Denver, Colorado

Ravn Ltd is a small studio in Denver. We make websites and software, and we run the advertising for a few companies.

If you got here from a link at the bottom of another website, we most likely built that one, and there is a list of them a little further down. If you run a company that spends money on advertising and can't say for certain what it's doing, the rest of this page is about that.

One of our founders has been putting things on the internet since 1995. We work with six client companies at a time.

get in touch what we do for clients

things we've made

Here is what we've built lately. Most of it is our own, and some of it is for other people.

Websites, a couple of apps, and some software for keeping track of things. If you came here from one of them, this is where you'll find it.

and five more

geo-emailvanity email by city
grass.cobrand and website
leadville.cotown website
photographymethodswriting about the craft
meetperseusproduct website

A couple of personal ones that aren't really work: coid.co, benett.net.

what we do for clients

We run the advertising for a handful of companies, and we measure it against the sales it actually produced.

Most of the companies we talk to are in a similar spot. Four different people have a hand in the marketing, and none of them can say which advertising produced a sale.

An agency buys your advertising

and then reports on the advertising it bought.

Somebody else built your website

and they don't work on the marketing.

Your analytics tool is guessing

because the tracking cookie expired after seven days.

Your CRM holds the real answer

and nothing is connected to it.

Google will tell you it produced the sale. Meta will tell you it produced the same sale, and so will anything else you happen to be running. Each of them is grading its own work. So the numbers on the dashboards go up, and you still can't answer the question you actually care about, which is which part of this is working and which part you should stop paying for.

Here is how we go about it, in the order we do it.

01
We rebuild your website, on hosting you own
It's fast, it runs on your own domain, and there's nothing sitting between you and the people visiting it. If we stop working together, you keep it.
02
We put tracking underneath it that doesn't break
It runs on your own domain rather than through a third party pixel, so ad blockers don't stop it and Safari doesn't throw it away after seven days.
This page runs that tracking. Here is what it saw when you arrived.
03
We connect that to your CRM and your invoices
When somebody buys, whether that's a week later or eight months later, we can tell you which advertisement brought them in. We mean the actual sale, not a form somebody filled in.
04
We send the real sales back to the advertising platforms
Google, Meta, and whatever else you're running, including Microsoft, LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit and Pinterest. Once a platform can see what a real buyer looks like instead of what a lead looks like, it starts finding you more of them. This is usually where the cost per sale starts coming down.
05
Then we run it, month after month
The advertising, the landing pages, the follow up. We watch what moves and change what doesn't. This part doesn't have an end date.

Most people we talk to have bought the first four of these from four different companies and ended up with four things that don't talk to each other. Doing them together, as one job, is what makes any of it pay off.

one client, two years

Here is what it looks like when it's measured properly.

This is one of our clients. They sell vehicles that cost more than $100,000, and we've left their name out. The numbers come from their own invoices matched against their own advertising data, not from what the platforms take credit for.

$1,354

spent on advertising for each sale over $100,000

74x

back for every dollar of advertising, in the first year

176

sales over $100,000 across two years

$18.4M

in sales traced back to $275,000 of advertising

what went in, what came out

advertising, two years$275,000

sales traced back to it$18.4M

Both lines are drawn to the same scale.

of one sale, at $112,000

advertising: $1,354, 1.2%
our fee, spread over the year's sales: $625
both together: $1,979, 1.8%

This is the first full year. The fee is $5,000 a month, spread across the ninety six sales made in those twelve months. The remaining 98.2% of each sale is the vehicle itself.

first year

they spent: $130,000
they sold: 96 sales
at: $112,000 on average
advertising per sale: $1,354 per sale

this year, still going

they spent: $145,000
they sold: 80 sales so far
at: $120,000 on average
advertising per sale: $1,812 per sale

who you'd be working with

It's a small team, not an agency.

One of our founders put his first website online in 1995. Before long he was buying advertising on the internet, which at the time meant banner exchanges and affiliate networks, ClickXchange and others like it, years before Google sold advertising at all. You learned quickly that the advertisement, the page somebody landed on, and whatever counted the sale were one problem rather than three, because if you didn't wire them together yourself, nobody was going to do it for you.

That part hasn't changed. The platforms got much better and they hide more of the machinery, but it's still those same three things, and they still only work when somebody joins them up.

The work you'd be paying for normally takes three different people. Somebody who understands the advertising, somebody who can build the website and the tracking underneath it, and somebody who can read the numbers afterwards. You deal with us directly, every time, and we do all three.

We also build machine learning systems, including training language models from the ground up. It's an odd thing to have sitting next to advertising, and most of the time it's beside the point. It matters here for one reason. The advertising platforms are all running their own models on your money, and those models decide who actually sees your advertising. Most agencies treat that as a black box and adjust settings around the outside of it. If you know how the models learn, you know that what you feed them matters far more than the settings do. That's the fourth step above, and it's usually where the cost per sale starts to come down.

The fair question is how a small team keeps up with six companies without letting things slip. The answer is that we built two pieces of software to do the parts a person is bad at, which are remembering everything and noticing things early.

Muninn

it remembers

Every decision we made, every constraint your business has, and everything we tried that didn't work. It's all still there a year later. You won't have to explain your business to us twice, and we won't quietly redo something we already ruled out.

it's open source, on GitHub

Huginn

it watches

It reads your numbers continuously and works out what it expects to happen next. When the real numbers don't match what it expected, it tells us. That usually happens a few weeks before it would have shown up in a monthly report.

built in house, not for sale

Neither of them decides anything. They do the remembering and the watching, which is most of what a bigger team would be for.

Odin kept two ravens called Huginn and Muninn, thought and memory, and sent them out every morning to bring back what they had seen. That's where the names come from.

what it costs

It's $5,000 a month, and we work with six companies at a time.

Six is about as many as a small team can do properly. When the six are full there's a waiting list, and we'd rather have you on that than take a seventh and do a worse job for everyone.

At the moment two of the six are taken.

every month you get

Your advertising, bought and managed.
Your website and landing pages, built and then changed as often as they need changing.
Tracking that ties a real sale back to the advertising that caused it.
Software built for you when the job actually needs software.
People who know your business and pick up the phone.

this is probably right for you if

You spend real money on advertising every month.
What you sell is expensive, and people take a while to decide.
You have a CRM that your people actually use.
You're too big to be guessing and too small to hire a marketing department.

If your customers usually decide and buy in one sitting, this isn't worth paying for, and we'll say so when we talk rather than take the money.

By week two

The tracking is live on your own domain. The website rebuild is under way, and your advertising keeps running while we do it, so nothing stops.

The first few months

The CRM is connected and the first real numbers exist. From then on, every month starts with what actually sold rather than what the platforms claimed, and we adjust from there.

Twelve months

The contract is twelve months, because this takes time to dial in and understanding your business is most of the point. Everything we build runs on hosting you own, so if it ends, you keep all of it.

who's behind it

Ravn Ltd is a Colorado limited liability company.

Ravn Ltd is the company behind everything on this page. It also makesElsker, a wedding planner for couples.

Ravn Apps is a trade name of Ravn Ltd, registered in Colorado.

Ravn Ltd, 1500 N Grant St, Ste R, Denver, CO 80203

hello@ravnapps.com (720) 608-0110

getting in touch

If you'd like to talk, tell us a bit about where things stand.

The questions below are the ones that decide whether this is worth your time or ours, so it's worth answering them properly. If we don't think we can help, we'll say so rather than book a call about it. If you're writing about something else entirely, that's fine too. Pick "nothing yet" for the spend and use the big box.