Login
Book a Demo
How to Track Revenue and Forecast with Ruler Analytics
Tracking revenue and forecasting allows businesses to ensure consistent growth. Keep reading to see how you can accurately do both.
84% of marketers are confident that their work impacts sales and revenue. But 31% of marketers said proving ROI was one of their biggest challenges.
And many struggle to efficiently track their lead conversion points.
Let me ask you.
If you can’t track your leads through their full customer journey, how are you tracking revenue?
Because that’s the key.
In order to feel confident you’re impacting sales and revenue, you need to be tracking it.
And the majority of marketers simply aren’t.
In this blog, we’ll be looking at revenue tracking and forecasting to teach you how to get more from your data.
Keep reading to learn:
Let’s get stuck in!
Revenue tracking is how businesses prove their marketing channels, campaigns and content hits their bottom line.
Companies who track revenue pay attention to how leads turn into sales and use that information to better attribute their marketing efforts.
Related: Track your marketing revenue in Google Analytics
Marketers struggle to track their revenue due to data disconnection from app to app.
Think of it like this.
A user on your website is anonymous. You can’t easily link them to leads and sales in your CRM. And because you can’t link them, you can’t attribute your revenue to your marketing touchpoints as you don’t have full visibility of your data.
Is this an issue? Absolutely. Revenue tracking is essential to understanding the impact of your marketing. Keep reading to learn why.
Tracking revenue and revenue attribution is a key component of your digital marketing reports.
It’s vital to be able to track your revenue for a few reasons. But here are the main ones:
Proving your digital ROI isn’t easy. And many marketers have created workarounds that allow them to get a vague grasp of their ROI. But in reality, they’re marketing blind.
Related: How to measure digital marketing ROI
Think of it like this. If you’re tracking leads – i.e. the volume of leads you create each month and you use this number as a benchmark, what are you actually tracking?
Let’s say in month one you generate 100 leads while in month two you generate 200. Tracking leads only, it seems like month two is much more successful. But you only have part of the data.
With revenue tracking, you’d be able to see that month one generated £10,000 in revenue while month two generated £8,000. From this, we can clearly see that month one was better performing than month two.
This is useful as it allows you to get real context on your marketing initiatives. If you were optimising your marketing based on lead volume, you’d likely be hurting your overall performance.
🚀 Pro Tip
We asked some of our current customers how Ruler is working for them and 100% said it’s helped them improve their ROI. See how they did it, and how you can achieve the same.
Revenue tracking shouldn’t be just a holistic view. With the right tools, you can track revenue across small campaigns, content and even keywords.
Related: Everything you can see in Ruler Analytics
And with this view, you’ve armed yourself with even more data relevant to your business.
Say you’re doing your usual end of month reporting.
You find that a piece of content you created drove a significantly higher number of sales and revenue than other content you’ve created.
As such, you know that you can reuse that piece as you’ve proved it brings value.
“Attribution is king. Without it, we’re in muddy water. Ruler paints the picture for our marketing team. It tells us who’s converting, where they’re coming from and which ads are working.”
Kurt Dunphy, Growth Manager at Rally.
Forecasting is the business process of making growth predictions based on past and present data for future time periods.
Later, these predictions can be compared against real data. For example, businesses might estimate their inbound revenue for the following year and then compare that figure against actual results to see whether they grew as expected.
Accurately forecasting revenue is an essential process for business leaders. Forecasting can help you to:
Looking at and preparing your forecasting data can help you to understand what to expect in terms of revenue and growth for a specific time period e.g. the upcoming quarter.
In fact, our opportunity report allows you to see your lead count and their attributed marketing channel split out by your pipeline. This will help you better forecast revenue for the months and quarters ahead.
Now we know what revenue tracking is and why it’s important, how can you achieve it?
You need to integrate a marketing attribution tool.
The key to marketing attribution is that it puts the data in your hands. Instead of struggling with disconnected data across apps, you can get a better understanding of what’s working, and what isn’t.
Here’s how Ruler’s marketing attribution works.
A user visits your website. Javascript on your site connects to Ruler and allows it to track key information like their source, what pages they interacted with and their device.
Every time that user visits your site again, Ruler will continue to track them, building up a customer journey.
Related: How to view full customer journeys using Ruler Analytics
Eventually, that user will convert into a lead. No matter if they convert via call, form fill or live chat, Ruler will match that new lead to all of their previous marketing touchpoints.
Now, your lead is in your CRM. And your full customer journey is viewable in the Ruler app.
When sales close your lead into revenue, Ruler will fire matching that revenue data to your marketing touchpoints. It’ll send revenue into your analytics tools; Google Analytics, Google Ads etc, where it will accurately attribute it to the influencing channels, campaigns and keywords.
With Ruler in play, you’ll be able to see your closed revenue directly in the apps you need it most. This will allow you to accurately attribute your revenue and track it through the full customer journey.
Plus, now you have revenue data to hand, you can confidently forecast based on accurate, historical data.
And remember, you can plug the revenue from your leads into revenue tools like ChartMogul. Take a look at all of our available integrations here.
And there you have it.
A guide to getting started with forecasting and revenue tracking.
Remember, the key issue you’re likely struggling with is data disconnection. You might be using a multitude of different marketing tools to drive new traffic, leads and sales. But connecting the data you need across each of these isn’t easy.
With a tool like Ruler in place, you can get rid of the data headache.
✏️ Note
Not sure if Ruler is for you? Here’s a handy guide to why exactly you need Ruler Analytics in your marketing stack.
All the hard work is done accurately and automatically, meaning less number-crunching for you. You’ll save time which you can then spend on optimising your marketing instead.
👉 Want to see Ruler in action? Book a demo with our team and see how we can help you better track revenue and forecast for your stakeholders.
