being a technologist skilled with data, while also having a strong sense of the business strategy. A unicorn, basically.
“We’re shifting towards this play with Apple and Google’s privacy updates where instead of being able to target people perfectly with technical implementations, we need to be both more creative-driven or algorithm-driven,” Bryan said.
"Plus you need to be more business-savvy than ever. Marketers are basically MBAs now."
“Talented CMOs truly understand this combination of how creative work can impact analytics and data and vice versa, and how to use both of them to your benefit,” Luca said.
“So it’s exciting; we’re filtering out the wannabes and the imitators.”
2. Embed yourself across teams
Why are COOs often called into take over for exiled CMOs? Because COOs have a bird’s-eye view of the entire business. They understand the product strategy. They understand the sales strategy. They understand the finances. And they know how marketing can fit into that equation in a complementary and holistic way.
Take note, CMOs: don’t stay in your lane. Get involved early and often in product and sales, customer success and finance, and any other teams that touch your company’s go-to-market flow.
A marketing department’s scope of control has never been broader. Consider this non-comprehensive list of marketing functions, and all the various departments at a company that could serve as potential stakeholders:
PR
Conferences
Webinars
Product marketing
Sales enablement
Partnerships
Website management
Newsletters and email campaigns
Experiential marketing
Community management
Analytics and reporting
Brand
Content
Communications
Research
SEO
Digital strategy
Social media
Analyst relations
Demand generation
CMOs are expected to either run these functions themselves, or manage people or agencies to do so. Community management requires a close understanding of the customer experience. Product marketing involves constant communication with engineering teams. Any paid channels necessitate an intimate relationship with finance’s priorities. The list goes on.
Only by having a clear picture of the entire company’s day-to-day and direction can you align your strategy fully with the overall vision — and get the information and resources you need to do your job!
Bonus: if you can manage some sway across departments, you can successfully avoid a situation where you are tasked with selling a sub-par product, or trying to grow the top of the funnel while the bottom is leaking severely. It’s a win-win, if you can swing it.
3. Become a master storyteller
Storytelling is what brings a brand to life and engenders life-long loyalty. But we’re not just talking about the stories we tell externally — CMOs have to become expert storytellers within their organization.
The truth is that most people who don’t do marketing have no idea what it is you do — not even (or especially not) your CEO or founder.
"There's a terrible refrain I've heard often after a senior marketing lead is ousted, " Bryan said. "People will say: 'What did that person even do here?' It's terrible to see a marketers true influence so misunderstood."
The vast majority (over 75%) of CEOs don’t have a background in marketing. Most come from operations, finance, or engineering. They don’t know the ins and outs of your role, how much budget you actually need, or what is a reasonable expectation or timeline for you to deliver on.
“Rarely do you see colleagues question any other discipline so openly,” said a CMO for Forbes. This results in a distinct and dangerous lack of trust.
Only 4% of CEOs say the CMO is the most trusted member of the leadership team — and only 32% trust them overall. That’s pretty dismal.
“I think this stems from a misunderstanding of marketing, a misunderstanding of what a CMO should be doing and the kind of results you can expect in 2024 and beyond,” Bryan said.
“In the event that a CMO is brought on when a founder doesn’t have a budget prepared, doesn’t have a staff ready, and they can’t speak to any of your questions particularly well, they’re not hiring a CMO: they’re hiring a co-founder.”
But often, they don’t recognize that they’re hiring a co-founder, an equal, and it’s your responsibility to make them understand that — your job may depend on it.
Storytelling can help build trust through affinity, persuasion, and pathos. Where data fails, storytelling wins, and vice versa. If you can’t make the case for your strategy through numbers, leverage your storytelling craft to educate the rest of your executive team about what you’re doing and why it matters.
"You aren't just storytelling for your customers, you're storytelling internally to your own team - make sure they understand what you're doing and why you're doing it," Bryan said.
4. Be ruthlessly realistic
“I think the absolute first conversation you need to have when you’re interviewing to be a DTC CMO is about budget,” Bryan said.
“Ask: how many people am I going to be permitted to hire? How many agencies can I hire? And do you agree that these people are required for us to succeed with the expectations that you’re setting for performance?”
“And if they don’t agree that you need an agency or two to handle your creative, your product marketing, whatever it may be, then you’re going to fail because they’re putting tire locks on your playbook before you’ve even started.”
CMOs are often met with a “just get it done” mentality from founders and CEOs. And while “just get it done” could be pulled off in other departments with sleepless nights and long-worked weekends, you can’t be expected to pull off miracles in the CMO role, where budget and resources are crucial — at least not with any regularity.
“The number one thing that is killing CMOs is the business shift into demanding ruthless profitability. Marketing is a huge line item on your P&L and one of the biggest variable costs. So when investors and boards are demanding profitability, they’re going to look at marketing first,” Bryan said.
Consider shifting your metrics towards harder numbers like cash, rather than engagement or marketing metrics that we know are relevant for growth but less understood by non-marketers.
“Profitability, cash in the bank, cash multipliers, and efficiency-focused metrics,” Bryan said. “Efficiency from day one is crucial. Don’t start with a massive budget; make your campaigns efficient from the start. Focus on capturing user data and building marketing around it.
"Look beyond traditional metrics and prioritize metrics that reflect your brand’s success and profitability. Brands are shifting their metrics constantly and what’s important today might not be tomorrow. Just try to focus on the things that matter and avoid falling into any unreasonable expectations.”
5. Innovate, innovate, innovate
Luca shared a quote from “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield:
“The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”
“I think that’s what a CMO should be: scared to death,” Luca said. “A CMO should not just be able to say ‘Hey, I hit a 5x return on ad spend this week’ and suddenly go around giving advice on how to succeed. A CMO really needs to understand that they’re dealing with a robust and changing audience.”
As a CMO, success has to be proven quarter after quarter, year after year. A successful campaign cannot be coasted on, but has to be replicated consistently, with continuous doses of ingenuity and innovation to keep it fresh.
“Your skills are your job security,” said Bryan. “Your playbook is your job security, it needs to constantly be evolving. You need to be able to put that into action and learn from it.”
Technology is your innovation superpower, too.
“Doing more with less is fundamentally a data problem. You need to have good data that explains the results of every little thing you do as a CMO. And it goes beyond having data to having accurate data that can tell the story you need to tell,” Bryan said.
“This is where Northbeam comes into play. You can draw a line from your activities to the revenue you’re generating, and take the guesswork out of attribution.”
If the first tip on this list is to have a thorough and up-to-date understanding of the ever-shifting marketing landscape, the last is to wield that knowledge as your superpower.
That knowledge will allow you to look ahead and innovate, to be creative and tactical and understand where the market, where your vertical, is going.
And here’s a bonus tip: enjoy the job. You can’t innovate without passion.
“You need to drink the tea,” said Luca. “You need to fall in love with the company and what it does. That company has to be the absolute savior.”
The implicit advice behind all of five of the tips above is to start with passion, and love for the art of marketing itself.
In the wide world of marketing analytics tools, Media Mix Modeling (MMM) stands out as particularly powerful. While multi-touch attribution (MTA) tools can go deep on the effect of individual touchpoints, MMM gives you thorough information about the performance of individual channels.
MMM goes beyond the day-to-day to give you a top-down look at performance so you can forecast, budget, and plan accordingly.
With more and more companies transitioning to MMM insights, the question arises: should you build a solution in house, or buy one off the shelf?
The Case for Building
Here are the three primary reasons you may want to build an MMM solution in-house:
Customization
Control
Cost
Customization
The main benefit of building an MMM solution yourself is that you can decide exactly what it does and how it does it. You have full control over the scope and specs of this tool, and you can change that scope whenever you need to as your needs change.
Of course, this requires resources, but some companies may find that those additional resources are worth it in order to prioritize their own product needs over the potential needs of other customers with an off-the-shelf solution.
Existing solutions may not always align perfectly with your needs. If that’s the case, building an MMM solution may be right for you.
Control
In a similar vein, building your own solution gives you complete control — not only over the scope of the product, but also over your company’s (or customers’) data.
If you’re in a heavily-regulated industry like healthcare or financial services, you may have more peace-of-mind knowing that you can control your security protocols from start to finish.
Building an in-house solution offers you complete control over proprietary or sensitive information, so you don’t have to worry about potential security issues down the line.
Cost
Building an MMM tool is more expensive up front (more on that below), but if you expect your data needs to stay the same over the years, you may very well unlock cost savings in the long-term.
Once your MMM solution is developed, the cost of maintaining and updating it is significantly lower, and it may prove to be more affordable than an enterprise-grade solution.
This is especially true for large enterprises that deal with massive amounts of data and have the deep in-house expertise to manage a tool like MMM themselves!
The Case for Buying
There are four main reasons that you may consider buying an MMM solution off the shelf:
Convenience
Expertise
Scalability
Resources
Convenience
Let’s be real, it’s way more convenient to buy a ready-made solution than to build one in-house. Instead of kicking off an expensive, long-term process that involves project management and maintenance, you can do your research, take a few demos, make a decision, and be up and running in a matter of weeks — not months or years.
Buying a solution allows you to skip the planning, development, and testing time and get straight to the actionable insights.
This convenience is hard to beat, especially for rapidly-growing teams that need to focus all their attention on the task at hand: building their business.
Expertise
If you don’t have the in-house expertise to build an MMM product and/or interpret its outputs, buying a solution may be the best option for you. Most MMM solutions come with not just the product itself but a dedicated team to help you get started and answer any questions you have along the way.
Consider how long it would take (and how much it would cost) to hire or train the expertise needed to build, maintain, and make the most of an MMM product.
With a team like Northbeam, you get tailored recommendations, strategic insights, industry best practices, and more included in the cost of doing business.
Scalability
As your business grows, so will your data and analytics needs. The MMM model that worked for you last year may not work for you this year, or next. There is serious maintenance to in-house MMM, and that maintenance will involve necessary updates and upgrades to keep up with your growing business needs — and the changing marketing landscape.
What if privacy measures restrict your existing sources of data? What if new platforms arise that you need to incorporate?
Off-the-shelf solutions are built to scale with you, and come with a dedicated team that can continue to tailor the MMM product as needed. If you foresee your business growing and changing in the coming years, a ready-made solution may make more sense for you.
Resources
We’ve touched on resources already throughout this guide, but let’s break it down further.
Here are some questions to ask yourself to assess whether your team is adequately staffed to build an MMM tool in-house:
When do you want to be up-and-running with an MMM solution?
How many people (engineers, project managers, marketing experts, data analysts, etc.) would you need to dedicate to this project in the building stage?
How many people (and how much of their time) would you need to dedicate to the maintenance of this product?
Consider doing some back-of-the-napkin math to put together a simple formula:
Cost of Building an MMM Tool In-House = Resources x Months x Salary Per Month
Here’s a simplified example:
Cost of Building an MMM Tool In-House = 1 Engineer and 1 Marketing Data Analyst x 6 Months x $12,500/month = $150,000
The above would be the initial cost to build an MMM tool — not the total cost. It doesn’t account for regular maintenance and updates. You may want to develop your own formula that takes into account the resources you would need to support this product.
Depending on your team and needs, it's likely that an off-the-shelf solution will prove more resource-effective.
Every Company is Different
Every company and use case is different. Depending on your particular situation, building an MMM tool may make the most sense. If that’s not the case, or if you want to talk it out with a professional, our team is here to help. Schedule a time to discover our MMM+ tool and how it can help scale your business to the next level.
The marketing world is full of metrics, and few cause more confusion than MER and ROAS.
On the surface, they seem interchangeable. In reality, they serve different purposes, and knowing which to prioritize can mean the difference between scaling profitably and burning through budget.
As marketers juggle cash flow, growth targets, and increasingly complex customer journeys, choosing the right metric at the right time can dramatically shift outcomes.
The wrong focus can create blind spots; the right one can sharpen your strategy and unlock stronger returns.
In this guide, we’ll break down what each metric measures, how they differ, and when to use each of them.
You’ll learn how to combine MER’s big-picture view with ROAS’s tactical precision to drive both short-term wins and long-term growth.
Let’s dive in.
What Is Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER)?
Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER), also called Media Efficiency Ratio, measures the relationship between the total revenue your business generates and your total marketing or advertising spend.
The Marketing Efficiency Ratio formula is simple: MER = Total Revenue ÷ Total Marketing/Ad Spend
Unlike campaign-level metrics, MER takes a top-down, holistic view of performance. It looks at all channels and campaigns together, showing you how efficiently your total marketing investment is converting into revenue.
This broad scope is why MER is sometimes referred to as blended ROAS or eROAS.
Instead of focusing on the return from a single campaign, it captures the cumulative effect of all your marketing activity, including brand-building efforts, halo effects from organic traffic, and cross-channel influence.
In some industries, you may also see MER framed as TACoS (Total Advertising Cost of Sale).
While the name is different, the concept is the same: understanding how much revenue you’re generating for every dollar spent across all marketing efforts, not just one slice of the pie.
💡To Recap: Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) is also sometimes referred to as Media Efficiency Ratio, blended ROAS, eROAS, or TACoS.
By focusing on the big picture, MER helps marketers cut through platform-by-platform noise and answer the most important question: Is my marketing spend making the business more profitable overall?
What Is ROAS?
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) measures the revenue generated by a specific campaign or channel compared to the amount spent on it.
The formula is: Revenue from a Specific Campaign ÷ Campaign Ad Spend = ROAS
Because it isolates performance at the campaign level, ROAS is highly precise.
It’s ideal for identifying which ads, audiences, or platforms are delivering the best return — and where to optimize or reallocate budget for maximum impact.
MER vs. ROAS Comparison and Key Differences
Both metrics have value: MER gives you the big-picture efficiency view, while ROAS helps you fine-tune at the ground level.
Together, they create a complete performance snapshot.
Why MER Matters Today
In an era of fragmented customer journeys and stricter privacy rules, attribution data is often incomplete. This is where MER shines.
Platform-reported ROAS can be misleading if it only counts conversions that can be directly tracked back to clicks or views.
For example, a customer who sees an Instagram ad, reads a blog post, and then purchases via an organic search might be invisible to that campaign’s ROAS — but MER captures the revenue regardless of the path taken.
As another example, imagine a DTC brand running paid search, paid social, and influencer partnerships saw an average ROAS of 2.0 in Meta Ads Manager.
However, when they calculated MER across all channels, the ratio was 3.5, revealing that paid social was driving halo effects in organic and email sales that platform metrics couldn’t see.
In omnichannel environments, where customers interact with multiple touchpoints before converting, MER becomes the true efficiency metric.
It sidesteps attribution gaps by focusing on actual business outcomes (total revenue vs. total marketing investment) giving marketing leaders the clarity they need to make strategic decisions.
When to Use MER vs. ROAS
Both MER and ROAS have their place. The key is knowing when to lean on each.
Let’s do a quick MER vs ROAS comparison:
Use MER when:
Evaluating brand-wide health and overall profitability.
Planning long-term budgets or proving ROI to stakeholders (e.g., CMO or board-level reporting)
Measuring the combined impact of brand-building, organic growth, and paid media.
Use ROAS when:
Optimizing the performance of an individual campaign or channel.
Allocating budgets tactically across platforms based on near-term results.
Testing creative, targeting, or bidding strategies for quick performance insights.
By pairing these metrics, you can make high-level strategic decisions while still fine-tuning the details that drive day-to-day performance.
Benchmarking MER & Best Practices
A good MER benchmark often falls around 5.0 or higher, meaning your business is generating $5 in revenue for every $1 spent on marketing.
However, good MER benchmarks can vary widely by industry, business model, and growth stage.
A scaling startup might operate with a lower MER in the short term, while a mature brand might aim for a higher ratio to sustain profitability.
Here are three best practices for using and improving MER effectively:
Standardize Your Inputs
Clearly define which revenue streams (e.g., online sales, retail, wholesale) and marketing costs (e.g., ad spend, agency fees, creative production) are included in your MER calculation.
Inconsistent definitions can distort trends and make it difficult to compare performance over time.
By keeping the inputs uniform, you ensure your MER is a true reflection of changes in efficiency, not changes in how you’re counting.
Track Continuously
Treat MER as a rolling benchmark, reviewing it monthly or quarterly rather than just at year-end.
This allows you to see the impact of campaigns, seasonal shifts, or budget adjustments in near real time.
Consistent tracking makes it easier to spot early warning signs or capitalize quickly on positive trends.
Pair MER with ROAS
MER delivers the big-picture view of how all marketing is working together, while ROAS zooms in on individual campaigns.
Using both ensures you can make strategic, company-wide decisions without losing sight of tactical optimizations.
This dual approach helps you balance long-term growth goals with short-term performance wins.
When applied consistently, MER becomes more than just a number: it’s a dependable signal for whether your overall marketing strategy is driving sustainable business outcomes.
MER and ROAS: The Full Picture
MER and ROAS aren’t competing metrics, they’re complementary tools.
MER gives you macro marketing metrics for overall marketing efficiency, showing how every channel works together to drive revenue.
ROAS delivers the micro-level insights you need to fine-tune specific campaigns and tactics.
The question is: Are your metrics driving clarity or creating blind spots?
By tracking both MER and ROAS, you can make confident decisions that support short-term wins and long-term growth.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a force multiplier, allowing organizations to do more with less. Northbeam was founded with AI baked into its DNA; its team of in-house academics and AI experts built Northbeam to wield the power of machine learning, attribution modeling, and statistical analysis to help marketers achieve their most ambitious goals.
By using Northbeam as your marketing team's source of truth, you're not only using AI by extension - you're making AI the backbone of your marketing processes.
So, how exactly does Northbeam use AI?
What is artificial intelligence?
Let’s differentiate between different types of AI.
AI is an umbrella term that refers to the ability of a computer to think, act, and/or learn like a human. AI has many different applications, like machine learning (ML), generative AI, natural language processing (NLP), and large language models (LLMs) to name a few.
ML is a form of AI that learns over time and is able to use algorithms trained on data to create new models — even new AIs! — to perform a variety of complex tasks. It is the powerhouse of AI applications. Using a strong ML model is like putting a supercharged engine in your car, whereas generative AI is more akin to giving your car a fancy paint job.
Northbeam uses ML to analyze trillions of data points and come to conclusions about your performance with a superhuman degree of speed and accuracy. Its ML models are built to deliver next generation ad attribution and forecasting so you can make the best decisions possible.
Ad Attribution
Marketing attribution is the process of measuring and quantifying the individual impact of all of your campaigns on a desired outcome. If your desired outcome is a completed checkout, attribution helps you understand the effect of every activity a customer did before they finished their purchase. If your desired outcome is lead generation, proper attribution can show you which campaigns contributed to a lead ultimately converting on your website.
If you can get attribution right — if you can understand the exact impact of each touch on the buyer’s journey — then you can get your budgeting and spend right. The simple truth is that if you don’t know how your campaigns are performing and contributing to your bottom line, you can’t truly optimize your spend.
Northbeam’s proprietary ML models do the dirty work of attribution for you. They analyze first party data across thousands of parameters and assign a percentage attribution to each campaign or touch along a buyer’s journey.
Because Northbeam feeds its models with direct first party data, they are not susceptible to reporting bugs or changes in privacy settings.
“Our technology is very resilient to the current privacy landscape and we’ve built out offerings like MMM+ that are future-proof,” said Josh Rad, Principal Technical Product Manager at Northbeam.
“We don’t rely on third party cookies or tracking, which makes me confident in the quality, accuracy, and compliance of the data that comes into our system,” said Dan Huang, Chief Technology Officer at Northbeam.
Northbeam doesn’t look at activity in a vacuum. Its models combine data across platforms and channels to present a unified picture of your ad attribution so you can make informed spending decisions with the help of powerful AI.
“If you look at click-through data on other platforms, you see lots of purchases and only one touchpoint — you know in most cases the person did not simply type in the name of the website to make a purchase," Huang said.
"We use probabilistic machine learning models to predict and infer where that purchase actually came from based on each brand’s own historical data and performance."
“It’s a very customized model based on the brand’s true customer data,” Josh said. “Our machine learning is reducing the amount of traffic that other platforms or tools will say is direct, but actually isn’t.”
You heard them: Northbeam's machine learning fills in the naturally-occurring gaps you see in other ad attribution datasets.
Forecasting
Super-accurate ad attribution is already a boon, but what if you could forecast how different channels would continue to perform in the future? ML is especially suited for this type of task: intaking trillions of data points and using them to model or predict future impact.
“We can forecast your attribution windows based on your historical information,” Huang said. “A click today might generate revenue in the next thirty days, right? And that is valuable information if you want to know how your campaigns are performing now or will continue to perform in the future without actually having to wait thirty days to get that data.”
Northbeam’s ML can go beyond real-time to deliver dynamic forecasting at your fingertips. You can run simulations on the Northbeam platform and see how channels would perform at different spending levels. This lets you predict when diminishing returns may occur and optimize your ad spend for maximum ROI.
The best part is that Northbeam’s ML gets better over time: a hallmark of strong AI. As it learns your unique data and channel performance, its predictions and attributions become more fine-tuned, delivering more and more value with each use.
“No one can give you 100% ground truth. If someone tells you they can, they’re being misleading. We intentionally don’t train our model on your entire historical dataset because we want to validate and see if we can match the non-trained historical data. This tests the performance of our methodology, and our accuracy against ground truth,” Huang said. “This is called ‘backtesting.’”
But perhaps the actual best part is that you don’t need to be an AI expert like Dan or Josh to use Northbeam. Its platform’s backend is built on a foundation of industry-leading AI and its frontend is built with you in mind, so anyone on your team can get instant value with ease.
A “cost per click” (or “CPC”) is a commonly-used metric in performance marketing. It stands for exactly that: the cost of a click on an ad campaign, ad set, or ad creative.
Intuitively, it feels like a good CPC means you’re running an efficient ad. Low cost per clicks means you’re getting people to click your ads at a relatively cheap price.
But is it that simple? Discussions about auction prices come up often on Linkedin and Twitter (X), usually without context.
Without context, any metric can be misconstrued. Whether or not CPCs matter depends entirely on the situation.
Let me show you a case study of a real situation of when high CPCs “mattered” and how we fixed it.
The Problem: $13 Cost Per New Visitor
Acceptable CPC ranges vary wildly depending on your product price, industry and business model. It’s almost impossible to say what a brand’s CPC should be without looking at the rest of their funnel first.
For example, you can look at “Cost Per New Visitor” (eCPNV), a derivative of CPC. This is the price you pay for a new visitor, obviously - but it’s an important measure for understanding how well your new customer acquisition is working.
If potential new customers aren’t clicking your ads, you aren’t going to get new customers. A high eCPNV means your ads aren’t bringing in new folks efficiently. That’s not what we want, right?
Let's look at an example. Below is a screenshot of real Northbeam data. For this brand in particular, a $13 eCPNV and $37 CPM are excessive.
This is a good indicator that this brand was spending too much on warm segments on Facebook Ads. These audiences already know a lot about this brand, which means we’re wasting spend pushing ads on them.
The Solution: Scaling Back & Diversifying Media Mix
This brand already had a large content library, so I moved some spend to YouTube. It made sense: I know video ad content is already working for this brand. Let’s take this content somewhere audiences are contextually primed for it.
Here, you can see in the first few days we are reaching much more people at a lower cost on YouTube compared to Facebook.
As you can see in the table, looking at Facebook and YouTube combined, our eCPNV is now 47% lower compared to the prior period.
Facebook eCPNV also dropped from scaling down spend. This means spreading our content across multiple channels resulted in more efficient results even in our primary selling channels like Facebook.
Despite the lower 1-day-click new customer acquisition costs (nCAC), we’re still hitting blended nCAC targets, so gaining the additional reach and cheaper email signup costs is a bonus win. That will have a downstream impact going into Q1 and beyond.
Plus these YouTube results are without any optimizations beyond an initial audience test, which suggests there’s an opportunity to unlock further performance.
Why reach and traffic volume matter
You can't build a brand without reaching new people.
But reach by itself doesn’t matter, or we’d all be manual bidding for clicks on the Google Display Network.
You need to make sure there’s an acceptable level of purchase intent, too.
— Zack Miller DTC/Ecomm Growth Marketing Partner (@growthzacks) December 7, 2023
If you’re thinking about CPCs, eCPNVs, nCACs, or any number of other metric acronyms, you should always consider the core metrics they derive from. For this brand’s eCPNV problem, it is important to look at reach and volume of traffic.
Reach by itself doesn’t matter, or we’d all be manual bidding for clicks on the Google Display Network. You need to make sure there’s an acceptable level of purchase intent, too.
I use Northbeam to help me understand that intent by looking at some of the following metrics:
% New Visits: ratio of new vs returning users based on data collected from Northbeam’s pixel. This is a great way of tracking site traffic in relation to your new customer acquisition strategies.
eCPNV: Cost per new visitor, which is a more effective measure of reach than just looking at CPC. It’s more effective because it adds value to your reach: you know what you’re paying to bring new eyeballs (and their potential LTV) to your store.
Cost per email signup: Existing customers and leads are already in your list. Email signups are a great measure of reach. It also marks them as at least somewhat interested - they wanted on your email list, after all. If you can acquire emails at a cheap price, those people are easily targeted using your email ad campaigns.
New customer ROAS (NC ROAS) and new customer acquisition cost (nCAC): If you’re struggling to reach new people, these metrics will be low compared to returning customer ROAS and CAC. Northbeam gives you new, returning and blended.
There’s no one answer for growth
When trying to solve something like high CPCs, this was the easiest solution. Start with the low hanging fruit while you’re planning to solve for more complicated challenges.
Thinking about new channels is a great way to expand your options for problems solving. In this scenario, we were able to have a pretty significant impact on reach just by shifting some money around while planning our next batch of content to test on Facebook.
Scaling on Facebook Ads alone is more challenging than ever, and brands need to be able to analyze data from multiple channels to grow profitably.
I use Northbeam to solve the high CPCs problem (and many other) because the metrics provided in the platform give me accurate, actually actionable insights I can use.
So long story short: no matter your CPCs, Northbeam is a great tool for helping you understand that data deeper.
Want to chat more? My name is Zack Miller. I help 8-figure ecommerce brands grow with strategy & execution on paid social, Google and YouTube for a fixed-cost monthly retainer.
Why would Google deprecate cookies in the first place?
Where did the pushback come from?
Why does this decision matter?
What does this mean for marketers?
Why would Google deprecate cookies in the first place?
Google announced its plans to deprecate cookies all the way back in 2020. The motivation for this plan involves a broader understanding of privacy concerns and regulatory pressures.
Privacy — especially digital privacy — has been a hot-button issue over the past five years. With a growing number of data breaches and increasing awareness of how personal information is used online, consumers have become increasingly concerned about their privacy. Governments around the world have responded by imposing more stringent data protection regulations that limit the way that corporations and other actors can collect data from users in digital spaces.
These regulations include the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the United States, among others. These regulations place limits on how personal information can be collected, stored, and used, and place hefty fines on organizations that violate these rules.
Amid this environment, privacy-focused browsers like Mozilla Firefox have drawn consumers through measures to block third party cookies. Third party cookies allow companies to track what you do not just on their own website (first party cookies) but on other websites as well.
For example: you visit a sunglasses website and then you start to see targeted ads on Google for the same sunglasses store. To put it simply, companies use third party cookies to target consumers based on their interests.
In response to increasing regulation and consumer pressure, Google announced its Privacy Sandbox initiative in 2019. The initiative’s goal was to enhance user privacy while simultaneously enabling advertisers to reach consumers in new and different ways. As part of this initiative, cookies were initially going to be phased out by 2022, then later 2023, and now deprecation has been indefinitely delayed.
Where did the pushback come from?
Despite Google’s best intentions to make both consumers and advertisers happy, the road to deprecating third party cookies has been fraught with challenges.
Third party cookies are a cornerstone of digital advertising. Without them, advertisers can’t easily target the right audience at the right time to drive purchases. They won’t be able to deliver highly-targeted ads based on a user’s online behavior, or build out robust and detailed user profiles. Deprecating how advertisers get the data that informs their strategy makes the job of marketing that much more complex. It may reduce revenue and increase spend dramatically, at least in the short-term.
Ironically, some regulators also expressed concerns that Google’s plan would further entrench their dominance in the digital advertising space. By eliminating third party cookies, advertisers may be forced to rely even more on Google’s own advertising tools and data. This is a complex situation that highlights the opposing forces of privacy, competition, and market dynamics.
Finally, finding something to replace third party cookies while still retaining consumer privacy is just difficult. There have been some proposed solutions, like Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoCs) and Topics, but they have each faced their own criticisms and potential risks. The current alternative is a user-choice prompt that allows users to select their preferred level of online tracking. This is similar to the changes and challenges that iOS 14 introduced to the marketing landscape in 2020. And like iOS 14, user-choice prompts may be disruptive to markers that rely on cookies. Marketing intelligence platforms like Northbeam minimize this disruption to nearly zero — more on that later.
Why does this decision matter?
Google’s decision to reverse its stance on third party cookies has significant implications for nearly all stakeholders in the digital ecosystem.
For advertisers, the continuation of third party cookies is a temporary relief. They can continue to use established methods for ad targeting and measurement for the time being. However, their search for effective alternatives should continue, and advertisers would be wise to stay engaged in ongoing discussion and developments.
For ad publishers like LinkedIn and Facebook, the decision is also a relief. They can maintain their revenue models without the immediate need to overhaul their advertising strategies. Because they rely primarily on ad revenue, this stability in the short-term is crucial. This is especially true for platforms that rely on ad revenue to provide free content to users.
For consumers, the impact is more nuanced. While the continuation of third party cookies means that cross-site tracking of personal information and activity will persist, consumers can also continue to benefit from the aforementioned free content powered by ad revenue. Ideally, having more time to develop adequate privacy solutions will allow this content to remain free while better protecting consumer data protection rights online.
For regulators, the job of scrutinizing the digital advertising landscape and the actions of dominant players like Google continues. The interplay between privacy, competition, and innovation is delicate and will require ongoing attention and potential regulatory adjustments and advancements.
What does this mean for data intelligence platforms?
Back in January, we wrote an explainer about what cookie deprecation would mean for data intelligence platforms like Northbeam.
Our short answer was: it won’t mean much. While some data intelligence and analytics platforms will be significantly hampered in their ability to deliver value without the use of third party cookies, Northbeam has a future-proof machine learning algorithm that mostly bypasses the need for third party cookies altogether.
We ran internal holdout tests to determine how the removal of cookies would impact our modeling outputs, and found that 98% of our data was unaffected.
"Years ago, when we were starting Northbeam, we knew this was coming,” said Austin Harrison, CEO and co-founder of Northbeam. “Google's been telling us for years they were going to do away with cookies, so preparing for that future has been our mission. It's not just about cookies, it's about advertising more effectively in a more privacy-minded era. That's what we're about."
Northbeam prioritizes first party data to resolve customer identities and solve for the deprecation of cookies — without impacting the level of intelligence that our users receive.
With Google’s decision not to deprecate third party cookies, marketers face both familiar and new challenges.
On one hand, they can continue to leverage these cookies for targeted advertising and measurement. This continuity creates stability and strategic benefits for campaign planning, performance tracking, and budgeting.
On the other hand, this is only a temporary reprieve. Changes are coming, and marketers must remain adaptable. The delay in cookie deprecation doesn’t mean the world isn’t shifting towards increasing user privacy online. Marketers will need to stay up-to-date on changes and act proactively to maintain their bottom line.
Marketers should use this time to explore and experiment with alternate targeting methods. Understanding these technologies will best position marketers to perform well when changes inevitably do arrive. Digital privacy innovation can also telegraph well to privacy-focused consumers who want their brands to act in alignment with their values. Ethical data handling will be critical to maintain brand reputation and customer loyalty in the future.
By embracing innovation, fostering transparency, and prioritizing consumer trust, marketers can set themselves up for success — and set themselves apart — in a future where privacy and marketing success are no longer at odds.
Not every underperforming campaign is a creative problem. More often than not, it’s a tracking problem.
You can have the most compelling ad copy, the perfect audience, and a flawless landing page, but if you can’t track where your traffic is coming from, it’s nearly impossible to measure what’s working (or fix what’s not).
That’s where UTM tracking comes in.
UTM parameters are simple, customizable codes you add to your URLs that give you crystal-clear visibility into how each campaign, channel, and creative is performing.
They’re one of the easiest yet most overlooked ways to improve ROI, optimize spend, and make smarter marketing decisions.
In this guide, we’ll cover:
What UTM parameters are and how they work
Step-by-step instructions for creating UTMs
Common mistakes that can ruin your tracking efforts
Best practices for clean, consistent data
And a few advanced tips for automating and scaling your UTM strategy.
Let’s dive in.
What Are UTM Parameters?
UTM parameters (short for Urchin Tracking Module codes) are snippets of text added to the end of a URL.
These tags help marketers track the performance of specific campaigns by passing detailed information to analytics tools like Google Analytics.
Think of UTMs as a way to answer critical questions like: Which campaign drove this click? From which platform? Through which channel?
Each UTM-tagged URL can include up to five key parameters:
Source (utm_source): Identifies where the traffic is coming from. This could be a platform, website, or newsletter. Example: utm_source=facebook
Medium (utm_medium): Describes the type of channel used to deliver the traffic. Example: utm_medium=cpc (for paid ads) or utm_medium=email
Campaign (utm_campaign): Specifies the name of the campaign or promotion. This helps differentiate between various campaigns running on the same platform. Example: utm_campaign=spring_sale
Term (utm_term): Used for tracking specific paid search keywords. It’s especially useful for PPC campaigns. Example: utm_term=running+shoes
Content (utm_content): Distinguishes between multiple links or creatives within the same campaign. Helpful for A/B testing ads or CTAs. Example: utm_content=cta_button vs. utm_content=text_link
When combined, these parameters give you a detailed view of where your traffic is coming from, how it’s interacting with your content, and which efforts are driving the best results.How Does UTM Tracking Work?
When someone clicks on a URL that includes UTM codes for marketing campaigns, those snippets of information are passed along to your analytics platform, like Google Analytics, Northbeam, or any CRM that tracks campaign attribution.
Still wondering how to use UTM tracking?
Here’s how it works in action:
A user clicks on a UTM-tagged URL (e.g., from a Facebook ad or email campaign).
The UTM parameters are sent along with the pageview when the landing page loads.
Your analytics platform captures these parameters and attributes the visit, conversion, or action to the correct source, medium, and campaign.
You can then analyze performance data by filtering traffic, leads, and conversions based on the UTM values.
This process allows you to:
See which campaigns are driving the most traffic (UTM campaign tracking).
Identify which platforms or channels are delivering high-quality leads.
Measure conversion rates by campaign, source, or even specific ad creatives.
Optimize marketing spend by doubling down on what’s working and cutting what’s not.
Without UTMs, you're often left guessing which campaign actually influenced a sale or lead.
With UTMs, you get clear UTM campaign tracking from the initial click to the final conversion.
Why Are UTMs Important?
In a world where marketers juggle multiple channels and campaigns, knowing what’s actually driving results is essential.
That’s where UTM tracking comes in. By tagging your URLs with UTMs, you gain the clarity and control needed to make smarter, data-driven decisions.
Here’s why UTMs are a must for any marketing strategy:
Accurate Attribution
UTMs provide a clear, detailed record of which campaign, channel, and creative drove each click, lead, or sale.
Instead of relying on vague platform reports or last-click attribution, UTMs help you trace performance back to its true source.
Budget Optimization
With accurate tracking, you can identify which campaigns are delivering the highest ROI — and which ones are wasting budget.
This allows you to shift spend toward top-performing channels and cut back on underperformers with confidence.
Better Reporting and Insights
UTMs unlock granular reporting capabilities: you can break down traffic, conversions, and customer behavior by source, medium, campaign, and even specific ad creatives.
This level of insight transforms vague analytics into actionable strategies.
In short: UTMs take the guesswork out of marketing performance and put you in control of your data.
How Do You Create UTM Parameters?
Creating UTM parameters is simple, but setting them up correctly ensures your data stays clean and meaningful.
Here’s a step-by-step guide for how to set up UTM parameters:
Step 1: Decide on a Consistent Tracking Structure
Before you start creating UTMs, establish standard naming conventions for your team.
Decide on lowercase vs. uppercase, set clear guidelines for campaign names, and document source and medium structures.
This consistency is key to clean reporting.
Step 2: Use a UTM Builder Tool
Google’s Campaign URL Builder is a free, easy way to generate UTM-tagged links.
Simply enter your destination URL and fill in the UTM fields: source, medium, campaign, and optionally, term and content.
Once built, your UTM parameters will be appended to the end of your URL.
You can use these tagged URLs in ads, email links, social posts, or any campaign asset that drives traffic.
Step 4: Test URLs Before Launch
Always test your UTM links to ensure they direct to the correct page and that the parameters are registering in your analytics platform.
Click through each link and check your real-time reports to verify tracking is working as expected.
Common Mistakes With UTM Tracking
UTMs are simple, but it’s surprisingly easy to make mistakes that muddy your data and lead to inaccurate reporting.
Here are some of the most common UTM pitfalls, and how to avoid them:
Inconsistent Naming Conventions
Using variations like “Facebook” vs. “facebook” in your utm_source will split your analytics data into separate line items.
Always use lowercase, standardized naming to ensure consistent reporting across campaigns.
Forgetting to Use UTMs on All Campaigns
It’s common to tag paid ads but forget UTMs on organic social posts, email links, or affiliate promotions.
This creates blind spots in attribution.
Every campaign link, paid or organic, should include UTMs for accurate tracking.
Overcomplicating URLs With Unnecessary Tags
UTMs should be clear and purposeful.
Avoid cluttering URLs with redundant or overly detailed parameters that don’t contribute to meaningful reporting.
Instead, stick to essential tags (source, medium, campaign) and only use term or content when they add value.
Losing UTMs Due to Redirects
Some redirects or shortened URLs can strip out UTM parameters, breaking the tracking chain.
Always test redirect flows and ensure your UTMs are passed through correctly. (If you’re using link shorteners, check that they preserve UTM tags.)
What Are UTM Best Practices?
Getting the most out of UTM tracking requires more than just adding parameters to links. It’s about building a disciplined, consistent approach across your team.
Here are key UTM best practices to keep your UTM data clean and actionable:
Standardize Your Naming Conventions
Create a documented set of rules for how your team will name sources, mediums, campaigns, and other UTM components.
Consistency is critical to avoid fragmented data in your analytics reports.
Keep UTMs Lowercase and Simple
UTMs are case-sensitive, so always use lowercase to maintain uniformity.
Stick to clear, readable names (e.g., utm_source=facebook, not utm_source=Fb-Social-Ads).
Use UTMs Across All Campaigns
Apply UTM tags to every traffic-driving link — not just paid ads.
That includes organic social posts, email newsletters, partnerships, and influencer campaigns. The more comprehensive your tracking, the clearer your attribution.
Centralize Tracking in a Shared Spreadsheet or Tool
Build a master UTM tracking guide or spreadsheet (or use a tool like Northbeam) where all campaign links and naming conventions are documented.
This keeps your team aligned and avoids duplicates, inconsistencies, and confusion.
Use a UTM Naming Template or Checklist
To streamline your process, use a UTM naming template that lists approved sources, mediums, and campaign structures.
Here’s an example:
Advanced UTM Tips
Once you’ve mastered the basics, you can level up your UTM tracking with advanced techniques that streamline workflows and enhance attribution accuracy.
Here are a few strategies for more sophisticated tracking:
Dynamic UTMs for Large or Programmatic Campaigns
Manually creating UTMs for hundreds of ads isn’t scalable.
Use dynamic URL parameters in ad platforms to automatically populate UTM fields with relevant values like campaign names, ad sets, or creatives.
This ensures consistency while saving time.
Connecting UTMs with Your CRM or Attribution Platform
To get a full view of how UTM-tagged campaigns drive revenue, integrate UTM data into your CRM or advanced attribution tools.
This helps connect the dots between marketing efforts and actual customer actions, beyond just clicks and sessions.
Automating Tagging with Marketing Platforms
Platforms like HubSpot, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), and Northbeam offer automation features for UTM tagging.
These tools can auto-append UTMs to outbound links, reducing human error and ensuring consistent tracking across all campaigns.
Make UTMs Work For You
UTM codes for marketing campaigns might seem simple, but they’re one of the most powerful tools in a marketer’s toolkit.
With just a few snippets of code, you can transform vague traffic reports into actionable insights, optimize your campaign spend, and prove what’s really driving results.
When used consistently and strategically, UTMs unlock a clearer, more accurate view of your marketing performance, helping you shift from guessing to knowing.
As the dust settles and the credit cards cool from this year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) weekend, it's time to reflect on how our early 2024 bets stacked up against the actual trends shaping the season.
Earlier this year, Bryan Bumgardner, Northbeam’s Director of Growth Marketing, and Brayden Cruz, Senior Media Strategist, shared their 2024 BFCM predictions. In this blog post, we’ll break down what we got right, what we got wrong, and what we’re looking forward to next year.
Our 2024 BFCM predictions
Sky-high online sales
With ecommerce growing exponentially, 2024 was poised to outpace the $38 billion spent during Cyber Week in 2023. A greater focus on mobile optimization and seamless online experiences was expected to drive this growth, particularly with more consumers avoiding in-store crowds.
Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) gains momentum
Following a 17% year-over-year increase in BNPL adoption in 2023, we anticipated even higher reliance on installment payments in 2024. Younger demographics, especially Gen Z, have embraced BNPL as a way to manage holiday spending without straining budgets.
Personalization is the name of the game
This year, we predicted that brands would increasingly rely on AI-driven tools to deliver customized recommendations and targeted campaigns. This trend was predicted to be pivotal for converting the growing number of online browsers into buyers.
Supply chain stabilization
Unlike prior years marked by global disruptions set off by the political landscape, COVID-19, and wars, 2024 predicted a smoother supply chain, allowing retailers to manage inventory and deliver products more efficiently.
How the predictions played out
Sky-high online sales
This year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday online spending confirmed our prediction of robust growth. On Black Friday, shoppers spent a record-breaking $10.8 billion online. This record was broken only a few days later on Cyber Monday with a whopping $13.3 billion in sales, making it the biggest online shopping day of all time.
Shoppers worldwide will spend an estimated $240 billion online during the holiday season, marking an 8.4% increase from 2023. In addition to Friday and Monday, Cyber Week as a whole accounts for over 25% of global holiday spending, emphasizing its position as the most significant contributor to annual retail performance.
About 75% of shoppers planned to shop online on BFCM, up 7% from last year. Notably, mobile shopping continued its dominance. Over 75% of shoppers have between 1-5 shopping apps on their mobile phones, and 50% of Gen Z and Millennials shop exclusively on their phones.
Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) gains momentum
BNPL adoption surged as anticipated, particularly among Gen Z and Millennial shoppers: 39% of Millennials planned to use BNPL during BFCM, followed by 38% of Gen Z shoppers.
By offering flexible installment options, retailers captured budget-conscious consumers navigating high inflation and financial pressures. This year, BNPL drove $18.5 billion in online spend during BFCM alone, an 11% increase from last year.
Personalization is the name of the game
Personalization proved to be a major differentiator during this year’s BFCM, particularly with the growing role of AI.
Generative AI tools were employed by 40% of shoppers to discover deals, specific items, or personalized recommendations, demonstrating how advanced technology is reshaping the shopping landscape.
Last year, AI influenced over 17% of all holiday orders in November and December — and there’s no reason to believe this trend hasn’t increased in 2024. Today, 70% of consumers use generative AI tools like ChatGPT to enhance their shopping experience. This includes finding the best deals, finding specific items online quickly, and getting brand recommendations.
Supply chain stabilization
Unlike previous years marred by supply chain disruptions, 2024 benefited from relative stability. Inventory shortages were minimal thanks to better forecasting, technologies like RFID, and smoother logistics, and retailers leveraged this stability to provide a more seamless shopping experience, ensuring consumers had access to popular products without significant delays.
But while political instability and an international pandemic can impact supply chains, there are other issues to consider, such as logistic worker strikes — like the U.S. port strike in September — or cyber attacks. Nearly 200,000 customers were affected by supply chain cyber attacks worldwide in 2024. As technologies improve on all sides, retailers and companies need to bring intense focus to cyber security to maintain supply chain stability over time.
Overperform with Northbeam
Our team took a look at the year-over-year data for brands that have been with us for multiple BFCM periods, and the results speak for themselves: Northbeam usage is correlated with significant performance growth over BFCM and the holiday period over time.
With Northbeam at their disposal, our clients know the impact of every dollar, and they’re more empowered to put money where it counts with full confidence.
Client A: Supplement company sees explosive ROAS
As an example, let’s look at “Client A,” a supplement company (anonymized to protect their strategy). In 2023, they spent $2.2 million on ads across the November shopping period, and brought in $5.1 million in revenue. That’s a 2.3x ROAS — not bad, but not stellar.
In 2024, they only spent $260,000 on ads — a 90% decrease — and made $8.2 million in revenue. That’s a 31.5x ROAS. How did they do it?
In 2023, Client A spent significant dollars across a wide portfolio of Facebook, Google, Snapchat, and Amazon ads. With Northbeam data in hand, they were able to hone in on the channels and campaigns that made the biggest impact and delivered the most bang for their buck. The result? Based on ad efficiency calculated by Northbeam data, Client A decided to shift a significant amount of advertising dollars into Amazon ads in 2024.
In 2023, Client A spent $38,000 on Amazon ads. In 2024, they upped that spend to $143,500 — nearly a 4x difference — and reduced spend across other platforms accordingly.
The result? Their Amazon ads had an outsized impact on revenue. Northbeam gave Client A the intelligence to approach the BFCM period with a data-backed strategy — and it paid off by the millions.
Client B: Beauty company sees big growth led by new channels
Let’s look at another example in the form of “Client B,” a beauty company. In 2023, they spent $213,000 across channels for the holiday shopping period and brought in $340,000 in revenue. In 2024, they spent $346,000 and made $1.15 million in revenue.
A spend increase of 60% resulted in nearly 4x the revenue!
How did they do it? With Northbeam’s data to enable their decision-making, Client B had the confidence to explore new channels and expand spend in strategic ways. While they maintained even spending on Meta and Google, they added in TikTok and boosted their Amazon spend, knowing that they’d be able to track the impact of each dollar.
Client B’s informed experimentation paid off with a record-breaking BFCM period!
What to watch for in 2025
As we look ahead, several strategies can help retailers succeed next year:
Early campaigns remain a cornerstone of success. Retailers should aim to launch their outreach at least three weeks before BFCM to capture attention before competitors flood the market.
With mobile devices accounting for most e-commerce traffic, retailers must invest in mobile-first designs, faster load times, and user-friendly checkout experiences.
Rising consumer skepticism about Black Friday deals underscores the need for transparency in promotions: over 57% of shoppers questioned the legitimacy of sales and deals.
Offering flexible payment methods, including BNPL, is not just a value-add but a necessity for capturing budget-conscious shoppers.
The 2024 BFCM season highlighted how innovation and preparation are key to thriving during the busiest shopping period of the year. While early predictions largely held true, the evolving consumer landscape emphasizes the need for agility, transparency, and strategic investments in personalization and technology.
Will these same predictions and outcomes hold true for the rest of the 2024 holiday shopping period? Let’s see what the end of 2024 has in store.
Northbeam: the premiere growth tool
Looking at the nearly $1 billion in revenue and $200 million in ad spend across Northbeam clients this year, here is how performance stacked up against data from last year’s BFCM:
The data above was derived from performance tracked across all Northbeam customers, across all industries, who had data inclusive of both 2023 and 2024 time ranges. Data represents the total across the five days of BFCM, comparing 2023 and 2024 year-over-year. All data is cash, on a 1-day click attribution window.
As we reflect on the 2024 BFCM season, it’s clear that data-backed decision-making is a cornerstone of success for retailers.
Northbeam’s MMM+ delivers unparalleled insights into how various marketing channels drive growth and impact revenue. Unlike traditional MMM, which often feels like a black box, Northbeam’s approach combines granular attribution data with intuitive, actionable reporting. This ensures that even complex multi-channel strategies can be demystified and fine-tuned with confidence.
The result? Brands can better allocate resources, maximize ROI, and make informed decisions across their entire marketing mix — even in the most competitive periods like BFCM.
The modern customer journey is non-linear and multidimensional.
They might discover a product on TikTok, research it through Google, get retargeted via Instagram, hear about it on a podcast, and finally convert through an email promo.
Yet, many brands still treat each channel separately, missing out on the full and holistic scope of the customer journey.
An omnichannel marketing strategy ensures every touchpoint works together, delivering a frictionless, personalized experience that increases engagement and revenue.
Read on to learn how to build a seamless omnichannel strategy that actually works.
Omnichannel vs. multichannel
Before we dive in, let’s clarify our definitions.
Many brands think they have an omnichannel strategy when they actually have a multichannel one. The difference?
Multichannel: Brands use multiple platforms (e.g., paid ads, social, email), but they operate in silos — each channel has its own messaging and metrics.
Omnichannel: Every channel works together as part of a unified journey, ensuring a consistent experience no matter where a customer engages.
Omnichannel isn’t just a marketing buzzword — it’s a fundamental shift in how brands engage with customers.
Consumers today expect interactions to be fluid and connected, whether they’re engaging through social, search, email, or in-store. Without a centralized measurement approach, brands risk misattributing conversions and undervaluing key channels that drive long-term growth.
The upside: omnichannel customers have a 30% higher lifetime value than those who shop using only one channel.
How to build a seamless omnichannel strategy
Unify data & measurement
A true omnichannel strategy starts with centralized data and measurement.
Tracking customer interactions across all touchpoints — social, search, email, and in-store — ensures brands understand how different platforms contribute to conversions.
Real-time attribution models, like Northbeam’s Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) and Media Mix Modeling (MMM+), eliminate guesswork and provide clear insights into how each channel works together. By unifying data, brands gain a complete picture of customer behavior, leading to smarter budget allocation and more effective campaigns.
Create a consistent brand experience
While omnichannel marketing requires brands to be present across multiple platforms, it’s not about copy-pasting the same message everywhere.
Instead, brands should focus on delivering a cohesive experience, ensuring that the voice, visuals, and core messaging remain consistent.
At the same time, content should be tailored to fit each platform’s strengths: short-form storytelling for TikTok, in-depth messaging for email, and engaging visuals for Instagram.
A seamless customer journey means that if a user clicks on an Instagram ad, they should land on a personalized landing page that mirrors the messaging and design from the ad.
Leverage first-party data for personalization
As third-party cookies fade, first-party data has become the most valuable asset for marketers.
Brands should use purchase history, browsing behavior, and engagement patterns to create hyper-personalized experiences. For example, if a customer watches a TikTok ad but doesn’t immediately purchase, instead of retargeting them with another generic ad, brands can follow up with a personalized email offer based on the product they engaged with.
This data-driven personalization leads to higher conversions and keeps customers engaged throughout their journey.
Ensure frictionless cross-channel journeys
A true omnichannel approach means making it easy for customers to move between channels without interruption.
If someone adds an item to their cart on mobile, they should see the same cart when they log in from a desktop later. Brands can also use cross-channel retargeting to remind customers of the products they browsed, whether through social ads, search results, or email follow-ups.
Additionally, aligning creative strategy across channels ensures that promotions and messaging remain consistent, reinforcing the brand experience at every touchpoint.
Test, optimize, and iterate
Omnichannel strategies aren’t static — they should evolve based on real-time data.
Brands can continuously run A/B tests across platforms to understand what resonates with different audiences. By analyzing cross-channel performance, marketers can shift budget toward high-impact touchpoints and optimize campaigns accordingly.
Using Northbeam’s real-time insights, brands can make data-backed decisions about where to scale spend and where to refine strategies.
How to measure omnichannel success
Success in omnichannel marketing is measured beyond just ROAS.
Brands should track Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) to see how omnichannel customers spend over time, as well as Attribution Lift to determine whether awareness channels like TikTok are influencing conversions elsewhere.
Cross-channel ROAS helps brands understand how investing in one platform (like Meta) impacts another (like branded search), while engagement metrics reveal how customers interact with different touchpoints before making a purchase.
With Northbeam’s analytics, brands can monitor these key metrics and more in real time, ensuring their omnichannel strategy is optimized for maximum impact.
The future is omnichannel
Consumers don’t separate their experiences by channel — so neither should brands. A seamless omnichannel marketing strategy ensures that every touchpoint contributes to a unified, high-impact customer journey that drives revenue and retention.
The key to making omnichannel work is measurement. Without the right attribution tools, brands risk misallocating budgets, undervaluing critical channels, and missing revenue opportunities.
Get in touch to see how a data-driven omnichannel strategy can transform your brand.
For years, marketing has been dominated by one key goal: acquiring new customers.
Brands have poured money into digital ads, optimized landing pages, and tested every growth hack in the book — all in the name of customer acquisition. But as customer acquisition costs (CAC) rise and competition intensifies, this model is becoming less sustainable.
Brands can no longer afford to rely solely on new customers to drive growth. Instead, companies that prioritize customer retention — keeping existing customers engaged and returning — are seeing better margins, higher lifetime value (LTV), and more predictable revenue streams.
In today’s marketing landscape, acquisition gets customers in the door, but retention keeps businesses profitable.
In this guide, we’ll explore why marketers need to shift their focus, what a retention-first strategy looks like, and how data-driven insights can make retention the most powerful tool in your growth playbook.
The hidden costs of an acquisition-only focus
Acquiring new customers is undeniably important, but relying too heavily on acquisition creates significant financial and strategic challenges:
Rising Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) – Digital ad platforms are more crowded than ever, leading to increasing ad costs and diminishing returns on acquisition campaigns.
Short-Term Gains, Long-Term Losses – Many brands acquire customers through discounts and promotions, only to see them churn when the incentives disappear.
Diminishing Returns on Ad Spend – As competition increases, brands must spend more to get the same results, making acquisition-based growth increasingly expensive.
To put it simply: winning new customers is getting harder and more expensive, while keeping existing customers is far more cost-effective.
Increasing retention by just 5% can boost profits by 25% to 95%.
The real question then isn’t (only) how to get more customers — it’s how to keep the ones you already have.
The retention advantage
Retention is more than just a cost-saving tactic — it’s a revenue-driving strategy that builds a stronger, more sustainable business.
Higher Lifetime Value (LTV) – Customers who return spend more over time, increasing their total contribution to your revenue.
Better Margins – Retained customers require no additional acquisition spend, leading to healthier profit margins.
More Predictable Revenue – Repeat customers provide financial stability, reducing reliance on unpredictable acquisition cycles.
Retention isn’t just a nice-to-have — it’s the foundation of long-term profitability. Brands that understand this are shifting resources toward keeping customers engaged, loyal, and consistently purchasing.
How to build a retention-first strategy
Here’s how to ensure that every customer who comes through the door has a reason to stay:
Leverage first-party data for personalization
The key to retention is understanding your customers’ behaviors, preferences, and needs. With the phaseout of third-party cookies, brands must rely on first-party data to deliver personalized experiences that keep customers engaged.
Here are a few tactics you could take:
Segment your audience based on purchasing behavior and engagement.
Use personalized messaging to target past customers with relevant offers.
Optimize cross-channel engagement, ensuring seamless interactions across email, SMS, and social media.
Northbeam’s advanced analytics can help brands identify who their most valuable customers are and how to retain them through personalized marketing.
Strengthen post-purchase engagement
Retention starts the moment a customer completes a purchase, and brands that create seamless, engaging post-purchase experiences are more likely to drive repeat sales.
Consider:
Onboarding sequences to help customers get the most value from their purchase.
Loyalty programs to reward repeat purchases with exclusive discounts or perks.
Proactive customer support to reach out before problems arise, building trust and goodwill.
Great post-purchase experiences don’t just encourage repeat purchases — they turn customers into brand advocates.
Build a community around your brand
Customers stay loyal to brands that make them feel like they belong. Investing in community-driven marketing creates an emotional connection that extends beyond just transactions.
Here are three possible approaches:
Create engaging content that speaks to your audience’s interests.
Foster user-generated content (UGC) by showcasing customers’ stories and testimonials.
Encourage social engagement, making customers feel like part of a larger movement.
Loyal customers aren’t just repeat buyers — they’re brand evangelists who drive organic growth through referrals, word-of-mouth, and social proof.
How to measure retention
If you’re moving towards a retention-first strategy, here are the four key metrics you should make sure to track:
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) – How much revenue a customer generates over their lifetime.
Repeat Purchase Rate – The percentage of customers who make more than one purchase.
Churn Rate – The rate at which customers stop engaging or purchasing.
Engagement Metrics – I.e. Email open rates, SMS response rates, and loyalty program participation.
Northbeam’s advanced machine learning models provide deep insights into retention trends, helping brands make data-driven decisions to keep customers coming back.
The future of marketing is retention-first
In a world where ad costs are rising and customer expectations are higher than ever, brands that invest in retention will drive more sustainable, profitable growth.
Retention isn’t just about keeping customers — it’s about maximizing their value, turning them into brand advocates, and ensuring long-term business success.
Want to unlock the full power of retention marketing? Learn how Northbeam’s data-driven insights can transform your strategy.
In today’s hyper-competitive marketing landscape, we know that every dollar counts. Yet, a significant portion of ad budgets are consistently wasted due to inefficient strategies, limited data insights, and the ever-changing digital ecosystem and algorithm.
Research shows that over 40% of digital ad spend is wasted — that’s millions of dollars that could otherwise fuel growth and profitability.
If your business is feeling the pinch or struggling to measure campaign success accurately, it may be time to rethink your approach. With smarter tools and strategies, you can unlock the true potential of your ad budget and maximize your return on investment (ROI).
The high stakes of ad spend optimization
There’s a high cost to ad inefficiency. When your campaigns aren’t optimized, the effects can be felt across your organization in the form of higher customer acquisition costs (CAC), lower lifetime value (LTV), and missed opportunities to scale.
The stakes are even higher in today’s privacy-first digital world, where the upcoming death of third-party cookies may leave many businesses scrambling for reliable attribution.
The rise of multi-channel customer journeys adds another layer of complexity. A single customer might engage with your brand across five or more touchpoints before making a purchase, from an Instagram ad to an email campaign to a Google search.
Without a clear view of how these channels work together, businesses can over-allocate budgets to poorly performing channels while neglecting high-performing ones.
But with the right tools and strategies, you can turn your ad spend into a powerful driver of growth and properly account for every dollar.
Common pitfalls in ad spend management
Before diving into solutions, it’s essential to understand the most common mistakes businesses make with their advertising budgets.
Avoiding these pitfalls is the first step to unlocking greater ROI:
Over-reliance on platform data. Platforms like to take full credit for conversions that may have been influenced by other channels. This over-attribution can lead to skewed insights and inefficient spending.
Only focusing on first- and last-touch. Focusing on just one touchpoint gives you an incomplete picture of the customer journey. Without a full account of what ultimately led to a purchase, it's extremely difficult to know where to focus your funds.
One-size-fits-all strategies. Treating all campaigns, audiences, or creatives the same is a recipe for wasted spend. Without testing, personalization, or creative optimization, it’s impossible to fully know what works, and what doesn’t. And keep in mind that what works today might not necessarily be the best strategy tomorrow!
By addressing these challenges, businesses can lay the groundwork for smarter, more efficient ad spend.
How to get more ROI for every dollar
To optimize your ad spend and drive growth, it’s essential to implement data-driven strategies and leverage modern tools.
Here are four actionable steps to help you get started:
1. Invest in Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA)
Multi-touch attribution provides visibility into the entire customer journey, showing how different touchpoints contribute to conversions. Unlike traditional attribution models that rely on cookies, modern MTA solutions (like Northbeam’s) use first-party, cookie-proof attribution for greater accuracy.
2. Use Media Mix Modeling (MMM+)
Media mix modeling (MMM) helps businesses understand the impact of different marketing channels and allocate budgets effectively. Northbeam’s MMM+ goes a step further by incorporating advanced machine learning to forecast revenue and optimize spend in real-time.
Imagine reallocating 10% of your social media budget to search ads based on MMM+ insights — and seeing a 20% lift in conversions. This level of precision ensures that every dollar works harder for your business.
3. Focus on Creative Analytics
Not all ads are created equally, and the performance of your creative can make or break a campaign. Creative analytics tools help identify which ads resonate with your audience and which fall flat, enabling you to make data-driven decisions.
For instance, if your analytics show that video ads outperform static images by 40%, you can shift resources to produce more high-performing video content, boosting your ROI.
4. Rely on First-Party Data
In a world where privacy regulations and platform biases limit the value of third-party data, first-party data is your secret weapon. Northbeam empowers businesses to leverage granular, real-time first-party data to gain unbiased insights into customer behavior and campaign performance.
By building your strategy on a foundation of accurate, reliable data, you can reduce reliance on platform-reported metrics and make smarter decisions.
Ready to make every dollar count?
Ad spend optimization isn’t always about cutting costs — it’s about unlocking growth. There are many areas of potential inefficiency that could be getting in the way of your ROI potential.
By investing in advanced tools like multi-touch attribution, media mix modeling, and creative analytics, you can maximize the impact of every dollar and drive meaningful results for your business.
Economic uncertainty presents significant challenges for businesses, from tighter budgets to shifting consumer priorities. In such times, maximizing return on investment (ROI) becomes a crucial strategy for survival and growth. For marketers, this means making every dollar count by identifying what works and doubling down on it.
In this guide, we’ll explore how data-driven marketing can help you navigate economic turbulence, optimize your campaigns, and achieve sustainable growth — all while maintaining a sharp focus on ROI.
5 Strategies for Maximizing ROI
1. Prioritize Real-Time Data
In an uncertain economy, timely decisions can make or break a campaign. Relying on delayed or outdated data puts your marketing efforts at risk of being reactive instead of proactive. Real-time data allows you to identify trends, adapt strategies, and allocate budgets as opportunities arise.
Example: A fitness apparel brand notices a sudden spike in performance on TikTok due to a trending hashtag. Using real-time insights, they quickly launch a related ad campaign, increasing conversions by 30% while the trend is still active.
2. Prioritize High-Performing Channels
Not all marketing channels perform equally. Identifying and prioritizing your own unique high-performing channels is one of the quickest ways to maximize ROI. Metrics like Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) can help pinpoint where your efforts are paying off.
Example: A direct-to-consumer skincare brand discovers that TikTok ads generate a 25% higher ROAS compared to Meta Ads. By reallocating 30% of their ad budget to TikTok campaigns, they achieve a significant revenue boost while maintaining overall efficiency.
3. Focus on Retention Over Acquisition
Customer acquisition is expensive, particularly during economic downturns: acquiring a new customer can cost 5-25x more than retaining an existing customer. Retention strategies have the potential to deliver a higher ROI by leveraging existing relationships. Companies have a 60%+ chance of selling to an existing customer versus a <20% chance of selling to a new customer — you’ve already built that trust, so use it to your advantage!
Metrics like Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and returning customer rate are critical for assessing the impact of retention efforts when budgets are tight.
Example: A home decor brand identifies a dip in returning customers through Northbeam’s analytics. By launching a loyalty program that offers exclusive discounts to repeat buyers, the brand increases its returning customer rate by 20% in just three months.
4. Optimize Your Ad Creative and Messaging
When budgets are tight, it’s essential to make your ad creative work harder for you. Tailoring messaging to resonate with your audience’s current needs and priorities can lead to significant improvements in performance.
When you need to optimize for every cent, take advantage of A/B testing to refine visuals, headlines, and calls-to-action to make sure your creative and messaging is going as far as it can.
Example: A SaaS company recognizes that its audience is focused on cost-saving solutions. By emphasizing "efficiency" and "affordability" in its ad copy over its existing “enterprise” messaging, the company improves its conversion rate by 15% and achieves a stronger ROI on its campaigns.
5. Improve Funnel Efficiency
A leaky funnel can erode ROI, no matter how effective your ads are. Optimizing every step of the customer journey — whether it’s simplifying checkout processes, improving website speed, or enhancing user experience — can make a significant difference.
Example: An e-commerce brand analyzes its funnel and discovers a high drop-off rate on the payment page. By streamlining the checkout process and offering more payment options, the brand reduces cart abandonment and sees a 10% increase in completed purchases.
Northbeam Empowers Data-Driven Decisions
Economic uncertainty doesn’t have to mean stagnation or decline. By embracing data-driven strategies, businesses can navigate challenges, optimize marketing efforts, and achieve sustainable growth.
Northbeam simplifies the process of tracking and optimizing marketing metrics, offering real-time insights and actionable recommendations. Its cross-channel attribution capabilities give businesses a comprehensive view of their campaigns, helping them identify high-performing channels and allocate budgets effectively.
During times of economic uncertainty, tools like Northbeam provide marketers with the clarity and precision needed to drive results and adapt to change with confidence.
In today’s crowded digital landscape, marketers are under constant pressure to prove which campaigns actually work.
With customers bouncing between ads, emails, social media, and search before making a purchase, it can feel almost impossible to know which touchpoints deserve credit.
Yet getting this right is critical: without this data, budgets get wasted and growth stalls.
That’s where marketing attribution comes in. Attribution is the framework for assigning value to your marketing efforts, helping you connect customer interactions to conversions.
Instead of guessing which channels drive results, attribution gives you a structured way to see what’s really working, and what’s not, so you can invest your time and budget more effectively.
What Is Marketing Attribution?
At its core, marketing attribution is the practice of figuring out which of your marketing efforts are actually driving results.
Every time a potential customer sees an ad, opens an email, or clicks through a social post, that interaction is a “touchpoint.”
Attribution is the framework that helps you connect those touchpoints to the final conversion, whether that’s a purchase, a sign-up, or another key action.
Think of it less as reporting clicks and more as understanding impact.
Instead of just knowing that a customer clicked an Instagram ad, attribution helps you answer: Did that ad meaningfully influence the sale, or was it your email follow-up that sealed the deal?
By assigning value to different touchpoints, attribution clarifies which channels contribute the most to your bottom line.
The result is better visibility into return on investment (ROI) and stronger alignment between marketing activity and business outcomes.
With attribution in place, teams can make decisions based on evidence, rather than guesswork.
Why Marketing Attribution Matters
Marketing attribution isn’t just a reporting tool: it’s a decision-making framework.
When you know which touchpoints drive results, you can stop guessing and start investing with confidence.
Here are the four primary benefits of marketing attribution:
Improved Budget Allocation
One of the top benefits of marketing attribution is the ability to make more informed budget allocation decisions.
Attribution shows you which channels actually move the needle, so you can shift spend away from underperforming campaigns and double down on what works.
Better Insight into Campaign Performance
Instead of relying on surface-level metrics like impressions or clicks, attribution highlights how each effort contributes to conversions and revenue.
Aligning Cross-Team Strategies
Marketing, sales, and finance often work with different numbers. Attribution creates a shared source of truth that helps everyone stay aligned on business outcomes.
Even a simple attribution strategy for beginners can go a long way in getting you and your team the data you need to collaborate effectively.
Higher Confidence in Scaling Channels
When you know where your returns are strongest, you can invest more aggressively in those areas without second-guessing.
In short, attribution gives marketers the clarity they need to prove impact and plan smarter growth strategies.
Common Attribution Approaches
There’s no single “right” way to measure attribution.
Different models assign credit to marketing touchpoints in different ways, each with its own strengths and limitations.
For beginners, it’s best to understand the basic types of attribution models before moving into more advanced options like multi-touch attribution.
Single-Touch Models
First-click attribution: All the credit goes to the very first touchpoint in the customer journey. If someone first discovered your brand through a Google ad and later converted, that ad gets 100% of the value.
Last-click attribution: All the credit goes to the final touchpoint before conversion. If a customer buys after clicking an email link, the email is considered solely responsible.
Why it matters: These models are simple and easy to implement, but they paint an incomplete picture since most journeys involve multiple influences.
Position-Based Models
These approaches spread credit across several touchpoints without requiring advanced algorithms.
A common example is the U-shaped model, which gives more weight to the first and last touchpoints, while still assigning some credit to the interactions in between.
Why it matters: This strikes a balance between acknowledging the importance of discovery and recognizing the role of closing touchpoints.
Custom or Blended Approaches
Many marketing teams design custom attribution models that mix elements of single-touch and position-based methods.
These custom setups might reflect unique buying cycles or industry needs. For example, a company could decide to give 40% of credit to the first touch, 40% to the last touch, and divide the remaining 20% among the middle interactions.
Why it matters: Custom models can feel more realistic, but they require thoughtful setup and ongoing validation.
How to Implement Marketing Attribution
Getting started with attribution doesn’t have to be overwhelming.
By taking a step-by-step approach, you can build a framework that grows with your business and learn how to implement marketing attribution with confidence.
1. Map Your Customer Journey
List out the main touchpoints where customers interact with your brand: ads, emails, social posts, organic search, referrals, and so on.
Understanding the typical path to conversion gives you a foundation for assigning credit.
2. Decide Which KPIs Matter Most
Are you trying to increase purchases, sign-ups, or repeat visits?
Choosing the right metrics keeps your attribution efforts focused on real business outcomes, not vanity numbers.
3. Choose a Starting Model
Pick an attribution model that matches both your goals and the data you have available.
For many beginners, a simple last-click or position-based model is a good entry point.
You can always refine later as your data maturity grows.
4. Implement With the Right Tools
Manual spreadsheets won’t cut it for long.
An attribution platform makes the process scalable by automatically connecting touchpoints, tracking conversions, and surfacing insights.
Tools like Northbeam are designed to help brands start simple and expand into more advanced models as they grow.
Challenges for Beginners
Attribution basics can feel deceptively simple at first, but there are common roadblocks that trip up many teams.
Being aware of these challenges early will help you avoid costly mistakes.
Data Silos and Tracking Gaps
When marketing, sales, and finance systems don’t talk to each other, it’s tough to follow the full customer journey.
Missing or inconsistent data makes attribution less reliable.
Overcomplicating the Model Too Soon
It’s tempting to jump straight into advanced setups, but starting with too much complexity can create confusion and mistrust in the numbers.
Misattribution from Incomplete Data
If some touchpoints aren’t tracked, like offline interactions or third-party platforms, you risk giving the wrong channels too much or too little credit.
Ignoring Attribution for Decision-Making
Attribution is only valuable if the insights inform real actions.
Some teams treat it as a reporting metric instead of a strategic tool, which means the data never drives smarter budgeting or campaign choices.
The good news? These issues are normal and manageable if you start with a simple model and build gradually.
Best Practices for Effective Attribution
Attribution works best when it’s treated as an ongoing process rather than a one-time setup.
These best practices will help you build a system that marketers, analysts, and executives can all trust.
Start Simple, Expand Gradually
Begin with a straightforward model like last-click or first-click.
Once your team feels comfortable, layer in more complexity to capture a fuller picture.
Validate Results Against Other Metrics
Attribution should never live in a vacuum.
Compare its insights against KPIs like customer acquisition cost (CAC) or return on ad spend (ROAS) to check for consistency.
Keep an Eye on Data Hygiene
Clean, accurate data is the foundation of any attribution system.
Regularly audit your tracking setup to make sure UTM parameters, pixels, and integrations are working correctly.
Use Attribution as a Decision-Making Tool
Numbers alone don’t create impact: action does.
The true value of attribution is in guiding smarter budget allocation, campaign strategy, and cross-team alignment.
By following these practices, you’ll build confidence in your attribution system and ensure it’s actually helping your business grow.
Get Back to the Marketing Attribution Basics
Marketing attribution is one of the most powerful tools for turning data into decisions.
By showing which touchpoints actually drive results, it empowers teams to allocate budget wisely, align strategies across departments, and scale growth with confidence.
If you’re looking for an attribution strategy for beginners, the key is to start simple: pick a basic model, test it against your KPIs, and refine as your data maturity grows.
Over time, you’ll build a more nuanced system that reflects the realities of your customer journey.
Platforms like Northbeam make it easier to evolve, giving you accurate and actionable attribution that grows with your brand.
Whether you’re running your first campaigns or managing a complex media mix, attribution ensures you’re always steering in the right direction.
Operating a Agency can be a Sisyphean task, to say the least.
From dealing with needy clients, validating ad performance, navigating privacy updates , and even just agreeing on attribution models— Agencies are punching far above their weight class when it comes to work load.
This reminds me of one of my favorite legends from Greek mythology. According to the Greek myth, Sisyphus is condemned to roll a rock up to the top of a mountain, only to have the rock roll back down to the bottom every time he reaches the top.
This is similar to the tasks agency operators face in 2024. Supporting a client for the long term can be an endless journey of blood, sweat, and tears.
We see Agencies make or break DTC brands all the time, the last thing they need to worry about is having accurate data. That’s where we come in.
Here's five reasons why Northbeam is the perfect tool to help your agency overcome the Sisyphean cycle.
Northbeam has infinite lookback windows and is unaffected by third-party cookie deprecation.
With the deprecation of third-party cookies in 2024 by Google and Yahoo, Northbeam becomes even more important to agencies and brands. We are 100% reliant on first-party data, use DNS-level tracking, and build our identity resolution in-house. This enables us to be unaffected by third-party cookie changes and maintain full visibility of your customer’s journeys.
When advertising on paid social channels like Meta and TikTok, many agencies face the challenge of getting budget approval for top of funnel spend. Most DTC brand operators are still stuck in their ways with last click attribution are laggards when it comes to top of funnel spend… Makes sense as they see hardly any conversions on a last click basis in Shopify or GA4.
Northbeam provides an infinite attribution window and models built to emphasize intent from top of funnel. These both fuel your signal to optimize for new customer acquisition and ultimately scale your clients business. We see brands with flat growth consistently pivot to top of funnel strategies when onboarding with one of our expert Northbeam agencies.
Flexible payback and conversion lookback timeframes.
Understanding CAC payback periods are crucial for scaling DTC brands. In a world bloated with metrics around CTRs, CPMs, and even ROAS — when you boil it down to necessity the most important metric is CAC/LTV.
Northbeam measures "conversion lag," defined as how long your ad clicks continue to drive revenue. We see for high AOV brands that often times 30-50% of customers were in the funnel for more than 90 days before ultimately converting.
We enable you to look forward and forecast campaign performance down to the ad level, or in hindsight to set benchmarks. Both of these are dynamically calculated throughout the day to ensure you can be as competitive in the auction to achieve key KPIs.
We have brands spending $120 million annually with a CAC payback period of 12 months. With Northbeam they learned that all they need on Meta to be profitable is a .51 ROAS on a 1DC to achieve their lofty business targets of profitable growth.
Creativity is the alpha and the omega. Are you prepared?
I'll say it again: CREATIVE IS THE NEW TARGETING.
The two most common reasons for flat growth are low new customer acquistion acquisition and creative fatigue.
Northbeam’s Creative Analytics allows our agency partners to rapidly scale creative testing with new hooks, angles, and ad types. We also partner with best in class Creative tools like Motion to power creative testing workflows with first-party data.
Ultimately, Creative let’s you reach new audiences. Northbeam enriches your creative with powerful metrics like New Visit %, or even new vs returning data to make sure you're prospecting.
Let’s face it. DTC operators are always going to be skeptical of the massive amount they are spending. Pair that with your agency retainer and you are bound to get a lot of heat from your clients on performance.
With Northbeam we enable you to turn your weekly/daily reporting into an integral part of your agency workflows. Save an unlimited amount of prepared views to make a CEO specific overview page, or paid social dashboard.
When a brand and agency are both optimizing on the same data, exciting growth happens. When both teams are using different data (cough cough… GA, platform data, AND MTA) then its bound to cause some problems in retaining clients
Customer journeys made easy and actionable.
Consumers have and always have bought products from where they spend their time. The problem is that today there is so many different places a consumer can buy from your brand.
From the numerous social platforms, TV, Google, Direct Mail, podcast, and good ol’ fashioned brick and mortar, consumers engage with brands in several different places before ultimately converting.
Northbeam highlights the customer journey at the order level, the customer level, across all customer paths, and even at the campaign level.
This means you can see every customer journey even for specific campaigns.
My favorite use case is understanding how Meta and Google interact with each other. Identifying where your brand search clicks are coming from is key to understand view through attribution, and continue to justify top of funnel spend.
Northbeam helps our agency partners retain their clients.
Our goal is to make sure that having accurate data is the last thing you have to worry about when operating your agency.
We take a hands on approach with our agency partners:
Agency wide trainings
Monthly Strategy calls
Dedicated Slack Channels
Industry insights + benchmarks
Our top goal is to make sure you are able to retain your clients by achieving KPIs with the most accurate attribution data.
Today’s top marketers aren’t just marketers: they’re data analysts, product insiders, customer champions, growth strategists, and more. Marketers have to hold an overview of the entire organization in their mind in order to best position their company’s products and services for success. They have to be savvy with numbers and comfortable getting down with accounting principles to make the best of their budget.
Understanding the different accounting modes — the different ways that ROI can be calculated and accounted for — makes a significant difference in how you assess the performance of your marketing campaigns.
In this guide, we’ll cover basic accounting modes and discuss the two most common ones on the Northbeam platform and beyond: Cash Snapshot and Accrual Performance.
What are accounting modes?
In this context, accounting modes refer to the different ways in which conversions and revenue can be credited within an analytics platform. Northbeam uses the Cash Snapshot and Accrual Performance modes to mirror traditional accounting methods used in corporate finance: cash basis and accrual accounting.
Cash Snapshot modecredits all revenue and conversions to the date when a given transaction actually takes place. This mode is particularly useful for measuring immediate cash flow. It helps you keep track of what is coming in on a daily basis. For example, if a customer makes a purchase on your website tomorrow, all the associated revenue would be attributed to that date.
Accrual Performance mode, on the other hand, credits revenue and conversions to the dates when relevant marketing touchpoints occur. This allows marketers to see a more accurate reflection of how different channels and campaigns contribute to conversions over time. If a customer interacted with your Meta ad yesterday, clicked on your email today, and made a purchase tomorrow, revenue would be distributed across all of these individual dates and touchpoints.
Cash Snapshot mode is more commonly used because it aligns with the way that businesses typically track their finances — based on when cash is received. For example, if you’re reporting on MER, Cash Snapshot mode can provide a clear view of the ratio between total revenue and total spend on a daily basis. This method is straightforward and easy to understand, making it a go-to for many marketers.
However, the simplicity of Cash Snapshot mode can sometimes lead to oversimplified or misleading interpretations of marketing performance. For example, if you launch an ad campaign that leads to significant engagement but no immediate purchases, Cash Snapshot mode might make the campaign seem like a failure, even if it leads to more purchases down the line.
Accrual Performance mode
Accrual Performance mode offers a more nuanced understanding of how your marketing efforts are contributing to conversions. By attributing revenue to the individual dates when marketing touchpoints occur, this mode gives you a clearer picture of which channels and campaigns are truly effective and generating ROI. This can be particularly valuable for marketers focused on scaling paid media and calculating ROAS. It can also be useful for products or services with long sales cycles where individual touchpoints need to be accounted for to get the full picture.
On the other hand, Accrual Performance mode could be over-complicated for straightforward sales cycles or simple marketing strategies. If you don’t have a lot of resources, or aren’t running a lot of campaigns, you may choose to keep things as simple as possible.
The benefits of choosing the right accounting mode
Take the time to think through your options and choose the right accounting mode so you can make the best decisions for your business. If you’re in doubt, try running both and looking at how the results compare. Northbeam lets users choose their preferred accounting mode, or toggle between the two for comparison.
Choosing the right accounting mode helps you:
Assess the true impact of your marketing efforts
Improve your budget allocation
Manage your daily finances
Align your marketing strategy with your business goals
And more.
When in doubt, chat with an expert. Northbeam’s dedicated advisors are happy to talk you through which accounting mode is best for your unique situation.
2025 will be here before you know it, so we’re covering the key marketing trends you need to know about to stay ahead of the competition. If you haven’t checked out part 1, we covered several seismic changes affecting the marketing landscape. From the rise of LinkedIn as the new hot platform to the potential banning of TikTok and the continued evolution of X (formerly known as Twitter), the next year is shaping up to be a very interesting one indeed. That’s not even mentioning how GenAI has completely upended the industry (and the larger world) and will continue to do so. In part 2, we’ll talk about the momentum of CTV in an increasingly cord-cutting world, new search methodologies, nano-influencers, and the growing awareness around data privacy.
Continuous Growth of CTV
In our modern digital world, Connected TV (ads shown on internet-connected TVs including smart TVs, external devices such as Amazon Fire sticks, gaming consoles, and even traditional TV offshoots like YouTube TV and Hulu with Live TV) has emerged as one of the most effective channels available to marketers. Even though the major social media platforms get most of the shine in digital marketing, CTV is one of the fastest-growing major ad channels in the US: projected to reach roughly $30 billion in 2024, a 22.4% growth from the previous year. That’s almost a third of all TV ad spending as cord-cutting becomes even more mainstream, especially among the younger Gen Z demographic. Linear TV viewership among Gen Z declines by a couple of million people a year, falling below 40 million viewers in 2024. On the other hand, there are 55 million Gen Z CTV viewers and counting. In fact, CTV ad spend is growing faster than the rate at which linear TV ad spend is declining. At some point towards the end of this decade, CTV will likely surpass linear TV altogether. Linear TV is still king for major live events such as the Super Bowl, Olympics, World Cup, etc., but even most of these are now available via CTV (albeit fractured across disparate streamers). This is driven by the fact that people in other generations are also choosing to spend more time watching CTV with their media consumption habits. In 2024, US adults spent 123 minutes per day watching CTV which lagged only mobile devices (235 minutes per day) in usage. CTV ad spend is forecasted to grow double digits through the end of 2027 and already accounts for 10% of ad dollars spent on digital formats.
Although CTV has “TV” in its name, CTV acts more like other digital channels such as social media rather than linear TV. CTV allows for precise segmentation and targeting based on interests, demographics, and viewing habits. Streamers have leveraged partnerships with retail media networks and other data brokers to get more accurate reporting and better attribution. CTV lets advertisers analyze trends in real time to aid in campaign optimization just like other performance channels. This is a distinct advantage over linear because we can track a consumer’s journey from first impression to purchase. Note that because streamers often exist as their own distinct walled gardens, advanced techniques such as multi-touch attribution are often needed to track a campaign’s performance across different networks. Last but not least, advertisers have a selection of innovative ad formats including shoppable ads that are more aimed at the bottom of the funnel rather than awareness. These also include formats not available in other channels such as overlays and less intrusive ads.
There are several players in CTV to keep an eye on, but Hulu is the biggest one in the US with $3.8 billion in projected ad revenues in 2024. The company was a first mover in building out an ad tier and live TV offering, so Hulu beat a lot of competitors to the punch when pitching for ad dollars. YouTube comes in second with $3.3 billion and has been aggressively building out its CTV infrastructure to grow that side of its ad business. Amazon has a few CTV products, including Fire Sticks, Fire TVs, Prime Video, and Freevee but is still very much a newer player that’s learning the ropes. Disney+ was able to leverage some of Hulu’s expertise as its corporate owner, but along with Netflix and Max, are still trying to find their footing in the ad-supported game. Notably, Apple TV+ doesn’t yet have a CTV offering, but this may change as the company invests more in digital advertising capabilities.
Newer Forms of Search
It’s no longer enough to have an SEO strategy in place for traditional search; in recent years voice and social search have emerged as popular alternatives to typing keywords into a search query to get answers. According to PwC, 65% of 25-49-year-olds speak to their voice-enabled devices at least once per day. Although voice-enabled search has been around for some time, recent breakthroughs and the wide adoption of smart speakers have accelerated this trend. In 2023, there were an estimated 200 million plus smart speakers in the U.S. Most smartphones, smart TVs, and an increasing number of connected devices feature voice search. In addition to the long runway of potential users, voice search is often faster and more convenient than typing into a search bar. Voice search is a critical opportunity to capture more organic search traffic, especially among this tech-savvy cohort of users who rely on smartphones and smart speakers to look for products and services. It’s important to note that while the foundational SEO strategies remain the same, voice search queries tend to be more conversational and closer to how we speak in real life. A text search might be phrased as “tacos near me” whereas a voice search might be something like “Where can I get the best tacos near me?” Voice search tends to shift focus toward the intent of the searcher as opposed to simply emphasizing keywords. Search engines also reward websites that optimize for voice searches, so investing in this channel can have positive effects on overall SEO and your site’s ranking.
Speaking of new forms of search, younger generations are turning to social media platforms for discovery as opposed to traditional search engines. Instagram is the top search engine for Gen Z with 67% of surveyed users claiming it as their first choice. TikTok was a close second with 62% and Google came in third with 61%. However, these numbers include YouTube, Google Maps, and Google Images which contribute a healthy amount of search traffic to Google, meaning Google Search is now a distant third for Gen Z. If we were to include Gen Alpha, these numbers would probably skew even heavier towards the social platforms. Although we don’t have official numbers, Google disclosed in 2022 that roughly 40% of youth use TikTok or Instagram to search for things like lunch spots rather than Google. Let’s be clear, we’re not saying this is the death of search engines like Google and Bing, but social media platforms are rising in the ranks as search tools across all demographic groups according to SOCI. This isn’t surprising since social platforms rely on algorithms to serve relevant content to users, so they’re naturally set up to be good search engines. Beyond personalization, social platforms tend to have more UGC and authentic content as opposed to Google results served to you by PPC ads. We expect to see this trend continue as younger generations (and even older ones) who grew up with social media increasingly rely on it for search.
Nano-Influencers: Small but Mighty
We’re not exactly sure when influencer marketing truly began, but the practice of companies using prominent figures and celebrities to endorse their products can be traced back to the late 19th century. Once social media gained traction in the early 2010s, the modern influencer was born on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and now TikTok. Today, they’ve become an integral part of our digital marketing ecosystem because brands want to leverage the communities and audiences those influencers have cultivated. We can loosely define influencers into a few categories:
Mega-influencers: influencers with over 1M followers, usually made up of celebrities, athletes, actors, rising stars, and other prominent public figures.
Macro-influencers usually have between 100K and 1M followers
Micro-influencers then are between 10K and 100K followers
Nano-influencers have the smallest audience, with somewhere between 1K and 10K followers.
Nano-influencers are a somewhat new addition to the influencer marketing world as their audiences have traditionally been seen as too small to make a difference. Many of us operate under the false assumption that the biggest names will be the most effective at promoting brands, but if we think about our own day-to-day purchase decisions, we’re often influenced by much smaller niche voices who are either part of our community or an expert that we found through research. These figures, with their smaller followings, are often seen as more trustworthy and relatable than the larger influencers who aren’t as approachable to the average consumer. This is because nano-influencers tend to be ordinary digital creators who have a knack for social media and have amassed a small audience along the way. Their followers consider them almost as peers because nano-influencers are highly authentic, presenting honest views of their lives as opposed to the high production value and glossy content from bigger influencers. The biggest benefit of working with nano-influencers is that they have a much higher engagement level than the other categories of influencers. This is because they have more time to respond and interact with their audience and develop meaningful connections. Nano-influencers generally inhabit a specific niche and have a deep understanding of their followers’ interests and preferences. This means they’re very skilled at creating highly specialized content that resonates deeply with their followers. This combination of high engagement rates and loyal audiences who trust the nano-influencer's recommendations translates into higher conversion rates when they endorse a product or service. Last, but not least, nano-influencers tend to be at the very beginning of their journey so they will be much more cost-effective to work with than bigger creators. Thanks to this lower cost, it’s much easier to get positive ROI on your nano-influencer campaigns without even taking into account the higher conversion rates. Partnering with these creators while they’re still up-and-coming allows for the brand and influencer to grow together and organically, even if they may require more coaching and mentoring upfront to get quality content. According to an internal survey conducted by influencer marketing agency Aspire, 70% of brands are already working with smaller creators. We expect to see this trend continue into the holiday season and beyond.
Data Privacy
Five years ago, data privacy was generally considered an afterthought; something your legal team dealt with that wasn’t on the forefront of our minds. Today, that’s changed dramatically as data privacy has become a priority for regulators, consumers, and businesses. Privacy laws such as the EU’s GDPR and California’s CCPA regulations spurred a chain reaction of other countries and US states passing their own laws. Examples include Brazil’s General Law for Data Protection, Egypt’s Law No. 151, and Canada’s Digital Charter Implementation Act. As of May 2024, 17 US states have passed data privacy regulations, with several more expected to join them. It’s clear the legislative pace will only pick up, but we’ve also seen regulators take a stronger stance on enforcement actions. In 2023, companies were fined over 2 billion euros for violations of the GDPR (more than the past 3 years combined). Large tech companies including Meta, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter) have been fined over $3 billion since the passing of GDPR. In the US, the FTC is currently investigating several companies over their use of sensitive data, including geo-location, health, and children’s privacy. One of the most notable cases involves Kochava, a geolocation data broker that the FTC alleges has been selling data that can be used to trace the movements of individuals to and from sensitive locations such as health clinics, shelters, addiction recovery centers, etc. Depending on the outcome of this case, the use of geolocation data may be severely restricted going forward for targeting purposes.
Another regulatory area to keep an eye on is the development of AI policy by governments worldwide. After ChatGPT exploded in popularity, governments became wary about the need for large amounts of training data to train AI models which could infringe on data privacy. Italy temporarily banned ChatGPT in March 2023 because OpenAI was using personal data to train the model without asking for consent (including children’s data because there weren’t age verification tools implemented at that point). OpenAI did create a form for European users to opt out of their personal data being used to train the model and created an age verification tool, but this did little to assuage the EU’s concerns about data privacy. The European Data Protection Board created a ChatGPT task force to develop suitable AI regulations, with several other countries including the US, UK, and China drafting their own guidelines.
In late 2023, Google claimed that its plan to completely deprecate third-party cookies was on track for the second half of 2024. However, in April 2024 the company announced that they would be further delaying the sunset of third-party cookies until some time in 2025 (although the exact timing is yet to be determined). Why? The company acknowledged that regulators (especially the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority) and advertisers still had key concerns about the implications of removing cookies. The CMA is concerned that transitioning to the Privacy Sandbox will only strengthen Google’s position at the expense of its competitors. At the same time, agencies and marketers can rest a little easier knowing they have more time to figure out a plan to replace third-party cookies in their strategies. We won’t be holding our breath on when Google will actually phase out cookies, but expect the company to figure out a way to launch Privacy Sandbox with the blessing of regulators. Google still expects to complete this in 2025, but would anyone be surprised at all if they kept delaying it for a few more years? Only time will tell!
Can you believe we’re already over halfway through the year? Before you know it, it’ll be Labor Day, then Halloween, Thanksgiving; I mean it’s basically almost Christmas if you think about it. As we get closer to 2025, the marketing landscape continues to undergo a transformative journey, driven by new technologies, evolving social media platforms and heightened awareness of data privacy, among several other factors. GenAI has emerged as a truly exciting innovation, enabling marketers to create personalized content at an unprecedented scale and speed. Imagine having a virtual assistant who not only understands your brand but also crafts compelling campaigns while you sit back and enjoy your coffee.
Meanwhile, social media platforms are starting to see glimmers of a world where Facebook no longer dominates the advertising landscape. Just like in Formula 1, platforms are constantly jockeying for pole position to fight for marketer’s advertising dollars. Platforms including LinkedIn and YouTube are making big pushes for relevance as user behavior shifts to adapt to new features and algorithm changes that challenge us to keep up and stay agile. In the past few years, we’ve seen some seismic changes in social media including the rebranding of Twitter to X (plus a variety of other changes instituted since the acquisition led by Elon Musk), a potential US ban of TikTok, and the introduction of Threads to rival X to name just a few. Beyond social, new search methodologies (voice, social) show much promise as opportunities to gain an edge over the competition for the savviest marketers.
Data privacy is also taking center stage, reshaping how marketers approach targeting and other strategies. Although Google has yet again postponed the phasing out of third-party cookies to early 2025, there is no doubt that the average consumer is increasingly wary of their personal information being used by marketers. In this two-part article, we’ll cover the top marketing trends to keep an eye on going into 2025.
The Rise of LinkedIn
Believe it or not, the platform best known for uploading your resume and job hunting has been one of the hottest movers and shakers since the pandemic upended our lives. In 2023, the platform reached 1 billion global users (including an impressive 211M+ in the United States) and 500 million newsletter subscribers. LinkedIn doesn’t share daily or monthly average users, but the company reported that in the spring of 2023, users shared 41% more content than they had in the same period in 2021. That kind of organic growth is hard to fathom for a 22-year-old platform, but LinkedIn has managed to position itself as one of the last places to have professional and increasingly personal conversations due to the changes at X (more on this later). Users who previously would have posted on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter are gravitating towards LinkedIn. Why? Terrified of TikTok eating their lunch, Meta has prioritized their products to emphasize interests instead of friends, moving personal sharing to semiprivate realms such as Stories or direct messages. X on the other hand, has simply become too unstable for many advertisers. Algorithmic changes, the introduction of the paid blue badge, amongst several other unpopular changes have caused brands to flee, bringing their ad dollars with them (a year after the acquisition, X’s ad revenues were down 55% YOY). LinkedIn also saw a huge boost during the pandemic when our personal and work lives became increasingly blurred. Workers felt more comfortable posting vacation pictures and emotional stories, content that previously would’ve been less socially acceptable, often captioned with a hail-mary, vague mention of something work-related (in case the boss sees). The product team at LinkedIn has ridden this wave, introducing new tools for creators and pushing “knowledge-based” content to great success.
Advertisers have taken note. While B2B marketers have long utilized LinkedIn in their campaigns, B2C marketers are increasing their spending, driving up ad prices and revenues (in some cases by as much as 30%). Business Insider expects LinkedIn’s US ad revenues to increase +14.1% to almost $5B by the end of 2024. While that’s only a small fraction of Meta and Google’s market share, it’s more than double that of Snap and around 4 times that of X. Despite the sky-high prices of impressions on LinkedIn, marketers report very impressive ROI on their campaigns (as much as 20% ROI). Penry Price, LinkedIn’s VP of Marketing Solutions, said that brands are investing more ad spend into LinkedIn because the platform is filled with decision-makers and key stakeholders in buying processes. We expect this trend to continue through the rest of 2024 and into 2025; as Bloomberg so eloquently put it, LinkedIn is cool now.
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The Race to Replace Twitter
In October 2022, Elon Musk officially acquired Twitter and immediately began dramatically remolding the company to fit his vision. He started by firing several senior executives at Twitter including CEO Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal, eventually laying off 80% of Twitter’s 7,500+ employees. He famously declared that only employees who wanted to engage in “maniacal work” should stay, leading to the resignations of hundreds of staffers (including a large chunk of the trust and safety team, spurring the flight of several large advertisers from the platform). Musk also took Twitter private, officially delisting it from the New York Stock Exchange in November ‘22, giving him the freedom to make changes as he saw fit without having to report to a board or shareholders. He went on to overhaul the verified system by launching a paid $ 8-per-month subscription, allowing anyone to obtain a blue check mark. This led to a wave of impersonations of public figures and brands, leading to mass confusion and misinformation. Musk also controversially reinstituted accounts of several notorious accounts that had previously been banned, including former president Donald Trump. The biggest change came in the summer of 2023 when Musk rebranded Twitter to X seemingly overnight in an attempt to turn the platform into more of an “everything” app similar to WhatsApp. Although it remains to be seen if these changes will benefit X in the long run, there’s no doubt that advertisers have fled the platform in droves. Reports that brand ads were being shown next to controversial and offensive content made marketing teams uncomfortable with continued spending on X (perhaps because the brand safety team had been axed). A year after Musk bought Twitter, ad revenue was down 55% year over year. Musk later named Linda Yaccarino, a former executive at NBCUniversal, as the new CEO of X in a bid to reassure and woo advertisers back to the platform.
This fall from grace for X has prompted a race to provide an alternative space for users fleeing “Twitter 2.0” for greener pastures. Meta, always keen to take competitor market share, launched Threads in July of 2023 as their take on a text-based social media platform. Threads started hot with a reported 30 million sign-ups within 24 hours of release before hitting 100 million members within the 1-week mark. Members aren’t the same thing as active users, but the latest update from Meta shows Threads has 130 million monthly active users. X currently has 550 million monthly active users, so Threads still has a way to go before dethroning the king, but Meta has made remarkable progress in just one year. Leadership has stated many times that they believe Threads has the potential to become the next billion-user platform. Although there are several other players in the space such as Mastodon and Bluesky, Meta’s expertise in monetizing social media platforms and partnering with advertisers makes them the smart bet to eventually come out on top of this race.
During the pandemic, TikTok emerged as a powerhouse and social media darling as the platform raced to over a billion monthly active users worldwide by September 2021. TikTok is largely responsible for the popularity of short-form video content in the US, primarily based on its powerful recommendation algorithm that’s adept at showing users more of what they enjoy. Owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, TikTok has courted plenty of controversy in the past as politicians have accused of it being a tool for propaganda and a national security risk. Many American lawmakers are worried that the Chinese regime could “weaponize” TikTok and spy on US citizens including military and government personnel. Many universities and government agencies at the local, state, and federal levels began enacting bans on the app from official work devices. The Trump administration attempted to force a sale, but efforts were largely unsuccessful until April 2024 when President Biden signed the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.” The bill stipulated that ByteDance has 9 months (until January 2025) to find a buyer for TikTok with the possibility of a 3-month extension if meaningful progress is made toward a sale. As of the writing of this article (summer 2024), TikTok has responded by suing the US government on First Amendment grounds. The case will almost certainly take more than a year to resolve, but as marketers, we can’t afford to be caught without a contingency plan in case TikTok does get banned by early January of next year. Creators are already beefing up their Instagram Reels presences in response, but YouTube Shorts has emerged as a promising contender to the big two. In early 2023 Shorts crossed the 50 billion daily views mark, which although still short of Meta’s combined 140 billion daily views across Facebook and Instagram, is starting to garner significant traction with advertisers. Interestingly enough, YouTube seems committed to longer-form content with the intent of using Shorts to drive engagement towards that content. The company is intent on chasing TV ad dollars instead of just digital ones given that YouTube owns more than 50% of ad-supported streaming watch time on TVs. This runs counter to the fact that Shorts isn’t designed for a TV experience (it’s optimized for mobile), but it’s useful for creators to have the option to create shorter content that can boost traffic to longer videos. While we’ll have to see who comes out on top of this short-form video war, this signals that YouTube believes its core value is in the longer video content that’s historically been its bread and butter.
The Elephant in the Room: GenAI
We would be remiss to talk about marketing trends without mentioning GenAI. Ever since ChatGPT was launched in late 2022, marketers have been salivating over the potential of using GenAI to create text, images, video, and audio. With GenAI, marketers can create personalized content at scale, producing tailored ads, social media posts, email campaigns, etc. that will resonate more deeply with target audiences. These AI-driven tools can analyze vast amounts of customer data to generate insights into behavior, preferences, and trends, allowing for more precise segmentation and messaging. Beyond that, GenAI can significantly streamline the content creation process, reducing the need to hire expensive agencies for good old-fashioned photo and video shoots. It can write decent copy, design graphics, and even generate videos, freeing up human resources to focus on strategy and creative oversight. GenAI has even empowered us to conduct A/B testing and optimize campaigns faster and more effectively than before. However, while content creation was the first widely adopted use case, another development could be more impactful to a wider range of users. In May 2024, Google rolled out AI Overviews: its AI-powered search engine (formerly known as Search Generative Experience). AI Overviews is designed to improve user interaction and engagement by offering conversational and contextually relevant search results in a UI similar to ChatGPT’s prompt system. When users search on Google using AI Overviews, they will no longer see highly-ranked links first. Instead, they will first get a summarized overview of the prompt before scrolling down to see which links contributed to that answer. As a result, AI Overviews tends to prioritize summarized content over publisher links which now get placements below the Overviews chatbox. Publishers have seen a substantial decline of up to 60% in organic search traffic, translating to an estimated $2 billion loss in ad revenue within Google’s pilot version of AI Overviews. It’s too soon to say for sure, but the release of Overviews may upend all of our traditional SEO strategies if we’re to stay relevant in this new era. Since GenAI can generate large amounts of low-quality content, we’ll likely need to focus on high-quality content that provides clear and valuable information to get our content featured in Contextual Summaries. It remains to be seen if SEO tactics will be as effective if getting highly-ranked pages is not nearly as impactful due to AI Overviews eating up most of the real estate on screen.
2024 has shaped up to be an exciting year already, and we can’t wait to see what 2025 brings us. Is your team keeping an eye on these trends? If so, watch out for Part 2 of our 2025 Marketing Trends deep dive, coming soon!
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