Selling Upper-Funnel Campaigns to Performance-Driven Clients

How do you keep awareness spending in the budget when it barely shows revenue on its own? One agency faced this exact problem with a specialty retail client whose awareness campaigns returned just $0.24 in tracked online revenue per dollar spent last year, yet the account still hit its best ROAS ever. The case shows why selling upper-funnel campaigns to performance-driven clients depends more on how you measure results than on the results themselves.

Why Selling Upper-Funnel Campaigns to Performance-Driven Clients Starts With the Right Metric

The client is a specialty retailer with a loyal customer base, a strong ecommerce business, and physical stores. Its awareness campaigns generated only $0.24 in tracked online revenue for every dollar spent last year. Despite that number, the account posted its highest ROAS on record, paid search revenue rose 12%, and new customer orders in Q4 grew 50%. These results did not come from the awareness campaigns looking better in isolation. They came from a change in what got measured.

The 2021 Search Lift Study That Failed to Make the Case

Back in 2021, the client ran its first search lift study, a test that measures whether ads cause more people to search for a brand. Brand searches rose 28% among people who saw the video ads. That number proved video got people searching for the brand. It did not prove the ads sold anything, so the client moved the budget back into Shopping and Performance Max, two campaign types built to drive direct sales. A brand lift number alone means little to a client paid on revenue. This is the core challenge in selling upper-funnel campaigns to performance-driven clients: a metric that proves awareness without proving sales will lose the budget fight every time.

Switching From Campaign ROAS to Account ROAS

The agency changed the scorecard. Instead of judging the awareness campaigns on their own tracked revenue, the team started measuring account ROAS, meaning the performance of the entire account while the awareness campaigns ran. This approach captures spillover effects, such as awareness ads driving more branded search traffic that later converts through paid search. Connecting GA4, paid search platforms, and account-wide revenue data this way is exactly the kind of cross-channel view that a platform like Measuremate is built to support, since it ties these data sources together instead of leaving each channel to be judged on its own. The client’s roughly 8% of budget spent on awareness stopped being judged as a stand-alone line item. It got judged by what happened to paid search revenue and new customer orders during the same period. That reframe turned a one-off test into a year-round investment across Demand Gen, video, and eventually YouTube TV.

What the Account-Wide Numbers Showed

With account ROAS as the scorecard, the results spoke for themselves. Paid search revenue increased 12% and Q4 new customer orders grew 50%, both while the account kept 8% of spend in awareness. No single metric captured this on its own in 2021. The shift from campaign-level thinking to account-level thinking gave the client a clearer picture of what the awareness spend was actually doing. Selling upper-funnel campaigns to performance-driven clients works best when you show them the effect on the numbers they already care about, not a new metric they have to learn to trust.

If you manage a budget like this, watch account-wide ROAS alongside campaign ROAS before you cut awareness spend. A single channel’s tracked revenue will rarely tell the full story. Track what happens to paid search and new customer orders during the period your awareness campaigns run, and judge the investment on that combined result. Tools like Measuremate make this kind of account-wide analysis easier by unifying GA4, GTM, and BigQuery data so you can see how upper-funnel spend actually moves performance metrics across the whole account.