How Green Building Supply grows revenue by 137% with attribution model using Snowplow

Background

Green Building Supply (GBS) is a niche building company that sells eco-friendly building products online. With sustainability front-of-mind for today’s environmentally-conscious consumers, the company knew there was a strong market out there. Yet they were competing with well-established, massive brands.

By enlisting the help of digital growth agency Big Tree, and drawing upon their expertise with Snowplow Behavioral Data Platform, GBS has new visibility across a long and complex customer journey—and is using it to transform the customer experience and marketing performance.

Challenge

To better compete with larger organizations, improve ad performance, and optimize the user experience, GBS needed to overcome key challenges, including:

• Acquiring the right traffic to the website
• Optimizing the consumer experience to guide them through the customer journey to purchase
• Measuring the success of digital marketing efforts to identify the greatest opportunities for improvement across the full customer journey

The quest to measure the efficacy of ads was complicated by the fact that customers could order samples online. But GDP couldn’t track how many of these ‘sample’ customers turned into real customers. They might get 300 new customers per month, but only USD$500 in revenue. When actual orders came in months later, either over the phone or online, GBS could not attribute it to the Google Ad that initially drove the customer to request a sample.

The team wanted a way to track which ads led to actual orders—not just the ‘micro-conversions’ where customers would order samples worth a few dollars each.

Solution

When Big Tree was brought in to overhaul the GBS marketing effort and introduce next-level digital marketing, they knew how to approach the challenges GBS faced. To kick things off, Big Tree worked directly on the GBS website to improve the user experience and guide the customer journey on-site to get prospective customers further down the purchase funnel.

Then, digging into how GBS had used Google Ads, Big Tree discovered that the company had managed to break even and add some volume to their business using ads. But the potential for much bigger growth and visibility was clear.

Big Tree convinced GBS to run controlled Google Ads experiments to prove that the ads contributed much more to GBS sales than Google Analytics could show. Because users could come to GBS through many paths—for example, an ad, a purchase from an ad, multiple times through different devices, or multiple people within the same household—Big Tree wanted to stitch all these divergent pieces of data together to clarify the connection between sample-order data and sales data. They just needed to know how to find out which samples could be tied to eventual purchases.

To unravel the complexity—particularly given that most GBS orders come to completion in a matter of months rather than days, with many mitigating factors affecting how to attribute marketing spend—Big Tree used data created with Snowplow. They could track complex multi-channel, multi-device customer journeys, completely revolutionizing their end-to-end attribution assumptions and seeing the full customer journey over even the longest sales cycle.

Once we got the Snowplow data there was this, ‘Oh my god!’ moment … it was fuller, richer and took into account all the different data sources. The difference was huge when you started to look at the full customer journey and stitch it all together.”

DAVID SINTON | CO-FOUNDER AT BIG TREE ONLINE

Results

Using a mix of data created with Snowplow, Google Ads data and Call Tracking Metrics data, GBS can now see which campaigns are delivering revenue. They have full visibility into the customer journey, from sample to actual purchase. And, with user data stitching, they can see that many different data sources can be attributable to the same person.

Armed with these insights, GBS has confidently quadrupled digital ad spend. This has delivered:

• +106% conversion rate
• +137% revenue
• +1400% paid revenue
• +65% organic revenue
• 13x increase in new customers acquired through ads

As Green Building Supply continues their rapid growth, they plan to continue using multi-channel data to optimize both their site and their digital marketing efforts. And, as they grow more data-driven, they will likely implement easily accessible data dashboarding to help them visualize the insights they gain.

With Snowplow data, we set sales records five months in a row from when we started the ad tests.”

AARON HIRSHBERG | COO AT GREEN BUILDING SUPPLY

How you can get started with Snowplow

To learn more about how Snowplow can empower your organization with behavioral data creation, book in a chat with our team today. Alternatively, Try Snowplow is our free, easy-to-use version of our technology, which allows you to create your own behavioral data in under 30 mins.

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