Connecting the Top and Bottom of the Funnel to Drive More Profit

In marketing, it's easy to focus on top-of-funnel (TOF) metrics—impressions, engagement, and visits—because the data is readily available and provides a quick sense of impact. However, the true measure of success lies in bottom-of-funnel (BOF) revenue-generating events, such as sales and repeat purchases.

If businesses fail to connect these points in the funnel, they risk optimizing for interest over profit, leading to wasted spending and missed revenue opportunities. By connecting the TOF and BOF data, marketers can make informed decisions that drive profitability rather than just engagement.

Why Connecting the Funnel Matters

While TOF performance metrics like cost per click (CPC) cost per lead (CPL) are important, they don’t necessarily translate to revenue. A campaign that generates high volumes of leads at a low CPL might still perform poorly if those leads don’t convert into paying customers.

Instead, businesses should track cost per sale (CPS) and return on ad spend (ROAS) to measure the actual revenue impact of their efforts. To do this effectively, businesses need to:

• Collect and analyze data across the entire customer journey
• Align marketing and sales efforts
• Use proxies when direct measurement isn't possible.

Let's explore how to connect these funnel stages and use the insights to maximize profitability.

1. Data Requirements: capturing the full journey

To optimize campaigns based on revenue instead of surface-level engagement, businesses need end-to-end visibility across the funnel. This requires reliable data capturing, analysis, and predictive modeling.

Key Data Points to Track

• Awareness: impressions, likes, engagement.
• Consideration: website visits, form submissions, trial sign-ups.
• Decision: sales, revenue, average order value (AOV), customer lifetime value (CLV).

How to Achieve Full-Funnel Tracking:

• Due Diligence: Within your existing toolset, explore every option for generating data at all points in your sales funnel and integrate the capabilities offering the greatest transparency. This can include web analytics (e.g., Google Analytics), CRM (e.g., HubSpot, Salesforce), and e-commerce platforms (e.g., Shopify).
• Consider Supplementation: If your current toolset is unable to create these TOF and BOF connections, consider supplemental data-generating solutions. Be careful to consider the costs of these additions as this can escalate quickly and may outweigh the benefit.
• Protect your Data Integrity: Whether yours is a new or mature business, it is never too early or too late to take steps toward protecting the integrity of your data. This will pay dividends for years to come.
• There’s Always a Way: Whether it be due to compliance, logistics, or cost, sometimes it’s not possible to establish one-to-one connections of a customer throughout the sales funnel. In these circumstances, there are modeling techniques capable of using aggregate data to infer these connections and provide equally valuable direction.

The Abacus by Media Culture® measurement platform enables businesses to track marketing investments from awareness to revenue, helping brands make data-driven decisions​.

2. Initial contact to conversion timeline: the missing link

One of the common challenges in optimizing for revenue is the time gap between initial contact and conversion. Depending on the business model, this timeline may be days, weeks, or even months.

How to Handle Long Conversion Timelines

• Analyze Historical Data: Whether at the individual level or aggregate, analyze past customer data to understand the typical timeline by using data captured during their journey.
• Research & Surveys: Reach out to your customers to learn about their journey using surveys or interview techniques. While subjective in nature, this data can be a powerful tool for comparison analysis and guiding model development.
• Forecasting: If the conversion timeline is too long to inform optimization decisions, implement forecasting techniques to approximate the conversion outcome using predictive attributes in the top-of-funnel and mid-funnel behavior.

By understanding this timeline, businesses can determine the ideal metric and timeline to inform optimization strategies based on actual revenue potential instead of short-term lead volume.

3. When to use a proxy: make revenue-based decisions faster

In some cases, tracking exact conversion outcomes for every marketing effort is not viable, especially with long sales cycles or offline transactions (e.g., retail, off-site conversions), do to cost or lack of sufficient data. That’s where proxies come into play.

What is a Proxy Metric?

A proxy metric is typically a mid-funnel KPI that correlates strongly with BOF conversions.

Examples of Proxy Metrics:

• Marketing-Qualified Leads (MQLs): Instead of optimizing for all leads, businesses can optimize for MQLs—those who meet a defined set of criteria indicating higher intent.
• Product Engagement Data: If a business offers a free trial, tracking product usage behavior can indicate the likelihood of conversion.
• Marketing Channel: Every marketing channel serves a different purpose and can signal where a customer is in their journey. The inbound marketing channel of a lead or visit can serve as a reliable indicator of intent and be used to approximate the BOF outcome.
• Locator Page Behavior: If your goal is for customers to transact at a physical location, store/site locator page behavior can be modeled with off-site conversion data to quantify their relationship. If deemed a reliable predictor, test an optimization strategy on this behavior to determine if the conversion outcome can be repeated and scaled.

By identifying the right proxy, businesses can make revenue impacting optimizations even with extended conversion timelines or disparate datasets.

Conclusion: The Path to Higher Profitability

Connecting top-of-funnel activities to bottom-of-funnel revenue is critical for maximizing profitability. Instead of relying solely on engagement metrics, businesses must:

• Capture full-funnel data
• Use proxy metrics when direct measurement isn't available
• Optimize for Cost per Sale and ROAS instead of top-funnel efficiency

Want to learn how Media Culture can help your brand bridge the gap between marketing and revenue? Contact us today to learn how we can help you achieve more profitable marketing outcomes.