Rockerboxer Roundup: Sameen Karim on New Visitor Analytics

In our next installment of our newest blog series, “Rockerboxer Roundup,” we’re asking Head of Product Sameen Karim what marketers at direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands need to know to better measure the effectiveness of their top-of-funnel marketing and drive new visitors to their website.

Keep reading for the full Q&A, and if you'd like to dive deeper into this topic, make sure to sign up for our recent webinar on-demand. There Sameen and I discuss why visibility into the sources of your web visitors is crucial for e-commerce sales and how to find out which marketing channels are bringing the most people to your brand for the first time.

Rockerboxer Roundup: Sameen Karim

1. Tell us about yourself, Sameen, and your role at Rockerbox.

Hey there! I'm the Head of Product here at Rockerbox, and I've been leading the development of our New Visitor Analytics feature. In my time here, I've worked in a variety of roles from customer solutions to engineering to sales.

Previously, I was the co-founder and CEO of Eventable (which was acquired by Rockerbox), and before that worked in web design and digital marketing. I've been in marketing software for over eight years now, and I love using data to tell stories and solve challenging problems.

2. Let’s get on the same page. What do we mean by top-of-funnel marketing?

Any marketing that is targeted at users who haven't heard of your brand before—awareness, branding, prospecting—counts as top-of-funnel.

The goal of this marketing isn't to get someone to immediately buy your product. It's to share your brand story and create a meaningful connection with the user. As your company grows, this will need to be on channels with larger and larger reach.

This diagram depicts a customer's journey based on their types of marketing touchpoints, the actions they took because of that ad exposure and the various devices they were using along the way.

3. How is measurement of the top-of-funnel different from other down-funnel marketing strategies, like retargeting?

There are a couple of key factors that make measuring top-of-funnel significantly more difficult: larger audiences, harder to track channels and longer time to purchase.

Larger Audiences: By its nature, the top of your funnel will have more people because you'll be casting a wide net to find as many people as possible and expose them to your brand. This volume makes it harder to keep tabs on users and exacerbates the issues with a fragmented approach.

Harder to Track Channels: The channels with the most reach are often the hardest to measure. OTT and Linear TV are prime examples of these channels that cast a wide net, and as a result are quite expensive. They're perfect for top-of-funnel, but can be challenging to justify the cost unless you have the right measurement in place.

Longer Time to Purchase: As your marketing budget is focused on more branding and awareness, the quick time to conversion that bottom-of-funnel channels deliver won't hold up. Taking the customer through the journey of learning about your brand and your product takes time. This makes it even more difficult to measure these channels, especially if you need to wait weeks or even months for a person to convert in order to attribute your marketing.

4. What are the biggest challenges marketers face with brand awareness today?

With an ever-expanding number of platforms and ad creative formats, a diversified strategy is often the best way to scale your customer acquisition efforts. However, with more channels comes more complexity, and an increasingly fragmented view of your marketing performance.

With more companies competing for consumers' attention, it can be difficult to stand out amongst the crowd. Having the right channel targeted at the right audience with the right messaging takes time to refine.

5. What are things to keep in mind before running a top-of-funnel marketing campaign?

First and foremost, if you can't measure it, you can't optimize it. So it's really important to have your measurement plan in place and ensure your team is aligned on how it will be used and the goals you want to achieve.

Be ready to make decisions quickly. Top-of-funnel channels can be expensive, so you need to be able to measure the performance within days of launch. Don't be afraid to cut and reallocate spend aggressively as you see the early results come in.

Lastly, be prepared for a longer time to conversion. Your marketing is reaching audiences who need education and guidance, so it will take them longer to make a purchase. Communicate this with your stakeholders and use leading indicators, like new visitors, to prove performance early on.

6. Tell us about the advantages of Rockerbox’s New Visitors Analytics. How does it solve the challenges you mentioned?

The first time a person comes to your website is extremely important in the customer journey. It is the moment that someone goes from passively seeing your brand message to actively viewing your website to learn more about your company.

New Visitor Analytics gives you an accurate count of those new visitors, thanks to Rockerbox's first-party tracking and identity resolution. You can see a unified view of all the offline and online marketing that's leading people to visit—both at a high level and on a granular level down to the creative. And with our native spend integrations, you can measure your cost per new visitor as you scale your campaigns.

Using the insights available in New Visitor Analytics, you can see how your top-of-funnel channels are performing, immediately after launch. By viewing the volume of new visitors driven, combined with the cost and on-site engagement of those visitors, you can quickly determine whether a campaign is performing well or not.

Rockerbox's New Visitor Analytics displays top-of-funnel insights, which you can filter down to each individual ad campaign.

7. What’s the most exciting element of New Visitor Analytics?

Access to fast, accurate insights about their top-of-funnel marketing is a huge win for brands. The ability to make decisions quickly, especially as we're getting into the holiday season, will help marketers make smarter decisions and optimize their top-of-funnel.

In order to win in this increasingly competitive market, brands need to confidently invest in their top-of-funnel and be able to optimize as much as possible. We're very excited about the possibilities New Visitor Analytics opens up for DTC marketers!

Rockerbox Brings All the New Visitors to Your Yard Website

As Black Friday rapidly approaches, every marketer's goal is to attract more and more new visitors to dramatically expand their reach and acquire happy customers. If you want to learn how to maximize your top-of-funnel marketing, check out our on-demand webinar on New Visitor Analytics and schedule a demo with one of our experts today.