Latest / ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence / How To Make Marketing Attribution Work - Scott Desgrosseilliers (#019)

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How To Make Marketing Attribution Work - Scott Desgrosseilliers (#019) · ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_04: Return on ad spend, it's very clear, you know, it's revenue divided by spend.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_04: You gotta get to one to break even, and that's just on the marketing spend that doesn't take product costs into account.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_04: CAC is another one, customer acquisition costs.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_04: That's how much did I spend divided by how many unique customers I got.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_04: So I spent$10,000, I got 100 customers, I spend$100 to acquire a customer.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_04: That's often a um a good metric to use uh as a goal.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_04: And that's where we come to another measure we have called new visit percentage.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_04: New visit percentages out of the clicks.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_04: How many of them do we feel are brand new visitors?
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_04: And you don't want that on any of your retargeting campaigns because it's retargeting, you want it to be zero.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_02: In this episode today, we are talking about a very important aspect of marketing, marketing attribution, which is gaining a lot of interest and attention.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: If you look at the global advertising spends today, about 75% of all advertising spends is expected to move to digital advertising.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_02: According to eMarketer and Digital Self Reports, about$850 billion is expected to be spent on digital advertising by 2027.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: I had a chance to have a conversation with somebody who spent over a decade pouring into complex marketing data about building this marketing attribution model.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: I am in conversation today with Scott Desapora Sealers, founder and CEO of Wicked Reports, a marketing attribution company based out of the US.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: I began my conversation with Scott on the definition of marketing attribution and the data sets that are required to build effective and impactful marketing attribution models.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: We then spoke about the various types of marketing attribution first click, last click, multi-touch attribution, and the effectiveness of each of them.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: Scott emphasized the need for the data sets to be pre-prepared with the right tags, with the right information, and to be available even before the campaign was planned by marketers.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_02: So he felt that was a big gap that was there today, and that is something that marketers need to take note of and plan.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_02: I then asked him about uh offline spends and how do you really fuse offline and online spends up to build effective marketing attribution models.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: His insights, examples, and experience.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: And the way he really explained these things was phenomenal.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_02: Over to my conversation with Scott.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: This episode of the Super CMO show was made possible by the great folks at Moving Worlds.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_02: Moving Walls provides a global technology platform built by out-of-home advertising experts for automating the process of planning, buying, executing, and measuring out-of-home campaigns.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_02: Moving Walls helps leading brands and agencies to move to audience-based planning, improve turnaround time with automated proposals, and implement programmatic digital, out-of-form and verify campaign performances.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: Moving Walls helps measure, reach and influence moving audiences across the world.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_02: For more information, log on to www.movingwalls.com.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_02: The area that you work in, especially in uh marketing, uh, is very close to my heart, which is really a marketing attribution.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_02: And uh it's an area that's getting a lot of attention from CMOs because uh a lot of money gets spent on digital today.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: I think uh the growth in digital has been fairly uh, I would say uh steep over the last decade or so.
• 4:02
  unknown: Uh-huh.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_02: Uh therefore, marketing attribution is uh an extremely important area for marketers.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_02: Platform also is something that uh uh is phenomenal.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: So what is your definition of successful attribution?
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: Is it accuracy, actionability, or both?
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_04: It's definitely both because uh you know you gotta have the accuracy.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_04: That's that's like table stakes for marketing attribution.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_04: It'd be like if you had a sports team and you didn't have accurate stats on how the players were performing, you'd have no idea if you actually had a good team or not.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_04: And so I like to look at marketing attribution like creating a scoreboard for your marketing.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_04: And then it helps uh make it more accessible for people.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_04: So you need you do need the accuracy because why we exist as a business and why it's a field is that it's hard to get accurate data.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_04: It's hard to get accurate data because people have different uh meanings of what a sales conversion means, even though they shouldn't.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_04: There's a lot of revenue that is sometimes not captured online, such as recurring subscription revenue or offline sales processes that get driven from online lead activity.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_04: And so just getting the accurate data in a lot of business models is challenging.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_04: Um, even in a pure Shopify store, it's tricky because you need to get the first-click data.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_04: People that started the customer journey is very important to getting value out of marketing attribution.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_04: And uh, if the technology is not good enough to capture that, it's gonna mislead you and report first-click data that's really like fifth or sixth click.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_04: And then you're banging your head against the wall, wondering why you're not scaling your business, and it's because your data wasn't accurate to begin with, even though the numbers look good.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_04: So that's why accuracy I'd say is paramount to get started.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_04: But then once you have accurate data and you can trust it, then accuracy doesn't matter because once you can trust you have accuracy, then you move on to you actually have to have to be able to make decisions with the data.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_04: So that's where the actionable comes in, is you have to not even just be able to make decisions, but have a consistent like weekly routine, or or if you're the media by a daily routine, so that you're in there doing repeatable processes and aligned with the team, looking at shared shared scoreboards of how the marketing's doing.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: So, what you're really saying is uh accuracy and actionability go hand in hand, right?
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_02: That's really what uh you're talking about.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_02: So, uh for our audience, if you can define what is marketing attribution, and uh if the definition can be in business terms, how do you really look at the definition of marketing attribution from a marketer standpoint?
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_02: It'll be great.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: I think it'll be a good place to start.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_04: So marketing attribution is the field of assigning credit to your marketing.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_04: So it's creating a scoreboard to say what's working and what's not working.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_04: So it sounds simple, but it gets challenging right away because there are a lot of different models.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_04: Attribution model is a different way of attributing credit.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_04: So when someone says, Well, I'm looking at a multi-touch model for attribution, initially that sounds like a great idea.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_04: I'm gonna take my revenue, I'm gonna spread it across all my marketing touch points, and then uh I'm gonna see which ones are profitable.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_04: And we certainly have the multi-touch attribution models, a couple of them available, because that does give you a general idea if something's working or not.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_04: However, let's just say that your average sales uh prospect to customer journey is 10 touch points.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_04: And let's say a sale for you is worth$100.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_04: A multi-touch model will then take those 10 touch points, take the$100, and then divide$100 by 10, and then give credit to each touch$10 each in a balanced model, which is uh one that's easy to understand.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_04: The trouble is that then is going to mute the impact because different touch points have different value, they're not all equal.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_04: And so you need to look at uh all the different ways you can keep score.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_04: Um, you need them the context of what you're trying to do with your specific marketing campaigns.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_04: Rather than look at this, look for one holy grail attribution model, it's more picking out the right model for the right job you're trying to get done.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_04: Because when you can measure, when you can measure the the outcomes you're trying to get against the intention of the marketing you're trying to do, you get a lot more value.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_04: The simplest uh simplest example I can give is the hardest thing to do in marketing that we see, you know, I've looked at over 10 billion in ad spend, the toughest thing to get is top of the funnel, which is cold traffic that's never heard of your brand.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_04: How to find the right sources of those that lead to customers in a profitable manner.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_04: And the challenge in attribution with that is people don't click and buy right away, particularly if you're not a household brand.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_04: If you're a household brand, you have huge brand awareness in your niche, then they will start doing that.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_04: But how they got to that point was marketing when you weren't a household brand.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_04: And so for that attribution of what top of the funnel started, that's where the first click attribution model becomes very handy.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_04: And it and how we look at that from marketing attribution is we take your revenue and then we use it as a signal and put it all at the first click for that one model, so that when you and a marketer are saying, Well, I sold$50,000 today, where did the first clicks come from?
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_04: We take that$50,000 and assign it at the very top of the funnel, the beginning of all those different journeys.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_04: And they won't match Facebook or Google who have gotten rid of first click and have no visibility, which is puzzling because they're great sources for first click.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_04: It would give them more credit, but I don't know, they don't do it.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_04: So, which is great for us.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_04: So, so it's it's creating a different scoreboard.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_04: It'd be like if you're looking at a soccer match and like you win the game four to two.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_04: Well, okay, who how was your possession time for the midfielders?
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_04: Um, what was how many shots were missed by the strikers, or were they accurate, or did they have 50 shots to score the four goals?
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_04: The goalie, did he only get have three shots and give up two goals?
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_04: So you could say, well, we won the game as a team, but our goalie's weak, and we need to fix the goaltending situation.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_04: So it helps you strategically and tactically move forward and improve your marketing and optimize it.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_04: Fantastic.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_02: One of the challenges in uh digital marketing attribution is the number of channels that are there because each of them are pretty much wall gardens, right?
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_02: So therefore, uh uh what happens is if I have to look at it uh holistically uh the way I allocate budgets, uh I allocate it across different media.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it would be Meta, it would be Google, it could be LinkedIn, it could be Shopify, uh, you know, it could be uh an e-commerce site like Amazon ads.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so clearly uh how do you really go about aggregating them?
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: Because that's the first challenge, right?
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_02: Which is really the biggest roadblock I would call for attribution is uh the way you uh orchestrate and bring the data and aggregate it together, and how hard is it?
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_02: And what are the steps if I were a marketer?
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_02: What should I take?
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_04: So I had that challenge before I created Wicked Reports with my very first attribution consulting client.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_04: I didn't even realize that's what I was doing at the time.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_04: This was a long time, 11, 12 years ago.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_04: So I decided to start from real sales.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_04: So I looked at his sales system and pulled out the sales and said, Well, this is what I'm trying to get more of for him or track what happened.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_04: I'll start from these actual sales.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_04: Then I pulled out from the CRM all the leads that were generated.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_04: And this was a pure e-com, but you still have people that uh you know you they don't buy right away, but they've opt in for a coupon, or you're doing abandoned cart capture techniques, or you're running paid ads to opt in to get special deals.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_04: All those ways you're still actually generating leads, even if you're not a lead gen marketer, you're an e-comm marketer.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_04: So I started from there.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_04: So you gotta start from the raw first-party data, because then you have data you trust because you can go and look at it, at least you have something you can validate.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_04: Because yes, the wall gardens aren't gonna give you anything, they're gonna give you ad spent and then inflated conversion counts.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_04: So starting from there, you know you have your leads that occur and you get your sales that occur.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_04: And lots of times they show up at the same time, but it doesn't mean they bought the same day.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_04: It means that they weren't identified by the CRM until they bought, and then they got pushed into the CRM.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_04: So you start creating a user, it's called identity graph is the term for it, but basically a timeline of what you know about the email address.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_04: And so from this, just pulling from the CRM in the cart, we have sales, hopefully multiple, depending on your business model, and we've got when they showed up in the CRM, which may or may not be before they bought.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_04: Then we have to start adding clicks to that timeline.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_04: And the way to do that is you've got to tag all the ads in a way that you can identify them, not just for what platform they came from, but you're gonna want to know which campaign, and then you're gonna want to know which ad set or ad group, which is the targeting, if it's um social.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_04: Add group is just a grouping of keywords or audiences if it's um Google or Microsoft.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_04: And then at the ad level, if it's uh social, or and then down to the keyword level if it's search.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_04: So the way to tag those is using UTMs, or you can create your own, generate your own ID and look that stuff up, or you can have some other mechanism, but that's what generally works.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_04: So that's another challenge because people will have a lot of a lot of ads.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_04: And so now it used to be really hard back in the day.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_04: You had to go in and manually uniquely code them all.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_04: Now there's um variables so that it's a little bit easier.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_04: So once you've got that, when people click, you've got a string of text on the end that identifies what made them where they came from.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_04: Let's just use meta.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_04: So it'll say meta campaign one, two, three, ad set, I don't know, mail lives in Boston like me, and then the ad is whatever hook you're using or whatever image.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_04: You want to name those UTMs so that they're uh accessible to you, you as the market to go, oh I know what that is.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_04: That's the whole point of the strategy.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_04: Now I like to name I like to instruct people to name the campaigns what part of the funnel is TOF for top, MOF middle, BOF bottom.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_04: Um so they have an idea.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_04: And it will help us know which model we should use to score it.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_04: Then the next the most challenging part, this the the the next work comes in, you got to capture the click, you gotta try to identify them, which is not is more possible if they end up submitting first-party data, meaning their email, while they're in that visit.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_04: But particularly when they're new to a brand, they might not.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_04: And so then you got to store that click with all the info you can IP address, device, whatever else you can get your hands on, and just store it away if you don't figure out who it is.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_04: And then that's where you really make your money as an attribution company, is that then when they end up becoming identified in the first party data, that's a that's a bigger signal to me.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, I've raised my hand and said, I'm willing to get your bombarded by retargeting ads and emails.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_04: Here's my email, or ideally, I'm willing to buy and take a chance on your product.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_04: Then we use our attribution time machine.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_04: We call it, we got to go back and figure out, okay, now we know them when we didn't know them, now it's value.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_04: Let's go find out that whole path.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_04: And that is like 10,000 lines of code to do that.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_04: So a lot of just continued, it just keep iterating on it and learning new ways to identify people.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_04: Um getting, you know, a lot of challenges there.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_04: So though all those things are what it takes.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_04: Because otherwise, if you're just trying to stitch the clicks when people buy right away, that does tell you what closes people.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_04: And if you're a household brand or if you have a really impulse type buy item with a small uh small average uh cart value, then that is probably still potentially good enough.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_04: But anyone that has some consideration, you need to be able to stitch the clicks before, because that's your competitive edge if you can get it.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_04: So I hope that helped.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_04: I got a little techie, but that was a trip down memory lane for me.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine you run a coffee shop online.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: People visit your website to look at the menu.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them order coffee beans.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: Others sign up for your newsletter.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: GA4 is like a smart camera and notebook bat.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: Watches everything visitors do, what pages they look at, what buttons they click if they place an order.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: Two, write it down as events.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: Each meaningful action, viewing a product, adding to cart, purchasing, signing up is an event.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: Three, post patterns.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: For example, most people who buy coffee beans first read your blog about brewing tickets.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: 40% of orders come from Instagram ads.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: Mobile users buy twice as often as desktop users.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: Unlike the old Google Analytics, which was mostly about counting page views, GA4 focuses on user journeys.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: It helps you see how people move through your site or app and which marketing efforts actually work.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: That's uh that's very, very important, uh Scott, because clearly what you're telling me is so if I'm a marketer, uh the importance of categorizing and building my data types uh for effective marketing attribution is the first step as much as you are thinking about your campaigns and where you spend the money.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: So therefore, uh tagging the data type by the campaign type, by the media type, uh whether it is top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, is as important, uh, if not critical, in your process as much as you're creative and as much as you're uh you know, multi-stage campaigns or multi-touch campaigns that you run, and therefore, as a marketer, uh giving that attention is very, very important, is what you're saying.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I mean, top the challenge at top of funnel isn't gonna go away because Meta has some super Andromeda black box AI.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_04: No matter how good they think they can target, it's still not gonna make someone buy until they're ready to buy.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_04: Because there's already all this fantastic creative out there.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_04: So there's still gonna be a path and a journey.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_04: And so you still need to measure it, and the only way to improve it, you've got to measure it so that you can then iteratively improve it.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_04: Because otherwise, now so once you've done all that tagging, if you don't have top-of-the-funnel measurement, you're gonna go into like Google Analytics 4 and see a lot more direct than Meta because of the time window that Google Analytics uses.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_04: And because Google Analytics 4 data is shared with all their properties for all their advertising, they can't do certain types of tracking that are perfectly legal if they're first-party data just kept for the brand's use.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_04: Because they're using it to make money against other brands for all their bidding and all kinds of smart business reasons, but not maybe beneficial to the brand using Google Analytics 4.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_04: So that means that you need that alternative score, otherwise, you're gonna go in there and say, geez, or the person with the budget will say, Hey CMO, I see all this spend at 50% of the budget at top of the funnel.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_04: I don't see any sales in Meta, and I don't see it in Google Analytics 4, and my Shopify automatic tagging isn't showing it either.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_04: It's showing these bottom of the funnel and these brand campaigns.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_04: So why are we spending more there?
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_04: So ideally, you have something that keeps score so that the in the CFO and the CEO are like happy, but if not, you need to get alignment on that because I mean if you're not spending at top of the funnel, you're gonna you're gonna be flat.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_04: Even though your stats, even though your ROAS in platform looks like three to five to ten on all your retargeting, it's retargeting all your existing people that might be closing off your SMS or your email, and then all the different channels are taking credit at the same time.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_04: And that's why if you try and aggregate the in the in-platform ROAS in conversions, there'll be more sales than you actually have, almost always.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: So clearly, uh, when we started this conversation, you talked about the way You tagged, you talked about how do you give credit to a campaign, right?
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: So, therefore, uh, how do I know that I am the same customer coming across different uh journeys?
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_02: And is that cookie-based?
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, does your system help build these uh identifiers, the identity graph that you spoke about?
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: So, can you talk a little bit about that?
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so we do use first-party cookies that they can load in from the brand's domain.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_04: So it loads in as the brand because we're only using the data collecting for the brand, using it for the brand, not sharing it, selling it, any of that stuff.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_04: So that allows you to load in under the domain.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_04: So that does help.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_04: IP address helps, even if people are masking their IP, because if they are opting in in that session, you can still use the fake IP.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_04: It doesn't help for location and demographics, but it does help for identifying where they clicked from.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_04: So, and then there's device, uh, there's other device ID, there's one or two others, but and then there's people that sell um, they they'll grab the TV IP and use that, which is very valuable.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_04: That one doesn't change a lot.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_04: Um, there's a few others, but that basically covers it.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_04: And so you're trying to collect them all, and then then there's certainly use cases you that no one can get a hundred percent perfect attribution because, like, if I am on my phone at a coffee shop and and I'm watching a YouTube video, and then I but then I don't take any action, there's no way to know, hey, they watched that video on their phone and then here otherwise.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_04: Now, Google might know it and aggregate it as a view, but that uh for me, I'm trying to get that one's really tough to get.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_04: Now, with Facebook, we pull in all the view data related to this, and then we allow the customer to set how much um credit we want to give it, because it's virtually never going to be 100%.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_04: But if you have a strong video campaign, you can you can drag a slider to give it more credit, but not the um uh extremely optimistic credit that Meta likes to give it.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_04: The for me, the the the table stakes has always been well, I we need to be looking at this as we're getting signals from everywhere, and we're trying to turn it into actionable data that makes people more profitable with their ad spend and stops wasting their money.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_04: And as long as we do that, if we miss a few, if there's a few untrackable situations, as long as we're still growing their top line revenue or making them more efficient with the return on ad spend or cutting their ad waste, then we're doing our jobs.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_04: But there are places that you can't track perfectly.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_02: So, therefore, what you're saying is once a marketer subscribes to your platform, uh clearly when the campaign gets set up, uh every creative, every uh uh I would say identity is actually built from your system into the brand's domain, and then every data comes in to your platform to really look at how you would allocate attribution for each of those campaigns up to the conversion.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: That's really the model and the benefits of using your platform.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, and so we have all these user journeys captured, and then we have all these models, and you can on the fly change your funnel and scoring.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_04: Now we want you to set up a few standard templates.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_04: We have this like Netflix interface where you pick different view templates based on your goal marketing goals, and then we've taken care of all the gory attribution settings in the background for you.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_04: But then you want to get these few standard ones that the teams get aligned on so that it's a shared scoreboard.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_04: And then uh, but then when you want to the the deeper dive, uh probably CMO or the data team can go experiment with changing all the different settings we have to change what the top of the funnel definition is, change um look back and look forward windows for actually because we can look forward and backward lifetime forever, but um some people don't want to do that for strategic reasons, so they can change that.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so it's it's highly customizable, but yeah, we have a default way we like people to look at it, unless they have their own because marketers are generous.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_04: CMOs spend a lot of time on marketing strategy, they don't spend a lot of time on measurement strategy.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_04: So that's where we come in.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_04: We spend all our time on measurement strategy and aligning it to your marketing strategy so you have the right measurement without spending weeks and weeks trying to configure it.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_02: Brilliant.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_02: I think CMOs spend a lot of time on marketing strategy, but it's critical for CMOs to spend time on measurement strategy, is a fantastic quote.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh very, very important, I think, uh, which allows me to get into the metrics and the KPI.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_02: So if I were using your platform and if I was doing marketing attribution, what are the common KPIs and metrics like like return on ad spend?
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_02: So can you talk about a couple of metrics and what do those metrics mean to a marketer?
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_04: Sure.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_04: Um, you know, let's talk about four actually.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_04: Return on ad spend, it's very clear, you know, it's revenue divide by spend.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_04: You got to get to one to break even, and that's just on the marketing spend that doesn't take product costs into account.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_04: So generally you want to get, you know, probably at least two, which means you're gonna double your money before you take product costs into account.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_04: Um, CAC is another one, customer acquisition costs.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_04: That's how much did I spend divided by how many unique customers I got.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_04: So I spent$10,000, I got 100 customers, I spend$100 to acquire a customer.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_04: That's often a um a good metric to use uh as a goal.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_04: And then the those are those are two standard ones, two more advanced ones that we provide that people really enjoy and hire us for is NCAC, which is new customer acquisition costs.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_04: So this will expose if your marketing is mostly just rebuying customers you already have, which in some cases is a great strategy.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_04: In some cases, you didn't mean to do that, and you're actually wasting the money.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_04: And so, what we do to measure that is when when we like we'll use Shopify, we have like 40 or 50 sales integrations, we'll use Shopify.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_04: If you have Shopify, you have a hundred different sales in a day, 40 of them might have been from new customers and 60 repeat.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_04: Could be a different spread, but that's a let's just go with that one.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_04: So, what Wicked Reports does is we take just the 40 new customers and then go figure out where you acquired them and then look at the ad spend there and then calculate the new customer acquisition cost.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_04: So in our case, where you know the that we spent the$10,000 for the 100 customers, well, only 40 of them anew, we spent$250 for the new customers.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_04: And so then that gets very uh that gets CMO's attending, like, oh crap, that's I thought I had a hundred dollar, I was acquiring cut like, well, yeah, you are acquiring customers at$100, but the new customers are$250.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_04: And then that'll really uh at first alarm people, but then it'll be like, well, now you have the evidence, now we gotta go improve it.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_04: And then when we go look to improve it, we go and say, well, let's look at the traffic that's coming in.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_04: Is the traffic potentially a new customer, or is it already on your customer list?
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_04: And you'll find that a lot of times people just accept the default settings, which mean target wide, and then the algorithms learn, oh, it's a lot easier to target these people, and what do they have in common?
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_04: They've already bought from you before.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_04: And so you've got to take great pains for the ad platforms to not just retarget your existing customers.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_04: And that's where we come to another measure we have called new visit percentage.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_04: New visit percentage is out of the clicks.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_04: How many of them do we feel are brand new visitors?
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_04: And you don't want that on any of your retargeting campaigns because it's retargeting, you want it to be zero.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_04: But at your top of the funnel, you want it to be as close to 100 as you can get, which is impossible to do because the as powerful and as accurate as the ad platforms are, they can't always handle your exclusions perfectly.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_04: They still people slip through.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_04: But we're trying to see are your top of the funnel bringing in new clicks, which then when you you retarget your just your new clicks, are then you have more percentage chance that they could be new customers, which then are you showing the right products that new customers are more likely to buy, which then should lead to a lower end cap.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_04: And then then you actually have the accurate data at the top of the funnel leading to the accurate closing, and then we can look at all kinds of other things to help improve that.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_04: But that'll generally start to get growth going once you know solve that puzzle.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_04: It's a challenging one, but people do solve it all the time, and then it can get growth, but then they then you have to align as a CMO with your media buyer and your budget holder that new customer acquisition takes a lot longer than a retargeting campaign.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_04: We like to set it at 30 days if we're blind and have no data, but then we can look how long do your customers actually take to convert, and you have reports that will show.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_04: You need a whole customer cycle to evaluate that.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_04: You go and you run a top of funnel every week, you like blow it up, it's not performing.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_04: Well, no one's is.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_04: No one's is.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_04: So those are the four that uh you know, generally those four are already gonna get you a lot.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_04: There's other advanced ones you can do, but those four are gonna get you in a really healthy place.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_01: Perfect.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_01: ContraMinds is a podcast dedicated to decoding people, minds, strategy, and culture.
• 32:05
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• 32:13
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• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: And now back to the show.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_02: So one of the questions on marketing attributions that I have is you've got the last touch attribution, you've got the first touch attribution, and you've got the multi-touch attribution, and that's also uh weighted, and uh you know you also have algorithmic, right?
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_02: So, therefore, uh can you talk a little bit about the four and which one amongst these, in your opinion, marketers should adopt and practice?
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so I spent 11 years worrying about that, so I feel very um qualified to answer.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_04: Only because of the time in the trenches, and I didn't figure it out at first, it took me a long time.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_04: So I created a system called the Five Forces because a lot of people were like, which attribution model should I use?
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_04: And then what should I do with the data?
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_04: And what I what I came upon was that you should the measurement strategy should match the marketing strategy, but in it as a in a day-to-day practice, uh, that means when you create a new campaign, you set an intention for that campaign.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_04: And that could be something like top generate top of the funnel traffic that converts.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, it always ends up being that ends up buying, but is it top of the funnel or is it new leads?
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_04: Is it retargeting traffic?
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_04: Is it I'm just trying to make the sale right from this ad, direct response.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_04: And based on what you're trying to do, determines the right attribution model to use.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_04: We've already talked about a couple of those, but let's take an example of generate new leads.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_04: If my intention is I need to get new, uh, you know, this campaign is to generate leads, it's okay.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_04: So then from a measurement perspective, that means when what we're measuring is not the clicks, not the cost per click.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_04: We're measuring how many leads get generated that are brand new in your CRM.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_04: And then we hold on to that source of lead generation, not just source, but campaign, targeting, and ad.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_04: And then for we look forever into the future, whenever there's revenue, we give that lead gen credit.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_04: Because uh, like a common funnel can be generate a lead, and then I'm gonna do a sales call, excuse me, or I'm gonna do a webinar, or you know, all the different Rasmitaz us marketers do.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_04: And so then down later in the funnel, you can say, geez, we're making more money.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_04: Where the heck did these leads come from?
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_04: Well, that's specifically what that attribution model solves.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_04: And the why we were using it is because you had a strategy where you were trying to generate new leads to begin with.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_04: And so we match it to the strategy, and so that's why there's no one, everyone tries to, oh, I got a different weighted one that's gonna work.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_04: Great.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_04: Anything that's weighted almost always goes a bunch of credit at the top, a bunch of credit at the bottom, and the middle's like evened out somewhat.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_04: That's how they all basically work.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_04: Um I like just changing the screen you have one score when you're trying to match your revenue from a CFO perspective, then you use a linear balance touch, which means I can't overcount whatever the sale was, is the maximum credit I can spread throughout the journey.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_04: But where the light bulb for me was not trying to use the CFO's view for the marketer.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_04: And for the marketer, uh, and using the revenue as the score rather than trying to always make it perfectly add up to your sales for the day, um, gave people greater insight and ultimately more efficient ad spent.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_04: And so that's that's what guides when we put a new model in there, a new idea is all right, how are people gonna actually use this?
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_04: How are we gonna have a template based on a common outcome that a Mark CMO wants?
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_04: I have a job to be done, I have an outcome I need.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_04: How can I click a square in our thing and we're gonna have the measurement set up that actually gives you insight, and then you can do actions.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and I had to get off my mathematical high horse to get there, you know.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_04: But I could be like all right all day and show like you know, standard deviation, this and that, you know, stats was my passion.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_04: And that wasn't helping anyone, it was just showing that I was good at math.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_04: So it really helped to just uh change it to how strictly look at a jobs to be done framework.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_02: Perfect.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, this is a course that you offer, and if I were having a marketing or a digital marketing team, the team can take this attribution course so that they start to get familiar with and comfortable with uh marketing attribution, right?
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_02: That's the 5D uh course that you're talking about, correct?
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so uh you can so it's called the Five Forces, and you there's three ways to access it.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_04: So you can take the course on your own at fiveforces.com, you can uh use the process inside of Wicked Reports by tagging intentions and then running the rest of the process, or our AI is trained up on it, and that's the only agent we use.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_04: So because I feel this is why attribution exists, what we created Wicked Reports for.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_04: So you can set it up and then hit a button, and then our AI every morning will generate, or on demand if you need, will just generate and run the analysis for you so that you don't you can just start plotting the when you see the output, you can just start taking action.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_02: So uh one question, Scott, I have is uh customer journeys are very complicated.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_02: It's not the way Google or the meta models really talk about because it's not as if every time I have I know I'm going to buy a product, right?
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I might actually consider it, I might probably search for it, then probably I will buy it.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_02: So there are several stages in the journey cycle that I go through.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_02: So which means that uh the intention that you're talking about and your campaign have to match with your identity graph, and therefore that framework becomes very very important because every time I will I I may not be in an intent signal to buy, I may be in an intent signal to search, I may be in an intent signal to uh you know compare, I may be in an intent signal to uh you know look at uh the features.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_02: So the fact that you need to look at intent signals with the purchase cycle or the phase that I am in, and therefore which campaigns are aligned to those intent signals is a framework that marketers need to be prepared for, and that's the measurement strategy that you're talking about, right?
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_04: It is, and uh for those different cycles, we we broke it down to top, middle, and bottom.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_04: Top for us is we don't know who the person is.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_04: All the clicks until they appear in first-party data, and that's customizable, but that's our default view at the start.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_04: You can make it just the very first click, you can make it the first two clicks, whatever you want.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_04: People usually just take our default because it works, because you use that and it scales.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_04: Then the middle of the funnel is whatever between they become identified in the CRM, however much on average you need to communicate with them, either email, SMS, or retargeting ads, until you consider it's it's time to buy.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_04: And that time to buy bottom of the funnel generally would be a week.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_04: Um, it can be certainly be longer for a higher ticket item.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_04: But if you look at it as the bottom of the funnel is the last week, the top of the funnel is until I know who you are, and the middle is all the stuff in the middle.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_04: And then um then you align your campaigns to that, then we measure according to that, and then it means different KPIs per um funnel uh step.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_04: Perfect.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um so many organizations uh really are hybrid, right?
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_02: So for example, uh not everything is digital, right?
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_02: So I have offline and I have online.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh if I have a hybrid attribution need, uh how can I go about it?
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a couple ways.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_04: What the a couple ways that we've helped people is when they're using, as an example, uh meta ads to book in-person office visits or demos.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_04: So in that way, how it would work is they're running the paid ads using our lead gen tracking.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_04: Uh they get the person to book online and pick through like a Call and Lee or whatever, and you book book the appointment.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_04: Then their online activity may or may not continue.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_04: They may still be retargeting them, but the sale's gonna happen in the store.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_04: And then what needs to happen, which people do it, is then the people upload the sales with the email that they book the appointment on, and then we can stitch on an online.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_04: It doesn't have to be email, but that's you know an easy way to explain on a podcast.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_04: So then we do that, and then um that's how we stitch online and offline activity together.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_04: That's a clean way that works every time.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_04: Um, example could be you're booking appointments for your med spa, or you're selling something home improvement, and you gotta go meet them.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_04: Uh anything like that, it works fine.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_04: It gets way more challenging if you have a retail store.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_04: Um, in that case, it only works if you're doing some online promotion that they're gonna go remit offline and they're gonna have some loyalty, so you've got the connecting email address or phone number.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_04: You need that online, offline.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_04: If you're creating this customer journey, you need the identifier, and some cases it's very smooth.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_04: A lot of times it gets it gets clunky or data accuracy.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_04: Your you know, my teenage daughter works at a clothing store.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_04: She didn't maybe she didn't ask for the email address, and then you lost the trail.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_04: So uh that's where just data accuracy.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_04: So then your data accuracy, what we where we started from, you don't get the data accuracy, so it's lost.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_04: There's some cool ideas around geofencing people's phones, and oh, they were on that street, so they went to the store that day.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but it's more for Fortune 500 brands that can buy all the credit card data and match it up and geofense.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_04: It's possible.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_04: We're not a good use case for that because uh our use case is only if it's very straightforward.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_04: They're gonna book something online, and then when they show up at your appointment, you've already got it printed out who they are with their email, and then you can upload to us if they buy something eventually.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_04: That can work fantastic.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_04: We can see people with 90-day lags that are making a factor of 7 to 10x more return on ad spend than Facebook will show, because Facebook won't see any of that.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_02: So if I'm an automotive brand where uh I have dealerships and I have television commercials and I have radio commercials and things like that, uh then uh how would you build attribution?
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_02: Because very, very difficult because then I need a QR code, I need a promo code, uh, you know, I get people to uh you know call me into the call center.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_02: So uh what are the ways in which you believe uh if I want to build a measurement strategy for my offline ad Spence?
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: Would you be the best platform to do it, or would you uh would you say you know you will probably work with the marketing team to build the attribution?
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, we'd be a partner, but that'd be a custom build because of that.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_04: I was just on the Cox Automotive podcast actually two weeks ago talking about this.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know if it's not out yet, but uh it will be.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_04: So, and they were asking about that.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I mean, so then you get to pick your most valuable signal which uh and work back rather than trying to nail the whole journey at once, because there's gonna be some a radio ad is just untrackable, as frustrating as it is.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_04: Even though the only thing you could do is holdout tests where you run the ad, and if you have multiple dealerships, you run the TV ad for one or the radio for one and not the other, and look at the lift and everything else is kept the same, is the only pure way to measure it, which would be tough to do, but it's possible.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_04: My thought would be to look back from test drives because that's a really high signal intent.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_04: And then work back from the test drive journey, or when you capture them in your CRM, a lot of tracking to try to get people into your CRM.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_04: So a bigger focus on first-party data capture.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_04: Because if you get that, then you've got it.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_04: Now, I believe Cox Automotive also has an identity graph product of their own because they have Auto Trader, they've got Kelly Blue Book, they basically have a monopoly on the data.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_04: So if you can get your hands on that, they've got a lot of that identity graph built.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_04: And then you layer it with our models, and then you'd have something.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_04: Because you could still use top, middle, bottom, change of definition, but the graph is the toughest, the accuracy piece is the toughest.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_04: Because I mean, I bought a truck in Halloween last year and it was auto trader.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_04: Auto trader was what I prowled around on, Kelly Blue Book.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_04: And then I started, then I would, then I would submit my info to a couple places once I kind of figure out my price range and mileage and what I could get.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_04: So once I'd done the research, I submitted, I submitted my info, so that's when they'd have it.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_04: That'd be my first choice would be get Cox automotive's data layered into our attribution, which we're in talks with them, so that might happen.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_02: Right now it'd be a it'd have to be a request to the person there, which the other thing is really uh there's a lot of debate around uh which uh technique is better.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_02: Is a Marco chain better?
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_02: Is a shapely uh you know algorithm better?
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_02: So uh because each of them have different ways in which so if I was a data scientist uh listening to this conversation, uh what would your experience and advice be on which ones to pick up and which one do you think has worked better for you?
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_04: So we don't use either one of those because we're dealing with uh we need actionable signals, not black box, and all of our attribution is transparent.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_04: So if we say that uh a Google campaign had 22 sales that day, you click on them and you can see the exact order IDs, and you click on the order IDs and you can see all the click timestamps, so it's completely transparent.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_04: Um it's um it's maskable with GDPR and whatnot if need be, but um, otherwise it's the brand's data, so they get to see transparently why we're saying what we're saying.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_04: So those models come in handy is when you've got you know household name brands like Yeti, Coca-Cola, when you've got brands where when you've got a challenge that you're not going to be able to build a graph.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_04: So and ours is always if you've reached a stage where you're beyond individual journeys and you're just modeling based, uh, then that's when you've outgrown Wicked Reports.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_04: If your scale is so big that you can't be journey-based, and that's where some of those models might more come in handy on massive data sets.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_04: So, yeah, we don't we don't engage in those at all, so I wouldn't I wouldn't be the right person to speak to them.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_04: Perfect.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_02: So largely you are a D2C brand, e-commerce, Shopify, uh, straight through uh uh campaigns to conversions on CRM.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uh that's really where your sweet spot is.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_02: But obviously, uh, you know, as brands, as e-commerce brands become physical commerce, neighborhood commerce, quick commerce, probably the fact that they may want to do attribution around these uh is becoming more and more critical.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_02: Is it would you agree with me on that?
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so for each one, it's if you can get the raw data, you can trust it.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_04: And if not, you have to start getting more black box and inferring the conversions.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_04: Like, for example, if uh you're trying to infer DoorDash conversions, that's tricky unless you can get the customer data.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_04: Because if not, you're just gonna have this sales ring that is against DoorDash that should if it gets piped eventually into your final sale, you know, your final sales, then there's there's it just can be more challenging if there's a journey.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_04: Now, a DoorDash is more a direct response, so you can look at just ads.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_04: Hey, click here and buy, you know, add me to DoorDash if I'm a restaurant.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_04: So you can actually scale that type of advertising because it's click and buy right away.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_04: There's no real consideration.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_04: I'm hungry, what are the options?
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_04: Click, do it.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_04: So that's where a last-click model works totally fine.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_04: So you could get attribution as simple as that.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_04: But it is going to become more challenging.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, the more places where you're collecting revenue and there's an intermediary, then it guess gets more complicated because then the attribution company has to work out pulling that data in, potentially deduping it against something else.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_04: There's just a fair amount of work for each new source.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_04: So it has to be big enough for someone to be willing to do it.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_04: So if you're just making you know a few hundred bucks a day on this other source and your sales are otherwise a couple hundred thousand, it's just not worth it to even spend the time to do it.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_04: So it has to reach the right scale.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_04: Um answered your question fully, but that's what I have.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_02: I think I think it's a good uh good way of looking at it because I've been talking to CMOs and uh you know when you look at billion dollar uh uh you know firms, uh large offline, online uh brands, they are looking at market mix marketing mix models, right?
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_02: Again, there they don't have all the data and they try to actually allocate uh at spends uh for each of those uh spends that they have.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_02: So clearly uh you know I run promotions in Texas or maybe in Mumbai in India, but I may run a different promotion in Chennai or in uh say uh California, which means that different promotions, different geographies, different spends, uh different segments, then obviously uh in offline, online, then the complexity of the marketing mix model becomes very hard to attribute the final sale, right?
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_02: So, therefore, that's the reason I asked that question.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, you gotta start ground up.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_04: So each channel needs to have its own, you need to get down to the campaign level, set the intention, measure them all at their granular level as best you can.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_04: You can't look top down, in my opinion.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, that's something I do a lot of stats.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_04: I used to be a financial systems trader.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_04: Before that, I was a baseball stats fanatic, and it always comes down to baseball stats, you come right down to the pitch and work your way up.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_04: And now baseball stats are taken over by all the stats guys, and all the different you know, approaches that the plate are now different because they broke it all the way back down to there in terms of what's the percentage chance we're gonna win on each pitch based on how you're swinging, what the angle of your swing is.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_04: So we've got reverse engineered all the way back to how you're gonna swing the bat on a pitch.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_04: To get, and that would be my advice to them is to get you gotta get granular to get results at the macro.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_02: Brilliant.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_02: So if having spent so much of time, a couple of last questions that I have, uh if I were a marketer or a CMO, what are the most important skills that I need to have in myself and in my team uh over the next say few years?
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_02: Which do you think are extremely important having seen and worked with large brands?
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_02: Uh what are the skills that you think are important?
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_04: Um I guess there needs to be two things that sometimes are at odds but shouldn't be.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_04: One is the uh ability to experiment an experimentation mindset.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_04: Um you gotta be able to take experiments and fail as long as you learn from them.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_04: And so if you're coming in and it's a high pressure, hey, we need results, we need results, that's when people will default to, okay, let's just pour money on retargeting to pump up the in-platform ROAS so it looks like we're doing well when that's not the solution.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_04: Uh additionally, you also need accountability, um, because otherwise, if everyone's just doing ideation and there's no clear number eventually on getting aligned on scorecard of a person's job role, I think is really important as well.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_04: I run, you know, I've seen inside a lot of marketing teams and clear lines of accountability, but the willingness to experiment are two things that lead to success, but they both gotta be clear or they'll compete against each other and you won't get either, is what I say.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_02: Uh what would be one piece of advice uh you would give to a young marketer entering this business?
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_04: Well, there's a lot of opportunity because it's a complex field, uh, even though at the end of the day, just trying to get people to buy stuff.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_04: So I I would say start with some local brand where you can get some the sooner you can get work experience, the better.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_04: And the beauty of the field is it's not really uh academic based.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_04: Like I'm not gonna say, oh, I want to hire a marketer because they're from Harvard.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_04: Uh who cares?
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_04: Are you good at uh are you good at running market, you know, can you fit the jobs to be done that we need as marketers, as a as a brand, is more important.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_04: And it's easy to get world real world experience, and then that's when you learn is on the job.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_04: So if you could even just approach your local smoothie place or clothing store or what have you and start working uh maybe at a lower rate than you you aspired to, but you get the experience, then you build a portfolio because as someone who's hired and fired a few marketers, but also seen a lot of agencies inside of them and a lot of brands.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_04: Um, it's the values in getting quality work done, communicating clearly, um, and ultimately driving more revenue.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_04: It's not always about the big aha idea, it's about just getting people to methodically do the work that they should be doing and aren't a lot of times.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_04: Like email sequences.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_04: A lot of people don't look at the reason just can you write a couple good emails and get them automated for someone and then track, oh look, they made more sales.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_04: Small brands and shops would be thrilled with that.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so I'd start I'd start local because it it's the challenge is the ad spin gets bigger and the scope gets bigger, but it's still about strategically talking to the brand owner, what's unique about what we do, how do you sell it in person that enables you to have this business, and then figuring out how to do it online.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_04: Still the same challenge as you go further in your career.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_02: If I were a uh you know marketer uh doing the stuff that you're talking about, having budgets, spending the money, uh, you know, looking at marketing effectiveness.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_02: Are there some books that you believe uh you can recommend or uh you know websites that where I could go there and probably start to learn this?
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_02: One is really your course, the other one, uh what are the other sources of uh information or knowledge which you have found useful, which you would recommend?
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_04: Not a lot of marketing books, actually.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_04: Um I follow a couple people on LinkedIn, uh Ralph Burns on LinkedIn has a lot of good strategies, John Moran, those are two off the top of my head from this uh agency tier 11.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_04: They've got a lot of good content they put on LinkedIn.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_04: Uh usually it's LinkedIn thought leaders, it's not so much books.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_02: Fantastic.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, what's one piece of advice that uh you got?
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure you would have got a lot, but something that's remained with you uh till date.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_04: Oh man.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_04: Um, probably around persistence from my father-in-law.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_04: He was like, you know, uh, he got me a plaque, it's around here, yeah, it's right over here, but it was around uh that you know, it's not the person with the most skill or the person that has the most money or the most intelligence.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_04: It's often the most persistence that ends up winning the battle.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_04: And I found that to be true running a SAS, like we might have some great idea and the market doesn't take to it, or you know, there's always a lot of ups and downs, but just persisting and continuing to attack the problem, and then I realized, you know, just focusing on what are our customers' outcomes and are they getting them or not, that orientated us uh really well once once I took that mindset, and that was our persistence of staying at the staying at it.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_04: So I'd give him credit for that.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks, thanks Scott.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, with that brilliant piece of advice, which I completely agree and uh it resonates totally with me.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_02: It was a fantastic conversation, it was an hour of uh I would say masterclass on attribution, marketing attribution, and thanks a lot.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I really think uh there's so much to be done in this area, and we've just scratched the surface, and uh, I think uh this conversation will inspire people to know more about what you are doing, the course that you are offering, and I'm sure uh this is a place where people will go to if they really want to start off and then get better at marketing attribution.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks a lot for your time and lovely talking to you.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, wonderful interview.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_04: I really appreciate it.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for listening to this episode.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_02: For selected links and detailed show notes, with it.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_02: www.contramines.com.
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