Marketing that’s hard to measure by design
For this travel brand, selling holidays across multiple touchpoints, third-party agents, inbound phone, and its own digital channels, the complexity of measurement had become a genuine strategic blocker.
Campaigns spanned paid search, paid social, CTV, and programmatic display. Bookings came in online, over the phone, and through independent agents. Most analytics tools simply weren’t designed for that level of fragmentation.
They partnered with Ruler to build a unified, data-driven view of performance, combining marketing mix modelling with multi-touch attribution, so the team could make confident decisions and allocate budget with clarity.
“Traditional attribution either ignores offline bookings or misattributes them. The gap between total web leads and net assigned leads was a known problem, it just hadn’t been solvable until now.”
Three measurement problems compounding each other
Roughly 60% of business flows through third-party travel agents. Of the 40% that comes direct, only about 10% completes entirely online. The bookings that matter commercially were invisible to marketing.
Offline bookings were invisible
Customers would engage with ads, visit the site, submit an enquiry, then call a travel agent weeks later. Standard attribution had no idea that booking happened.
Duplicate lead counting
A single prospect submitting three tour enquiries in one session appeared as three leads. Revenue sat downstream in a CRM, unconnected to any campaign.
CTV couldn’t be proven
The team had run Connected TV for years with genuine conviction it worked. But when leadership asked for numbers, conviction alone wasn’t enough.
Bringing everything together with unified measurement
Ruler’s platform provided a unified view from raw channel signals all the way to a single, trustworthy revenue number. Four components worked together to close each gap.
What changed for the marketing team
For the first time in the company’s marketing history, there is a single view of spend, revenue and return spanning online, offline, and channels previously impossible to measure.
CTV finally validated
Connected TV showed measurable contribution across multiple brands. Seeing it return a positive ROAS, along with meaningful marginal headroom, gave the team evidence they could act on. The optimised scenario view placed CTV in a position of strength rather than uncertainty, changing the tone of conversations with senior leadership entirely.
Meta and Facebook performance confirmed
Both channels performed well in the model, reinforcing something the team had long suspected but struggled to evidence. Their core audience, affluent retirees with time and inclination to scroll, responds well to social advertising. Now that’s a data-backed position, not a hypothesis.
Gross vs net lead problem resolved
Deduplication work addressed the lead inflation issue directly. By building the model on actual revenue rather than aggregated platform conversions, the output reflects what the business genuinely earned, not what each platform claimed credit for.
Budget cuts made with precision
During a period of financial pressure in the travel industry, the team could identify exactly where diminishing returns were setting in. Instead of blanket cuts, spend was reduced where the model showed least incremental impact and protected where it mattered most.