About the client

The client is one of the largest manufacturers of luxury window treatments in the US. They have been in business for over 30 years. The identity of the client is protected for privacy purposes.

Summary of what I did

Website redesign
WordPress development
SEO
Google Ads
Analytics with Salesforce integration

Highlights

Doubled monthly leads and sales volume within 12 months (without increasing ad spend)
40% decrease in Google Ads CPA (cost per acquisition) within 6 months
18% growth in monthly organic search engine traffic within 12 months
30% more accurate marketing attribution data in Salesforce

The problem

For several decades, this client had focused on selling their luxury window treatments through partnerships with large home improvement store chains. This allowed them to grow their factory operations to an impressive scale, but they wanted to focus more on selling direct to consumers online. This strategic decision would help ensure their future by being less dependent on their partners and increasing profit margins.

They had been working with a marketing agency for several years focusing on Google Ads and advertisements in print publications. They weren’t achieving the type of growth they wanted in direct sales, and they weren’t confident in their Google Ads ROI (return on investment).

Growth strategy

This project started with a comprehensive assessment of their digital marketing including brand identity, website, digital marketing channels, and analytics. We developed a quick and feasible 12-month growth plan that included:

Minor rebrand to modernize the visual identity
Positioning strategy and core brand messaging
Website redesign to improve SEO and conversion rates
Improve Google Ads performance
Analytics upgrade with Salesforce integration

New website strategy

The client’s previous website was small and lacking in all key areas—design, content, and SEO. The quality of the website wasn’t positioning their brand as an industry leader, even though they were the largest manufacturer in their region.

After we strengthened their positioning and core brand messaging, we designed the website around their newly crystalized communications strategy. We supported their messaging with high-quality content and social proof.

Designing product landing pages that would achieve high conversion rates from Google Ads and Meta Ads was also a key part of the new website strategy. While the old website was a brochure-style website, the new website was designed to be a lead generation machine integrated with their digital marketing channels.

SEO strategy

The client did not have local storefronts to sell their products. They were focusing on generating leads through their website and selling through a team of in-home sales consultants who covered a huge region spanning multiple states.

Without local storefronts, they were at a disadvantage for SEO for many of their target keywords where Google showed local pack results featuring businesses with storefronts nearest to users. However, many of their target keywords were not featuring local pack results. Either way, there were plenty of opportunities to gain organic traffic from their target keywords regardless of whether Google showed local pack results or not.

The client’s SEO competition was steep including several established window treatment brands as well as large home improvement store chains. Despite being one of the giants in their industry, the client never worked on link building in the past, so they didn’t have a very strong domain authority.

My SEO strategy focused on bottom funnel keywords with the highest search volumes, and we expanded the number of pages on the site to target more of these keywords. We also published blog articles to target higher funnel longtail keywords, but the blog was never the main SEO strategy because that type of traffic doesn’t convert nearly as well as bottom funnel keywords.

SEO results

Below is a chart showing their organic search engine traffic in the 2 years after we launched the new website. Like many businesses, they are affected by seasonality and always have the strongest sales in Q2 and Q3 with dips during the fall/winter months. When comparing their YoY (year-over-year) organic traffic for each quarter, there was 18% growth on average. That growth was primarily in bottom funnel keywords where we focused our SEO strategy. That type of growth isn’t easy for a website that had already been around for over a decade.

Improving Google Ads performance

The client had previously partnered with a marketing agency for Google Ads. I took over the account and made significant changes right away. Too much of the ad spend was going towards keywords that weren’t an exact match to their products. By cleaning up their keyword targeting and utilizing more negative keywords, the quality of their search terms went from 60% to 90% within a couple months.

The other major change was improving their bidding strategy in order to leverage Google Ads AI. This required entire account restructuring including their campaigns, ad sets, and ads.

All the changes I made quickly resulted in a lower CPA (cost per acquisition) which was based on lead forms and other direct contact methods. Their previous Google Ads CPA was $450. Their new CPA was $260. That’s 40% decrease in CPA.

Most importantly, the client confirmed that their new Google Ads leads were qualified, and they were closing 50% of those leads! That’s an amazing close rate, and much of the credit goes to their sales team and sales process that they have perfected over decades. This company just needed someone to bring them qualified leads, and they could handle the rest!

Here’s a basic snapshot of how their Google Ads ROI worked out:

$260 CPA (cost per lead)
50% close rate
$5,000 CLV (average customer lifetime value)

The high profit margin from Google Ads gave them the confidence they needed to keep investing in Google Ads to help drive their growth. The chart below is based on the first 15 months after I took over Google Ads management, without increasing monthly ad spend during this time.

Solving marketing attribution problems in Salesforce

The client wanted what every savvy business owner wants… one-to-one sales attribution. In other words, they wanted to know which marketing efforts led to each website lead/customer/sale. They were using Salesforce as their CRM and wanted to have this marketing attribution data available right in their Saleforce reports.

The client was advertising through many channels including Google Ads, social media, and multiple forms of offline print advertising. Multichannel marketing always creates marketing attribution challenges. Although conversion tracking is available through Google Ads and Google Analytics, there were a large percentage of leads and sales coming in without knowing exactly where they came from.

First-party server-side tracking with WordPress

As a digital marketer, not knowing where leads and sales are coming from is even more frustrating for me than it is for my clients. I’ve spent a ton of time trying to find ways to improve analytics and marketing attribution. Right now, the best thing working for me is first-party server-side tracking. This is one of the reasons I built this client’s website with WordPress. Having control over the website’s code and database, I was able to set up custom server-side tracking that doesn’t rely on third party tools.

In short, my solution uses both cookies and local storage to identify users and store their marketing attribution history server side in the WordPress database. When someone submits a lead form, their marketing attribution history is pulled from the database and added to the form submission. The form submissions are integrated with their CRM (Salesforce in this case) so that each customer in the CRM has their marketing attribution data in a field that can then be filtered and sorted in CRM reports. This solution works beautifully.

This visual shows an example of the full story that businesses need in order to understand their marketing attribution accurately. It may not show up this pretty in CRMs, but the data is there.

In this example, the customer had three different marketing channel touchpoints in their journey including Meta Ads, Google Ads, and email. It’s important to give shared credit to all marketing touchpoints. Google Analytics and other analytics tools often lose older touchpoints due to data tracking limitations. You may only be seeing the first or last touchpoint in reports.

How my solution works better than common analytics setups

Common analytics setups include Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Meta Ads, CRMs, etc. I use these tools as well. However, browsers can specifically target these well-known tools and block their cookies and tracking events, or expire them early. In addition to browsers hindering tracking efforts, data is often lost due to user-specific settings such as clearing cookies or using ad blockers.

My custom-coded solution for WordPress works independently of Google Tag Manager and uses both first-party cookies and local storage which is more resilient to being blocked or deleted. My solution doesn’t rely on firing Javascript events to a pixel that could be blocked… the data is stored in the WordPress database and collected directly in the lead form submissions through server-side programming that browsers can’t interfere with.

After implementing my solution for several clients with WordPress sites, their marketing attribution data has improved by 10-30%! The amount of improvement varies based on the amount of website traffic/leads and the existing analytics setup. Even 10-20% improvement makes a big difference when it comes to calculating marketing channel ROI and making the right marketing decisions.

Don’t trust what customers answer in contact forms

It’s common for businesses to have a question in their contact forms—How did you find us? This is a super simple way to collect marketing attribution data… but is it really accurate?

This client was previously using these answers as a key part of their marketing attribution process and decision making. I revealed that the answers were <60% accurate for this client’s primary lead form!

There are many reasons people don’t accurately answer the question—How did you find us?

People are in a hurry and just answer anything. They don’t care about helping businesses with marketing attribution.
There were multiple marketing touchpoints. For example, they clicked a Facebook ad two weeks ago and then clicked a Google ad today. What is the correct answer in this case? Facebook or Google?
Answers of “Google” don’t tell you whether they clicked an ad, organic result, or business profile.
People forget their marketing touchpoints such as clicking on an Instagram post more than 7 months ago.
People just lie. 🤷‍♂️

Here is a small snapshot of their website lead form submissions that I analyzed in a spreadsheet. Notice how there is a column for how each customer answered—How did you find us?—and there is also a column with their tracked marketing sources. I highlighted in yellow the form entries with mismatching answers that didn’t give accurate credit to paid advertising channels.

It’s funny seeing how many people answered differently than their tracked marketing data. After reviewing hundreds of leads collected over several months, I found that:

40% of total leads answered differently than their tracked data
30% of leads with Google Ads in their tracked data didn’t mention Google in their answer
50% of leads with social media in their tracked data didn’t mention social media in their answer

How do I know that my tracked data is accurate? The code and logic behind tracking visitors who come from marketing channels such as Google Ads or Meta Ads is straightforward. There’s not much room for error outside of edge cases such as someone who clicked on a link that had incorrect UTM tags. That kind of thing happens, but it’s usually a very small percentage of your overall traffic. At the end of the day, I trust tracked attribution data more than what people say. 💯 If a user was timestamped landing on the website from a Meta ad on a specific date, than that probably really happened.

Why is the discrepency especially high for leads attributed to social media? I believe it’s largely due to the fact that social media is often remarketing which targets users who already visited the website. In these cases, social media often wasn’t the first marketing touchpoint. People could be answering any of their marketing touchpoints. Even if people try to answer honestly, the answer is often more complicated than selecting a single response. Whether you value the first or last marketing touchpoint most, it’s important to see all touchpoints and give shared credit in your marketing ROI analysis.

Despite the inaccuracies of using the question—How did you find us?—in contact forms, I still recommend it to many clients. I even ask the question on my own contact form. The reason is that some responses may shed light on marketing channels that can’t be tracked digitally. For example, print publication ads, billboards, radio, and referral sources are difficult to track digitally. I believe it’s good to collect data from as many sources as possible and stitch everything together for the most complete picture possible.

Previously, this client was relying on marketing attribution data in Salesforce that came from a combination of Google Analytics and what people answered in contact forms. By implementing my custom server-side tracking to their website, I improved marketing attribution accuracy by 30% in Salesforce. It changed their marketing ROI analysis—especially for social media channels—and helped them make better marketing budget allocation decisions.

In conclusion

This decades-old window treatment company wanted to drive long-term growth in direct leads and sales through their website.

My primary focus during the inital 12-month engagement was to:

Improve performance in Google Ads
Improve SEO
Improve website design
Improve marketing attribution in Salesforce reports

Within 12 months:

Doubled monthly leads and sales volume (without increasing monthly ad spend)
40% decrease in Google Ads CPA (cost per acquisition)
18% growth in monthly organic search engine traffic
30% more accurate marketing attribution data in Salesforce

Your call to action

If your digital marketing isn’t generating the type of growth you want, you should consider my Growth Strategy Consulting. It’s the perfect starting point to create a real growth plan that leads sustained, long-term growth. If you’re specifically looking for better performance in pay-per-click, I offer 20 years of experience as a Google Ads Specialist.