How Kurve responded to the changes that came their way throughout 2021

Featuring the insights of Oren Greenberg, Founder and Partner of Kurve

Kurve became more UTM-focused, and is using MER as a guide

Oren is an on-demand CMO and digital marketing consultant for disruptive tech companies. His approach is to blend brand building with performance marketing. He is focused on automation leveraging tech to increase efficiency, and drive transformative results. Oren has been quoted in publications such as Virgin Entrepreneur, Business Zone, The Guardian, M&S for business, Business Info Guide, Real Business, Fourth Source and Raconteur. Voted as top 100 hot list for British Interactive Media Association 2015. 

2021 sure did a number on growth teams worldwide—we collectively barely got a break between the changes/restrictions on ad networks and the after-effects that came with it. Of course, that was all on top of navigating through the changes in consumer behavior that’s associated with the new normal.

This is why I decided to reach out to some top marketers, to get a better grasp on how they responded to the changes that came their way through the course of 2021, and I just knew that my friend, Oren Greenberg of Kurve, had to be featured. Luckily for (all of) us, Oren took his sweet time in getting back to us with plenty of his tried-and-tested insights on how to come out on top of growth efforts, based on his work with Kurve.

Check out what Oren has to say!

There are many obstacles being faced by growth teams. The biggest problem is less transparency on paid acquisition (due to iOS14) since a large majority of users stopped tracking (up to 90% of users in some cases). In addition, there is less trust with certain channels (e.g. Facebook due to more and more scandals in the news and whistleblowers.) 

This has a knock on effect to consumers and businesses not wanting to buy via a Facebook advert due to less trust on data privacy.

The results of the complications

CAC has increased on each channel. This was due to less tracking and attribution to where sales occurred. 

On Facebook we’re seeing up to 40% discrepancy between the number of sales shown on FB, and the number of sales in the backend in the CRM—which is the source of truth. 

With less transparency, advertisers are less able to make informed decisions about which campaigns are working, and they therefore shoot in the dark, especially with mobile app campaigns which is even worse compared to website conversion events.

The best ways to work around these complications

Everything is now becoming UTM focused. 

Facebook for instance will pass on the Facebook ID of a user to the backend via the conversion API. This allows users to gather data based on UTMs to identify where and how conversions have occurred (hence why app ads are much harder as you can’t send UTMs to the Apple store). So firstly the conversion API is essential to improve accuracy up to 90%, however it's definitely not 1090%.

The second (and equally as important) data point is post-purchase surveys, to ask users where they heard of the brand/company. 

This will give subjective feedback on how they converted into a customer. This obviously isn’t 100% accurate, and won’t tell you which campaign. However it will give you a strong indication on the impact a particular channel is having.

The use of MER (marketing efficiency ratio) is an important guide for marketing teams now to see a noticeable trend when spend for a channel increases. MER is total revenue/total paid ad spend from all channels - it’s a more holistic way of calculating CAC and ROAS when looking at performance.

Click here to find out how some other top marketers responded to the changes that came their way in 2021.