Rippling doesn't measure brand campaigns on direct-response metrics. Instead, creative top-of-funnel ads are designed to "implant a seed" of brand awareness. Success is measured by how these campaigns increase the efficiency and conversion rate of subsequent mid- and bottom-funnel ads shown to the same audience.

The home services industry became addicted to trackable digital marketing, leading to inflated acquisition costs. Building a strong brand makes you the default choice, driving cheaper, high-intent branded searches and lowering overall customer acquisition costs over the long term.

Relying on last-touch attribution creates a feedback loop that over-invests in bottom-of-funnel channels like branded Google search. This model fails to account for the preceding marketing actions that prompted the search, misallocating budget away from crucial brand discovery activities.

The combined effort of creative messaging, social media, and community involvement builds brand equity. This trust ensures that when customers have a need, they think of you first. This bypasses the competitive search process and reduces your reliance on expensive, direct-response advertising.

Digital marketing has conditioned businesses to equate investment with clicks. However, the true function of advertising is to capture attention, which builds awareness. This awareness is what prompts a customer to seek you out when they have a need, making clicks and calls a byproduct of prior attention-grabbing efforts.

Stop viewing brand as a top-of-funnel activity. For elite companies, brand isn't a precursor to selling; it is the selling. It creates inbound demand that bypasses traditional conversion tactics like search ads or affiliate marketing, making it the most powerful and sustainable growth engine.

Instead of relying on vague brand metrics, Float measured the success of its billboard campaigns by observing the direct lift in its performance marketing. Demo requests, website visits, and even Google and LinkedIn ad performance all increased by 30-50% during and after the OOH flights.

To move beyond last-click attribution, small businesses should add a simple metric to their daily tracking: impressions. By analyzing the relationship between impression spikes and the subsequent rise in clicks days or a week later, they can start to see the true top-of-funnel drivers of their business, revealing which channels are building crucial initial awareness.

Leading marketers confidently invest in high-cost, low-measurability channels like billboards and physical books. They understand that reaching a concentrated target audience builds brand in a way that can't be captured by direct attribution but drives long-term pipeline.