Connecting Paid Campaigns to Verified Visits
A lead only counted once the business could tie it to a visit and a sale.
Result: cost per attributable revenue dollar on lead campaigns fell about 70% after I rebuilt the audiences from verified visitors.
The problem
A hospitality business was running Google Ads and Meta Ads, and the platforms reported clicks, messages, and leads. None of that said whether a person ever walked through the door or spent money. The owners wanted to know which campaigns brought in paying customers.
What I built
I started by defining the funnel: exposure, engagement, lead, verified visit, purchase. Then I closed the gap between the ad platforms and the till.
Dated flyers first. The earlier owner spent about 2,000 a month on printed flyers with no tracking. I dated each flyer and tied it to a free drink with a food purchase, so every redemption traced back to a campaign and gave a cost per acquisition. It was the business's first campaign-level view of offline return, and it showed print wasn't paying for itself.
Phone numbers and personal codes. For paid campaigns, customers gave a phone number for a discount and had to show a personalized code to redeem it in person. Each redemption tied a campaign to a verified visit and the revenue attached to it.
Audiences rebuilt from real visitors. Verified visitors fed remarketing and lookalike audiences. I ran two funnel shapes: a direct path from ad to visit, and a two-stage path that converts people to Instagram followers first and to visits second. Lead campaigns cost a lot to acquire, so I ran customer lifetime value analysis on each funnel stage to see which ones paid for themselves.
How the owners used it
The owners could finally tell a platform lead from a paying customer, and campaign reviews ran on attributable revenue and customer value instead of impressions.
I also tied marketing to capacity. I forecast visits by hour with 90 to 95% intervals, so the owners knew how much food, stock, and staff a given spend would need. I used those forecasts to temper a new owner who wanted to spend more. Demand past capacity wastes the budget and hurts word of mouth.