Summary
The webinar discusses marketing attribution, focusing on tracking online ad effectiveness and customer journeys in self-storage. Start knowing how customers found out about you online!
Highlights
📈 Attribution Importance: Understanding where customers come from is crucial for marketing success.
🛠️ Three Components: Effective attribution relies on ad platforms, website tracking, and facility management system capturing.
🔍 First-Click Attribution: This method is most effective for self-storage due to demand-driven searches.
📊 Data Integration: Properly configured tracking can enhance reporting and decision-making.
🔄 Continuous Improvement: Regular adjustments based on data insights optimize ad spending and performance.
🤝 Cross-Platform Compatibility: Attribution methods can work with various FMS and web platforms, enhancing versatility.
Key Insights
🧩 Understanding Attribution: Attribution is key to identifying which marketing efforts drive conversions, helping businesses allocate resources more effectively. This knowledge can lead to better marketing spending decisions and improved ROI.
📊 Data-Driven Decisions: With robust tracking and reporting systems, operators can analyze which ads and platforms yield the highest returns, leading to informed advertising strategies and budget allocations.
🔗 Integration Challenges: Successfully implementing attribution requires seamless communication between ad platform tracking codes, website cookies and forms, and the FMS, necessitating technical expertise and collaborative efforts.
🔍 Focus on User Journey: Tracking the entire user journey—from first click to rental—provides a comprehensive view of customer interactions, enabling businesses to fine-tune marketing strategies.
💻 Tech Stack Matters: The choice of technology and platforms significantly impacts attribution success, emphasizing the need for compatible systems that facilitate data flow.
🔄 Retargeting Opportunities: Effective attribution allows for retargeting potential customers who didn’t convert initially, maximizing the chances of securing rentals in the future.
🎯 Campaign Optimization: Continuous monitoring and analysis of ad performance can help businesses adapt strategies in real time, ensuring they capitalize on market opportunities.
Video Highlights
What is marketing attribution and why is it important for self-storage?
What are they 3 key ingredients for self storage attribution that need to work together?
What are UTM tracking codes and why are they important for digital ads?
The "magic moment" when a user submits and form - are you passing the right information into your FMS?
Here is the full transcript
All right, hello, everybody. It looks like people are still trickling in as we kick off the webinar. My name is Mitch Briggs, and I’m the Chief Marketing Officer at Adverank. Before we get started, I want to welcome you all to our webinar, "From Clicks to Customers." We’re going to dive into the topic of marketing attribution—understanding how people come to your website and eventually become customers, and how to track that journey.
Our host and speaker today is Jason Zickler, the CEO and co-founder of Adverank. He’ll walk us through this topic. Before we begin, just a few housekeeping items: you’ll notice a Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. Feel free to ask any questions as they come to mind. I’ll try to answer some on the side, or we can address them at the end.
We’re also recording this session and will send it to you afterward, so don’t worry if you miss something. Without further ado, let’s dive in. Jason, take it away.
Thanks, Mitch, and thanks, everyone. My name is Jason Zickler, and as Mitch mentioned, I’m the CEO and co-founder of Adverank. Today, we’re going to talk about how to track ad clicks all the way through to rentals or tenants. I’ve got a few dozen slides to walk through, and then we can open it up for questions. Feel free to use the Q&A feature in Zoom if you have questions along the way.
Our discussion today is broken into three parts: what attribution means, how to look at different ways to attribute advertising success, and the three main components or "ingredients" of attribution that work together to tell the complete story of the customer journey. I’ll also show you examples of how real self-storage operators and investors set up and manage attribution for their storage portfolios.
As I mentioned, Adverank focuses on Google ad management and social media ad management. The reason we’re doing this webinar is that self-storage operators often ask us how to justify their online ad spend. They want proof of what’s working and what’s driving online rentals. Common questions include: "Is Google pay-per-click better than SEO? Are Facebook video ads effective? Do Spotify or YouTube ads actually bring in rentals?"
We all know that people begin their self-storage search online by typing something like "storage near me." Operators want their facility to appear first in those search results, because capturing that first click often leads to rentals. In their facility management software, operators want to know where each tenant’s first click came from, so they can attribute which marketing technique created the rental.
Attribution is key to answering these questions. It’s about attributing your paid advertising to the actual revenue generated from rentals. Essentially, it’s the process of figuring out which marketing efforts led a visitor to make a reservation or rental. There are several methods for attribution, but for self-storage, first-click attribution tends to work best. This model attributes success to the first ad a user clicks on to begin their rental journey.
There are other models like last-click attribution, linear, time decay, and position-based attribution, but today we’re focusing on first-click. It’s the most useful for tracking the effectiveness of paid ads in the self-storage industry. You also want to analyze the landing page where your ads send potential tenants—this is usually the page for the storage facility you’re trying to fill.
Finally, your facility management software (FMS) is the ultimate source of truth for attribution. It houses the tenant records, so it makes sense to store data about what brought those tenants in.
In self-storage, there are three key components of attribution: ad platforms, websites with traffic and tracking, and FMS applications. The art of attribution is getting these three separate systems to communicate with each other. Let me show you an actual example of how we’ve done this for a real self-storage operator, Avid Storage.
Avid Storage, run by Jesse and Jarrett, manages about 30 facilities. With such a large portfolio, they need to justify their ad spend across multiple facilities and state lines. Jesse handles operations, focusing on move-ins and occupancy, while Jarrett manages financial performance and investor relations. Jesse is always asking, "Where are my move-ins coming from?" And Jarrett wants to know if his ad spend is paying off.
The only way to answer these questions is through attribution. So, we started optimizing Avid’s online experience. It begins by setting up ads with proper tracking information using something called UTM parameters. These parameters are embedded in the ad link and allow us to track where the traffic is coming from.
We can use UTM parameters across all channels—Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and more. For Avid, we use these codes for all ad platforms they run, including Meta, X, Google Display Network, and Spotify. The same UTM codes can be used for ads on Instagram stories or YouTube ads, and we can see which ad first got the user’s attention.
Next, it’s important to focus on the handoff of these UTM parameters to the website, where the user begins the rental process. This is where tracking begins. Tools like Google Analytics or Facebook's tracking pixel help track the user journey. For Avid, all their advertising traffic is sent to the facility pages on their website, and tracking kicks in when users arrive.
At this point, all users are anonymous. However, once they fill out a reservation or rental form, we can gather their information and attribute the ad source to their submission. This is where the real magic happens—when the submit button is clicked, all the systems start working together, and we can see the complete customer journey from the first ad click to the signed lease.
The attribution data is stored in Avid’s FMS, SSM Cloud. This data is invaluable because it allows operators to see which ads are driving rentals. Avid can even run reports comparing campaign effectiveness across platforms. We’ve set this up so that Jesse and Jarrett can make data-driven decisions every day.
To give a real-life example, we recently helped Tim Springer, Avid’s president and founder, track the impact of their Google pay-per-click ads. They saw a 4x return on ad spend, generating $7,000 in lifetime value from $1,500 in ad spend. At another location, a 30-day paid social campaign resulted in an 11.3% increase in occupancy, which amounted to $220,000 in new customer value with an ad spend of just $4,000.
Attribution is essential for tracking and justifying ad spend. If you have questions, or if you want a demo of any Adverank or SSM products, feel free to visit selfstoragemanager.com or adverank.ai/demo. Now, let’s open it up for questions.
