A profit-first funnel analysis means breaking your marketing funnel into stages like awareness, consideration, and conversion and adjusting your budget based on how each stage performs.
Dan Ben-Nun, founder & CEO at Adspace, shared an example of this with a DTC campaign. They had solid conversions but low traffic. Instead of spreading the budget evenly, they focused more on top-of-the-funnel paid ads to drive more traffic and leads.
“We combine this tactic with micro-influencer collaborations to achieve better results. Our primary objective is always to gather as much data as possible and use it to make sound decisions that will maximize impact without overextending our marketing budget,” Ben-Nun explains.
2. Use attribution modeling to reallocate the budget.
Analyzing attribution data to understand the actual role of each channel in driving conversions is key to ad spend optimization. GlobeMonitor, a marketing research agency, revealed its journey with attribution modeling accounted for reduced the overall cost per acquisition by 20%.
“In one campaign targeting B2B germany cell phone number list clients, we initially distributed the budget equally across paid search, LinkedIn ads, and content marketing. Attribution modeling revealed LinkedIn ads generated the highest-quality leads with a 40% conversion rate, while paid search brought in a larger volume of lower-quality leads that inflated the cost per acquisition,” said Bassem Mostafa, lead market analyst and founder of GlobeMonitor.
According to Mostafa, Content marketing was effective in nurturing LinkedIn leads but was underfunded in the initial allocation.
To address these insights, GlobeMonitor’s team reduced the paid search budget by 30%, redirected it to LinkedIn ads, and increased investment in content marketing to improve lead nurturing.
These adjustments resulted in:
- Improved lead quality and reduced the overall cost per acquisition by 20%.
- Conversion rates on LinkedIn increased to 48%.
- Content engagement grew by 30%.
“Our case demonstrates how attribution modeling and well-aligned strategies could maximize impact without increasing the overall budget,” says Mostafa.
3. Retarget and A/B test.
“Make data-driven choices, which means spending on what delivers ROI and scaling back on what doesn’t,” says John Kawecki, marketing manager at F1 B.
In one campaign, Kawecki zeroed in on Facebook and Instagram ads promoting content around F1 events. He started small with a clear use profit-first funnel analysis objective — boosting article engagement; and tracked which ads generated clicks and engagement at the lowest cost.
Through A/B testing of different copy and visuals, he could reallocate the budget to the top-performing ads.
“The retargeting ads proved especially business sale lead effective. We targeted users who‘d previously engaged with our content but hadn’t signed up for our newsletter. These retargeting ads converted at a much higher rate, and shifting more budget there drove up our subscriber numbers,” Kawecki says.
The takeaway: Track performance and reallocate based on real-time data. When something flops, pull back fast. When it works, double down.
