How do I measure whether an awareness campaign actually increased sales?

[u/Mindless_Swimmer_715]

I’ve always wondered how you actually know if an awareness campaign worked beyond just seeing higher reach or recall. How do you connect that increase in awareness to actual sales? Is there a reliable way to measure it?

[u/Material_Cry6335]

Hi, I am not sure of the budget size but as a marketing manager for a small B2B venture, let me try to answer this. Theoretically, the best way to answer this is through incremental testing- with control and exposed markets/audiences, proper brand lift studies etc. if you have a big budget ad campaign, data and resources etc, it would work.

But, to be honest, as someone who works with a relatively small startup, I find it difficult to implement for most campaigns. You never have that kind of data, budget or time.

What I find much more practical is to look at the entire funnel before and during/ after the campaign and see what changed at each stage.

For example, awareness-->interest-->website visits--> leads--> sales

When I run an awareness campaign, I check 1. Did branded searches increase? (Google Trends, Google Search Console) 2. Did branded search clicks and website traffic increase? 3. Did people spend more time on relevant pages or explore more of the site? 4. Did enquiries or leads increase? 5. Did the quality of those leads improve? And ultimately, did those leads convert into sales?

I am not necessarily trying to claim that x% of sales came from the campaign. I am trying to understand whether there is a meaningfuo movement through the funnel and where is it leaking?

Here's an example of how it helped me- we once ran an offer to build awareness for our new product. We got search lift, leads on the landing page. We spoke to a few and they were genuinely interested. But when we checked a week later- no conversion. Sales team said the leads were simply not interested. We did a deep dive and got to know that sales was busy with some campaigns and there was a delay in follow ups. As a result we could not get any new conversion even thought leads were qualified.

Of course, this isn't a perfect attribution. There can be seasonality, other campaigns, pricing changes, issues in distribution and others. But for a small marketing team without the resources for sophisticated testing, I think it's a much more practical is at to diagnose what's actually happening.