You know what they say about first impressions—you might only have one chance to get it right! But how do you truly gauge how your business or brand might come across to your audience? Like a nerve-wracking first date or an important job interview, apart from directly asking, it can be hard to know. Luckily, when it comes to making a great first impression on potential customers both online and offline, businesses can access a wealth of data to paint a clearer picture.
For both B2B and B2C brands, top-of-funnel (TOFU) analytics stand as an essential part of your marketing playbook. They tell you if you’re knocking it out of the park from the first time someone learns about your brand or if your ideal customers are actually tuning you out.
Let’s do a deep dive into what top-of-funnel analytics are, how you can use them to measure your marketing impact, and explore some budget-friendly tools Bitly Analytics can help you connect with your audience right from the get-go.
What are top-of-funnel metrics?
For more than a century, the marketing world has used a funnel to describe the journey a typical customer takes when deciding to buy a product. Starting from the top and then moving your way down the bottom, a traditional marketing funnel looks like this:
- The top of the funnel (TOFU) is the earliest stage. This is where the broadest audience exists and where individuals typically become aware of a problem or need they face. Ideally, they’ll later discover that your product or service can provide the solution.
- The middle of the funnel (MOFU) comes next. Here, brands try to educate customers and build relationships with them to bring them closer to purchasing over time.
- Finally, customers that stick with you reach the bottom of the funnel (BOFU). At this stage, brands might offer discounts or showcase what sets their product apart from competitors to help customers make the final decision to purchase.
All parts of the conversion funnel help you move someone from not knowing your brand exists to becoming a loyal customer. But if your TOFU tactics don’t cut it, your audience’s journey will be over before it even starts. That’s why it’s so important to measure engagement with your brand early on in the customer journey—and that’s where TOFU metrics come in.
Understanding your audience’s behavior empowers your brand to allocate time and resources to the channels they prefer to engage with the most. Here are some key TOFU metrics every business should start tracking if you aren’t already:
- Unique website visits and pageviews
- Session lengths
- Link clicks from referring pages and click-through rates
- QR Code scans from a package or in-store display
- Social media impressions and engagement
When you know how your audience engages with your brand thanks to insightful data, you’ll be able to make even stronger, more memorable connections with them.
3 ways top-of-funnel data helps you win
Just knowing how many people visit your website or follow your brand on social media isn’t enough insight to grow your audience (and your business). From decoding early interactions to establishing your brand’s presence in a competitive landscape, TOFU metrics help you learn both how people engage and why they choose your brand.
1. They help you understand early audience interactions
First impressions matter. They can form the foundation of a relationship with a potential customer or turn someone off from your brand for good. You need TOFU metrics to understand how your messaging comes across from the get-go. Knowing why people buy makes all the difference in optimizing your marketing efforts.
What was it about your product, branding, or messaging that spoke to your customers and inspired them to take an initial action like clicking a link or scanning a QR Code? Was it your company values, a convenient purchase experience, a playful or funny brand voice, or a truly unique product? By learning what love at first click looks like for your customers, you can drill down into what sets your brand apart through the entire customer journey.
2. They give you a sense of your brand’s presence
These days, competing for the time and attention of your audience is no small task. With so many marketing channels to manage and new competitors popping up left and right, it can be hard to get a feel for how your brand is resonating. That’s why you need to take up space in your corner of the world so that your best customers can hear you through the noise—and TOFU metrics show you how well you’re doing that.
How much awareness do you have among the demographics that tend to buy from you? How often do they click through when they encounter your brand both online and offline? Answer these questions by keeping a close eye on your engagement and click-through rates. You’ll learn what resonates with customers, where you should invest more, and what your target audience wants to see.
Over time, as you make changes to your products, offerings, website, and calls to action, TOFU data shows you how you stack up against your competitors and how effectively you capture attention from the very first impression.
3. They teach you why people buy from you
Marketing teams with incredible conversion rates and mind-blowing revenue growth understand their customers inside and out. They’re zeroed in on the journey their target personas take, starting at the top of the funnel because they know that even the first click can tell a story about why someone might eventually make a purchase.
For small businesses or marketers with shoestring budgets, this can feel like an impossible standard. Robust, complicated analytics platforms can be expensive and require time you may not have to make the most of them. However, accessing and understanding helpful TOFU data doesn’t have to break the bank or require a fancy degree.
With targeted campaigns, thoughtful A/B tests, and analytics dashboards that give you in-depth insights at a glance, you can dive deep into the minds of your customers. Learn what appeals to them, understand what leads them to buy, and tailor your marketing accordingly.
Gather TOFU insights with Bitly Analytics
If you want to make meaningful, measurable connections with your audience across every interaction, then Bitly is your best friend. With trimmed, trustworthy short links and simple, scannable QR Codes, connecting with your customers both online and offline has never been easier. And now, with Bitly Analytics, tracking and analyzing all your key TOFU metrics across every customer touchpoint is as simple as pie.
Armed with audience insights and high-level performance across channels—plus the same deep-dive data on individual links and codes you’ve always known and loved—marketers can now quickly capture big-picture data trends in real time. Bitly Analytics gives you key top-of-funnel metrics like:
- Your top-performing QR Codes and Short Links by click and scans
- Clicks and scans by location
- Clicks and scans by referrer
- Clicks and scans over time
Analyze your audience’s behavior, report on results, and refine your marketing efforts to optimize your impact. With Bitly Analytics, you now have a powerful look at how your campaigns are performing, all from one central location.
4 quick tips for tackling TOFU metrics
Now that you have the tools you need to strengthen the customer journey from the very beginning thanks to Bitly Analytics, make the most of this top-of-funnel data and boost your impact. Follow these four quick tips and let data guide your TOFU optimization tactics!
1. Create UTM links for maximum insights
When it comes to analyzing TOFU engagement, your goal should be to uncover when, where, and how your audience initially interacts with your brand. This knowledge helps you create campaigns that resonate and can lead to even more engagement as you implement strategic changes based on data.
One of the best ways to consistently collect that information is by using UTM links, which let you capture detailed information about where your clicks come from. By including key bits of information such as the source, content, or campaign associated with each link (these are called UTM parameters), you can uncover audience insights across every link you share.
Best of all, you can create UTM links right from within the Connections Platform. Create a Short Link or QR Code as you normally would, and simply add in UTM parameters so you can see where all your clicks and scans are coming from.
Once those clicks and scans start rolling in, you can easily see how they are all performing in Bitly Analytics. Hone in on the social media channels or devices that your audience uses most often and then allocate your resources to campaigns that are already taking off (or fix the ones that aren’t yet!).
2. Test new tactics and drill into their results
A/B testing, which involves comparing two versions of a campaign with segments of your audience to determine the better performer, remains an incredibly helpful tool for marketers. It’s especially useful for learning which messaging or calls-to-action appeal to your audience most. Plus, it’s a great way to refine your top-of-funnel interactions!
If you’re using Short Links on a new social media channel or even adding QR Codes to product packaging, Bitly Analytics will help you understand performance right away. The dashboard shows spikes in overall engagement across your campaigns in real time—and from there, you can dig deeper to see which TOFU channels are performing best and invest in them strategically.
You can also test what kinds of messaging and offerings appeal to your audience. Try UTM links for each of your social ads or landing pages to gauge what call-to-action drives the most engagement for higher conversion rates at every step.
3. Use TOFU insights throughout the funnel
Insights about your audience’s first impressions of your brand don’t just inform your top-of-funnel efforts—they also impact your marketing strategy across every stage of the funnel.
TOFU data within Bitly Analytics might reveal your target audience’s favorite channel or even primary geographic location. On the other hand, you might find that a certain topic or pain point appeals to your audience most and drives more clicks or sans. Whether it’s your brand’s sustainability messaging or addressing the day-to-day challenges of your audience, heightened engagement in a particular area offers guidance for content creation. This engagement forms the foundation for a relationship that you nurture through the middle of the funnel, guiding prospects toward the bottom—and to purchase!
Customers tend to make emotional or get-drive decisions about brands in the first few seconds they come across them. So understanding initial engagement via clicks and scans early in the funnel reveals a lot about how they might interact with your brand later in the funnel as well.
4. Let quantitative insights spark deeper dives
The numbers—or quantitative data—reveal a big part of your audience’s story. They also point to new opportunities to gather qualitative insights by talking directly to your customers.
If your Bitly Analytics dashboard shows you that a channel or messaging is consistently underperforming in certain markets or overall, it might be time to get curious about why. Likewise, you might be getting more clicks and scans from a product that isn’t your main offering, which could signal that your audience sees a different value from your product than you expect.
Use the data to spark surveys, interviews, or focus groups with loyal customers to learn what they love about your brand or product. You’ll gain additional insights that help you understand your audience more deeply, so you can make your target audience feel known and heard from the first click or scan.
From top-of-funnel data to bottom-line impact
Just as you refine your resume before a job interview or tweak your dating app profile before a first date, tapping into top-of-funnel data is the key to understanding your customers before you try to convince them to buy your product or sign up for your service.
After all, the more effective your TOFU marketing and messaging are, the more likely it is that people will move through the rest of the funnel to become long-term customers. That’s why you need real-time, big-picture data to understand how your efforts are performing and make critical improvements that grow the group of people who’ll become raving fans.
Bitly is here to help you build lasting connections with your customers thanks to the all-in-one Connections Platform. And now, with Bitly Analytics, you have all the data you need to maximize your engagement and impact.