Latest / Talk Commerce / Beyond Vanity Metrics: Building Measurement Systems That Actually Drive Growth with Mallory Wilberding
Transcript
- Brent Peterson (00:01.102) Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Mallory Wilberding. Mallory is with FusePoint. Mallory, go ahead, do a much more elegant introduction and tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions in life. Mallory Wilberding (00:15.41) Yeah, of course. Well, like you said, my name is Mallory Wilberding. I am the director of sales at FusePoint. And here we focus on measurement data and all the what now questions that happen when you experience that. So my day-to-day is focused on working with brands to help build custom measurement and strategy plans and introduce the FusePoint data team out into the world. Brent Peterson (00:42.798) That's great. And passions? What did you have for passions in life? Mallory Wilberding (00:43.038) something about, right? I got a lot of passions. I'm a girl of many hobbies from dog training to knitting. I've got lots of passions, but those are some two big ones for me. Brent Peterson (00:57.344) Anything, anything good that we can teach our dogs after this episode? Mallory Wilberding (01:02.844) I have a new puppy that's a big mastiff so he's gonna look a little intimidating when he's older and so I taught him that whenever I say friend he has to go on the ground and roll over and show his belly so he looks really goofy and people can pet his belly so I think that's a fun one. Brent Peterson (01:16.718) That is awesome. I love that one. We won't go into dog stuff, but. So Mallory, before we get started on content, we're going to talk about FusePoint, not dogs. You have volunteered to be part of the free joke project. I'm going to tell you a joke. All you do is give me a rating 8 through 13. So here we go. And your dogs might like this joke too. Who knows? What's the difference between a hippo and a zippo? One is very heavy. Mallory Wilberding (01:33.492) Mm-hmm. Brent Peterson (01:46.082) The other's a little lighter. Mallory Wilberding (01:48.244) That's good. I would give it at least a 12. Brent Peterson (01:53.518) All right, thank you. Thank you very much. All right, so give us the 411. Can I still use 411? Give us the 411 on FusePoint. Tell us kind of your background on how you got into what you're doing. Mallory Wilberding (02:09.78) Yeah, I'd love to. So I have a career in kind of ad tech as well as e-commerce and marketing. Earlier in my career, I worked at Metta, previously called Facebook, when it was called Facebook. And there I was working with some of the largest spending brands on the platform. And then experienced iOS 14 and a half too while I was there, which solidified my love of measurements, which led me to work in ad tech on the measurement side in consulting. And then that led me to FusePoint because there are tons of measurement tools out in the world today, but FusePoint's a bit different. are a data service and consultancy, really strategic, answering the what now question of measurement and making sure brands are getting a lot of support there. Brent Peterson (02:56.63) It has to be incredibly harder nowadays that first party data is going away or it's gone away or it must be more difficult or there's just different ways of measuring, right? And you mentioned the 14X. Tell us, it's been a while now, but just give us the background and why that was such a huge impact on measurement. Mallory Wilberding (03:12.262) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mallory Wilberding (03:26.804) Yeah, it was a really big impact because at the time, feel like Facebook knew my future firstborn child's name. They knew everything about us. And being a marketer, that's really great to have all of this data. But consumers didn't always love that. And so when those, and I said Facebook, but all of these other channels too. those, you know. data points we were used to having for a long time and then they're gone. And so a lot of brands and marketers were looking for an exact replacement. So out popped up a lot of measurement tools. But something that I just think is really important for people to know is not all measurement is created equal. And I don't mean that by this company is better than this company. I mean, there's different types of measurement and they answer different questions there. So with the loss of a lot of first party data or in the ability to access all of that data from our sales channels, brands are kind of forced to look at different ways to measure and might not all have access to the same expertise to get answers that used to be really easy to get. Brent Peterson (04:34.502) I do talk a lot to entrepreneurs and it seems like a lot of younger businesses or even medium sized businesses, they forget to even measure when they're doing their marketing. Tell us the importance of why you should measure and some of the unique points that you're solving in just brand measurement and marketing measurements. Mallory Wilberding (04:58.258) Yeah, I'd love to. Something that we kind of talk a lot about today is just removing the reliance on what we call vanity metrics, like a ROAS and platform. A lot of brands, even a lot of finance teams that are helping create these benchmarks that marketers are aiming for, they're so used to having these metrics and platform that that's just what has become the gold star for a lot of teams. But what it's missing is the actual tie back to the ROI of that marketing investment. So yeah, I can look at a ROAS and a dashboard and say this looks great, but that's not telling me how it's actually impacting my P &L. So that's what's really missing. It's relying on only platforms that don't talk to each other really makes it difficult for a brand to see the true success of marketing. I think that's where lot of the skepticism might come in from non-marketers. or even young brands on not understanding why they didn't grow as fast as X brand in their industry, even if they feel like they have a great product. So the importance of measurement is one, knowing what we're trying to measure. If we're putting dollars behind a brand effort, so more top of funnel, we can't measure that in that seven day window. the impact of that will not come back that quickly, right? Or if we're measuring out of home or linear TV, we can't measure that with an attribution tool like GA or third party because those aren't digital touch points to track, especially if you're selling in retail brick and mortar, for example. So it's just important to have measurement because we need to be able to connect all those dots, but it's not just to a metric like a ROAS, it's how is this truly impacting my P &L? Because the whole goal of marketing is to bring revenue into the business, is to get more sales, is to get more purchases. And we want to be able to actually measure the impact that marketing is doing and be able to help marketers prove how impactful their efforts are. Brent Peterson (06:53.922) I typically do the e-commerce circuit shop talk and e-tail and all the other, the lead and NFR, NRF. And I just sat through a talk in e-tail Boston about how ROAS isn't the measurement that a lot of marketers should be looking at. There's better measurements. I can't remember the one they should, that we should be looking at, but. I feel like every time I sit through a new marketing talk, there's a new measurement and somebody's telling us that old measurements to wrong measurement. Is there a book of measurements we should be looking at or is there something that is sort of the... I would imagine it's always changing, but some things are constant. Mallory Wilberding (07:35.794) Yeah, I wish there was a silver bullet. It would make all of our lives a little bit easier. But something that we really like to focus on is the actual ROI. So we look at incremental ROAS. What's the true incremental impact? And it's just the way that we view our measurement. Instead of looking at ROAS, how did this campaign perform, it's where will my next dollar be spent because of its most impactful placement. So by understanding incremental ROAS and how each channel is incrementally beneficial, we can then answer that question as, well, if I had another 100K, buy it an extra million, where would that dollar go? And that's. What kind of leads to a lot of our discussions with our brands today at FusePoint, instead of being another ad tech that's a software that a brand has to learn and then decode and then be able to represent to maybe their C-Suite, for example. We're doing the measurement. We're helping decode it, building that strategy and then helping educate the rest of the team. And it allows us to be really agile and custom. So as things change, like, maybe we don't want to look at this metric. We can adjust with our plan. But yeah, think everyone, if someone tells you there is a single source of truth, don't trust them. Someone tells you there's one metric you should be looking at, have a little bit of skepticism because it's always different for what you're looking at. I'm not going to look at always revenue when I'm looking at a top of funnel, right? Sometimes it's engagement we're looking for versus bottom of funnel. We for sure want to look at more revenue based. It's a long way to say there isn't a book, but hopefully that helped answers a little bit. Brent Peterson (09:14.412) Yeah, I think you see really small businesses doing a great job at measuring and maybe it's easier for them and then you get into larger businesses and sometimes they don't have much more advancement on their tooling than the small business does. Do you see mistakes that the typical merchant would make in how they're approaching measuring their data and their marketing? Mallory Wilberding (09:41.972) Yeah, I do. It's interesting because I like that you brought up that you might say the same things with any size company. FusePoint, we're really trying to bring that enterprise approach to mid-market as well and all of that expertise that comes behind that. But a lot of brands that I talk to, you're one of two camps. You know measurement, but you might be using a different type that may not be as beneficial or maybe need more support on the what now question. So we see our measurement, but what do we do with it? Or you're with a brand that is large or young, too. maybe people have experience with, hey, we can load the data we have access to, which might be last click. And that doesn't serve a lot of the impact of our marketing dollars for other areas of the funnel that's not the last click. So challenges I'm seeing is one, not understanding measurement. There are different types. I know I've mentioned this a lot. It's like my soapbox topic. There's different types of measurement, really important to understand how each of them brings us an answer that's part of the whole. The other thing I'm finding is people are really stuck on ROAS still, and like that talk you heard, a lot of people are saying don't use it. And they're not able to be really agile with what's happening in the market or outside changes. something is always happening, right? There's tariffs, there's gas price changes, there's maybe a loss of access to different pieces of our product that we're trying to sell, right? There's always something that's going to happen and being able to be agile and adjust is really important. So the challenge I'm seeing a lot that people are making mistakes on is focusing on the wrong metric, but also not being willing to adjust with what's happening. And a simple solve for that is to have measurement on that gives you that really nice flywheel of this is what's happening. OK, this is how I adjust. Let's test this. Either worked or didn't work. Now we have a new plan and we're going to keep going. Mallory Wilberding (11:51.357) I think you might be muted. Brent Peterson (11:53.743) You think one of the mistakes that some marketers make is they're trying to hit 100 % on all their tests. And I saw a really interesting talk from somebody at booking.com where they're hoping to get 10 % on their tests, but they're learning from that failed 90%. Like they're testing so much that they're learning all the fails and always moving forward with the wins. there a metric in there that people should be testing and failing at and then learning from what they're failing at. Mallory Wilberding (12:27.528) Yeah, for sure. I I think the most important thing is just to test. When we are running, so FusePoint, the measurement that we do is we focus on media mix modeling and incrementality test. And a media mix model or marketing modeling mix, which also incorporates organic, helps give us a structural idea of what's happening. And then you use incrementality tests, so testing, like what you heard at booking. to then inform our model, our machine learning model, better. And so I believe in always on testing, meaning just there always should be tests. The mistake is not so much about looking at a specific number, because yes, you'll learn from both the successes, that 10 % versus the 90. It's about how we run those tests. We need to run them appropriately. If we're running a programmatic test, it needs to run a lot longer. than for example a conversion test on a sales or a marketing platform. Just by nature of how people interact with each of those different types of ads. So for me the learning of successes and failures with testing is more knowing how to appropriately run a test so that you can reach. and answer, be it the one you like or don't like, versus running them all the same. And you might not get to that 10 % because it's not run appropriately, if that makes sense. if we get really into the specifics, it's about statistical significance and all that fun stuff that can go over my head sometimes too. Brent Peterson (14:03.426) I sit through a lot of Google ad meetings and you hear different reps coaching the merchant or the agency about PMAX and how much they should use PMAX and how much they should turn on or off within the system. Is the AI portion of ads gaining traction now and are we more trusting? I can just remember when PMAX first came out, a lot of marketers were like, You know, it just seems like it's spending a lot more money with less return. But I have to rethink that that's smarter than somebody just manually trying to do things like that. And I'm assuming that you have the same approach where you're using link large learning models to help educate the system on the data that they need, right? Mallory Wilberding (14:56.936) Yeah, exactly. It's so interesting. And MMM is a machine learning model, the way we use it. So it's constantly kind of running and learning. And what's nice is, know, FusePoint, just so you and your listeners know, came from an agency called Powered Digital Marketing. And we've been doing this work for years and years, but we chose to brand the data team and separate as its own entity, right? So that people can see, hey, you know, we're a measurement team that, you know, regardless of who's running your media, we're going to give you true answers to what's going on. have tons of historic data to feed our machine learning models and understand what we call as priors. And then the incrementality tests come in to update those priors. And so we've done tons of tests on PMAX and all of these fun stuff. And it's really interesting to see how it changes the perspective of our brands. Either they're like, wow, this actually is working, but it didn't seem like it because it couldn't tell with the sales that are being attributed to it, or yeah, maybe it's not working as well, but you know, the measurement just tells you what's happening. You need the expertise to tell you why it's happening. Is it because we're not putting the right creative into our campaigns or anything like that? It feels kind of like a non-answer, but I think it's interesting how AI is learning a lot more quickly. There's a lot of brain power in AI, so I really like using it. And machine learning is a subset of AI, right? So we definitely believe in having our machines learn and get smarter as we go. And that's why we run tests to feed in better data points to our machines so they learn smarter. Brent Peterson (16:37.934) Yeah, that's just a point in that too. They always tell you, well, this has to run for so much time. And the more data you have, the better it's going to be. Obviously, in the less traffic you have, the more likely that your data is not going to be correct or they're not going to predict what could happen because there's not enough data there to predict it. As we're going into the, you know, we're going into Black Friday, believe it or not, or Cyber Monday. I come from the developer space, the agency space, and everybody's already locked down. You shouldn't be making any more changes to your store. From the marketing standpoint, from the measurement standpoint, this seems like the right time to get your measurements in place. I wouldn't say it couldn't be too late to start measuring. How do you start preparing now for Black Friday, Cyber Monday? Mallory Wilberding (17:30.152) Yeah, it's never too late to start measuring. When I talk about Black Friday, Cyber Monday with measurement, I like to talk about the entire year because everyone says it, but we shouldn't be relying on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, but there's tons of buying intent. And something that we do is obviously we have the always on measurement I've talked about, but we do a lot of projects, persona work, creative analysis, like really understanding. who our customer is and how we're going to get them to purchase from us. And that obviously includes Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There's tons of intent. So with that measurement, like let's say we turn it on now, we can start to see how behavior is changing going into this year. And then it gives us a great first quarter of measurement, for example, if we turn it on now. But also at the same vein, we're also talking about 2026 too. So like what December all of a sudden we're all taking vacations for a second and 2026 planning for it to like jump back into seat. And so that's another part of it. It's having the measurement on where we understand our customer. We understand how long it takes them to come in, how many interactions or where our dollars are best spent in the funnel in what time period. So that once we get to that high buying intent time, like Black Friday, 7th of Monday, you know exactly how to then switch to our retargeting to get our buyers in. And so it's a combination of having us on all year. So we know exactly who to target, how to target, how to message, how to plan our dollars, and then having that measurement on so we know, OK, we're doing the right things to capture the most dollars possible in this holiday season. Brent Peterson (19:10.84) So the answer to FusePoint is you needed it 10 years ago or whenever it started and the second time is right now, right? Mallory Wilberding (19:21.204) Yeah, exactly. I am a big, big fan of measurement, if you guys can't tell. So I think everyone should have it yesterday. But there is never a bad time to add it in. Even if you're in this space. At FusePoint personally, we're the team that runs it and then also decodes it and then builds the strategies. So it's not a big bandwidth add, for example. But there's tons of... tons of different measurement things that can be done during and not during holiday seasons. Brent Peterson (19:51.887) What's your advice to brand marketers that they should be doing for growth? Mallory Wilberding (20:04.21) My advice to brand marketers is to not be afraid of using your full funnel and working to educate on the impact of brand and top of funnel in trying something new. That makes it hard because usually when you try something new, there needs to be enough spend for something to happen. But there is a lot of opportunity in just really investing in our brand and our top of funnel that does come back to pay off. If it's needing to have some type of measurement or understand that it might take a quarter or two for a type of funnel to come back in. I really encourage brand marketers focusing on growth to do that and then to do some sort of analysis on their LTV to CAC. And also when we're looking at some of our internal metrics, taking into account your COGS and your APEX, right? That is a part of our costs and we want to make sure that we can prove, our marketing is paying for everything. That definitely helps when we're asking for more budget in the future. Brent Peterson (21:06.734) That's great. I, there's always the question about how do you go to the CFO on your new budget? and how, how do you ask for that extra spend on some measurement thing? And they're always going to say, how's it going to return? Right. Mallory Wilberding (21:21.172) Yep. Brent Peterson (21:22.958) So Malar, we have a few minutes left as I close out the podcast. I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What would you like to plug? Mallory Wilberding (21:32.532) I think I'm just gonna be boring. I'm gonna plug Chatting with FusePoint and Chatting with me even on LinkedIn. We've got tons of different resources that I share and that's kind of the big thing that I'll plug. Maybe if we talk again in the future, Brian, I'll be more fun. Brent Peterson (21:50.211) You've been great. Thank you. Mallory Wilberting. Wilberting. I got it right that time. Ewa, the Director of Growth for FusePoint. Thank you so much for being here today. Mallory Wilberding (21:55.004) Yes. There you go. Mallory Wilberding (22:02.93) Yeah, appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Brent Peterson (22:06.593) Alright, we got through it.