Richard Kohberger explains why a separate existing customer campaign often creates tracking problems instead of solving them. Accurate attribution matters because it shapes how you spend on acquisition versus retention, and mixing channels makes it impossible to know which one actually drove the sale.
What's going on everybody? It's Richard Kohberger here, the blue collar nerd. So I think at this point we can all agree that tracking your marketing is important. You need to understand how much a particular marketing campaign is bringing in so that you can compare it to how much that marketing campaign is costing you to run. And therefore you can make an informed decision about where your marketing dollars are best spent. But what we don't all agree on is an existing customer campaign. This is a campaign where some companies will attribute every single job and every single revenue dollar that comes in from a customer that's used that company before, regardless of how that customer actually contacted the company. PPC ad Existing customer Social media ad Existing customer Organic web result Existing customer ad above the urinal at the local Wendy's Existing customer. And in my opinion, this is not only unnecessary, but detrimental to your marketing data and your ability to make informed marketing related decisions. See, the power of marketing data comes from its legitimacy and its granularity. And an existing customer campaign sacrifices both of those things. It sacrifices legitimacy because you're not tracking what actually happened. If an existing customer calls you off of a PPC ad, that's how they contacted you. That's what actually happened. But if you change the campaign to existing customer, even though they called you off of a PPC ad, you're no longer tracking what actually happened. You are tracking what you assume might have happened if that PPC ad wasn't there. You're just assuming that they would have contacted you another way. But you don't know that Client retention is a big part of business and it's important to know how to how much client retention is costing you. Just as important as it is to know how much client acquisition is costing you. Which brings me to the second sacrifice, granularity. If you throw every single existing customer into this one existing customer bucket, then you have no idea how they actually contacted you. And so therefore you have no way of knowing how much you are actually spending on client retention. Now, to be clear, it is important to know how many jobs and revenue dollars a campaign is bringing in from from new customers versus existing ones. That is important information, but you don't need a separate campaign for that. You can see that in reporting. For example, here's the Marketing Dashboard report. And as you can see, we have separate KPIs for both new and existing customers. Let's take an example. Let's say that you have a PPC ad and when you look at the reporting you see that 80% of the customers who are booking jobs off of that PPC ad are pre existing customers. And you suspect that if you were to cut that ad, those pre existing customers would still call you off of the organic search result. Well, if you're right, then you would be able to cut that ad and reduce your client retention spend and potentially allocate that money elsewhere. So you could temporarily turn off that campaign to test your theory. And if after doing that, you see a spike in your job volume and revenue coming in from your organization organic listing and your overall job volume and revenue stays about where you would have expected it to be had you not cut that ad, then congratulations, you were right. But if you cut that PPC ad and then don't see a spike on your organic listing and overall job volume and revenue from your existing customers starts to decline a little bit, then you know that that PPC ad was providing you a serious value. It was providing you with client retention. So either you need to keep that ad up or figure out why it is that your existing customers are finding you that way. But you can't make these decisions if you don't have the data. These are important insights into your client journey. So by throwing every single existing customer into one bucket instead of tracking what actually happened, you're now blind to how your campaigns are affecting your client retention. And you're liable to make some really poor decisions because of it. If you make revenue from a customer who contacted you from a particular marketing campaign, then you owe that revenue to that marketing campaign. It doesn't matter if that customer has used you before or not. Client retention is difficult. It's not a given. And it doesn't make sense to track what ifs instead of tracking what is actually happening. It blinds you and completely takes away your ability to experiment and understand what is happening as a result of your actions. Okay, but what if your company has an old phone number, the phone number that they started with and advertised with before tracking numbers became so common and a bunch of your existing customers have that number saved and maybe it's still hanging out on a few vans or something? Well, in that case, I would have a dedicated campaign for it. I would call it something like legacy number or mainline. Just don't call it existing customers because that's not what it is. Just because somebody calls in on that number doesn't necessarily guarantee that they're an existing customer. And just. Just because somebody is an existing customer certainly doesn't guarantee that they're going to call in on that number. It's not a campaign for existing customers, so don't call it that. That would be confusing. Anyways, that's all I got for today. Be sure to hit the like button. If you like this content and found it valuable, be sure to subscribe to Service Titan's YouTube channel. If you haven't done that already, hit that bell icon so that YouTube notifies you. Anytime we upload a new video and leave me a comment down below, let me know what your thoughts are on this topic. Appreciate it. Peace. Sam.
