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Bonus Episode 6
Decoding Marketing Attribution: Data Driven Success
About This Episode
Learn how new technologies are shaping marketing attribution and how to select an attribution model that aligns with your marketing efforts.
Ryan McClurkin | Chief Analytics Officer, Jewelry Television
Transcript
Episode Introduction (00:00:00)
A lot of companies are still stuck in a last-click attribution world, right? There’s an old-school metric. It’s been around for 2025 years, and it attributes the conversion event to the last impression or last click click-based attribution specifically last click, it creates some serious challenges, stuff that is real low in the funnel is gonna get all the conversion value, and the upper funnel would never pay out like you will never measure the upper funnel efficiently using last click conversion, I’m spending money here, but I can’t measure its effectiveness because all of the conversion values getting attached to a lower funnel.
How Agencies Thrive Introduction (00:00:30)
But then you think about the social landscape. The research data is hugely significant when we combine all of these different touch points, so that long term loyalty and then diving into the clicks to leads to sales, gotten to a point where it can drive better results in audience targeting, and really is what’s going to set you apart. You’re tuning in to the How Agencies Thrive podcast.
Sneha (00:00:53)
Marketing efforts today use the most number of channels and platforms to reach prospects than they ever have before. So naturally, there’s a lot more data available. So how do you as a marketer, working with a brand in an agency or an independent consultant, make sense of things, and make data work for you, instead of drowning in numbers? In short, how do you make attribution work for you? Let’s talk to an expert and find out more. Hello, and welcome to the How Agencies Thrive Podcast. I’m Sneha Suhas from StackAdapt. And joining me, we have Ryan McClurkin, chief analytics officer at Jewelry Television. Thanks for being here excited to pick your brain about all things attribution, before that, I’ll pass it to you for an introduction. Please tell us about your professional background, areas of expertise and also about Jewelry Television.
Ryan (00:01:48)
Yeah, thank you for having me. You know, first off, I’d like to say do or television, we’re the kind of the largest non-bridal jewelry seller in America, we’re a home shopping network, that’s how we started. And if you want to think about that as a QVC, or HSN, but we sell primarily jewelry in that space. And like I said, kind of the largest non-bridal jewelry website in America and just seller of non-bridal jewelry, that’s kind of our expertise is in color gemstones. And we sell a lot of jewelry in that space. So you know, give you some background on me. I’ve been I’ve been in the industry about 12 to 13 years in the analytics space. And, you know, we cover all different kinds of verticals of analytics when it comes to retail. We cover everything from you know, what I’ll call financial, financial forecasting, different types of retail analytics, as it relates to sales volume, customer analytics, we do a lot of customer lifetime value modeling. And then one of the you know, in a lot of merchandising Analytics as well, you know, what sells? Well, what doesn’t sell? Well, at any given time, we’ll have about 40,000 active skews. So we do a lot of pricing Analytics as well as dynamic pricing. So all kinds of different verticals of analytics. But one of the most interesting ones for me personally, because I’ve also a background e-commerce is the digital media side, digital advertising and e-commerce, e-commerce media. Very interesting side for me is when we are well-developed in that space. You know, we started this journey back in 2016, and 17, to really kind of bring what we’ll call our digital media analytics to the forefront. And we’ve come a long way in that space. So that’s a really interesting space. For me personally, I’m passionate about that space, and excited to talk to you about it today.
Sneha (00:03:32)
Thank you, it’s great to hear about your journey and your experience. So far. So excited to start this chat with you. To just start off, I wanted to ask you about attribution. How would you define attribution?
Ryan (00:03:47)
Yes, what do you think about attribution, you know, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of different, what I’ll call attribution models in the space. And, you know, when we get though, to just the theory of attribution, you know, and that’s where we had to kind of go in 2017. But when you think about the theory of attribution, it’s really any type of impression that leads to an order, I’ll just, I’ll just, if you want a real broad definition of how we think about it, it’s it’s any impression marketing or advertising impression, that leads to a conversion in order. You know, and, and everybody’s different in a retail world, we’re looking for orders and customers, right. But you could think about it as if you were running a newsletter as a sign-up or, you know, any type of conversion events. So any type of impression that leads to a conversion event is kind of broadly how we think about attribution. And that’s important that I say that broad definition because I think we’re gonna end up talking about you know, all the different attribution models like last click attribution, or first click attribution and, and some of the flaws associated there. But generally speaking, we’re gonna define attribution as any impression whether it’s a display or a click, or you know, I hear it on the radio it’s, it’s a it’s a brand or or impression that leads to a conversion.
Sneha (00:05:02)
And what would you say? Are some of the old school attribution practices people still kind of stick with? And what are some of the new ways to approach this?
Ryan (00:05:13)
Yeah, I think when you look at the space, it’s, it’s, it’s still amazing to me with modern analytics, how undeveloped the space is, in terms of the attribution methods. So, you know, when you think about what a lot of companies still do, you know, I’ll go to different trade shows and whatnot, and you’ll see a lot of companies still stuck in a last-click attribution world, right? This is this an old school metric, it’s been around for 2025 years, right? It attributes the, you know, the conversion event to the last impression, or last click. Specifically, if you talk about clicking click conversion, there’s, there’s some challenges with click conversion in general, because I think there’s a lot of brand impressions that happen outside of a click, that create conversion. So we have to be careful of that. But that’s, that’s critical. But when you when you think about some of the old school practices, I think some of the canned what I’ll call the canned attribution models, such as last click, or even first click or linear attribution. There, are there issues with it. And when you’re dealing primarily with first-party data, which a lot of companies deal with, right? Are they run through their, you know, canned attribution models inside Google Analytics or Adobe analytics, their click-based start? I think that’s, that’s one of the challenges. You know, like I said, I think when you study, attribution in general, in, you know, with StackAdapt, for example, when you when you study display conversions versus click conversions, you’ll see, you know, 80% of your orders happen in the display world, from a conversion perspective versus just click. So if you’re dealing with click-based attribution, specifically last click, it creates some serious challenges. One of those challenges is actually in the upper funnel, right. So when you’ve talked about last-click conversion, the first problem you’re dealing with is the fact that you’re only using a click versus using clicks and displays. But the second problem is, is that last click conversion, which is the most common attribution methodology in the marketplace right now. It always has been, I think there’s some challenges with that, but it’s going to attach all of that conversion value to the things closest to the order. So you’re talking about retargeting events, email, you know, brand search, you know, stuff that is real low in the funnel is going to get all the conversion value. And so when you think about companies out there trying to build, you know, let’s say you have really low unaided brand awareness, for example, you’re trying to build your brand awareness, which, ultimately, you want to conversion out of that right, especially in the retail from a retail, but I’ll talk from a retail perspective, right. But from a retail perspective, you know, the reason we spend money in the upper funnel is to generate brand impressions, and eventually a new customer, right? Like, at the end of the day, it’s, you know, you want those dollars to work for you. So you’re spending money in that upper funnel to generate brand awareness, new customers, and that’s ultimately what you want. But when you try to measure that, especially the upper funnel on a last-click conversion basis, you have these massive challenges, because you can’t, you will never measure the upper funnel efficiently using last click conversion. And when you think about television journey in that space, you know, I’ll talk about this, this journey that we’ve had, over time, when we go back to 2017 16. And 17, we started to make some material investments in our digital media space. And one of the biggest challenges that we had was last-click attribution. We came in, we came in and we said, Okay, we want to we want to increase our digital investments substantially. And as the executive team we came in, and we said, Okay, I came and said, How are we going to measure it? Right? And, you know, we had Adobe, or Omniture analytics, and we had this last click conversion reporting. And, you know, we’d come in, we’d sit down, and we’d say, Okay, well, how much do we spend last week? And how much do we generate? And what you ended up with was all the value going toward these lower funnel? All the value goes into all the lower-funnel campaigns and tactics, right? And when you think about that, and the challenges that it creates, is we couldn’t balance our portfolio, we would say, okay, yeah, spend more money in the lower funnel, then also know when scale like you wouldn’t get the scale you needed, right? And it’s because you’re not feeding the funnels properly. And it became really challenging as an executive team to spend in the upper funnel, when you can’t measure the efficiency in the upper funnel properly. Right? It would never pay out like when, when you’re using last-click attribution that some of the old school attribution models, the upper funnel would never pay out, like you sit there and you go, Okay, I’m spending money here, but I can’t measure its effectiveness because all of the conversion value is getting attached to a lower funnel. And so, you know, we after about a year, we said, you know, I stepped back and said, Okay, how do you define attribution to start? If we, if we say, you know, an ad theory, it should be any impression that leads to an order, right? But we’re not measuring it that way. Right. We’re measuring all this all this conversion value being attached to Do lower funnel tactics. And that’s not the right way to think about it. Okay, so we step back. And if we look at basic ad theory, we kind of identified three major areas of concern. The first being attribution, which we’re talking about, right? The second being what I’ll call the ad dollar journey, which I think we’ll talk about next. And then the third being some old school metrics. I think, when you think about row ads, for example, revenue on ads, better return on ad spend, right? Or er, expense to revenue, just the inverse of that. There are also some challenges in the different funnels with using kind of old school metrics. But, you know, from an attribution perspective, we really had to evolve out of that last-click attribution, to evolve into being able to make business decisions to spend money in the upper funnel and elsewhere.
Sneha (00:10:51)
What were the mixes looking like in terms of upper funnel and the lower funnel? How would you say programmatic played a role in all of this?
Ryan (00:11:01)
Yeah, so you know, at the time, like I said, from an executive standpoint, you know, in a lot of companies face the challenge, they’re not going to spend money, where they can’t measure the value. I mean, in today’s world, you want to go spend ad dollars, you want to spend money, you better be able to show return on that investment, right? Especially with, you know, as data analytics and reporting has gotten just bigger and bigger. And there’s a huge demand for, you know, companies and executives aren’t willing to spend money in places that they can’t measure, well, let’s just start there, right. And that’s just, it just becomes a fact. Like, you need to be able to measure return on investment, and you need to be able to show the benefit of the dollar you’re spending. It’s especially true at our, our company culture, we try to measure almost everything, right? And we’re almost to a fault in a way. And so it becomes really challenging when you’re trying to say, okay, you know, you’ve got a marketer coming in saying, you know, we’re probably spent, we’re underspent in the upper funnel, like, we got to generate some brand awareness, and then you got to spend those dollars and you can’t, you can’t show return on that investment. That creates a massive challenge internally, right? Where your CFO sitting there going, you’re not generating a return on this investment you like, like, prove it to me, right? And then we’ll spend the money. And so when you think about evolving out of that space, you evolve into what I’ll call like, the multi-touch attribution space, okay. And that’s what we did, we evolved out of kind of this last click attribution or canned attribution models, we said, let’s read, you know, I said, Let’s redefine attribution, right? Like, like, when you think about it, in general, an impression that leads to an order, let’s step back and go there. And we came to our different providers, and we said, Okay, we, you know, we need some data feeds, right, we need, we need, if your pixel is picking up an order, I want to see all the impressions that lead to that order, okay. And whether it’s display, whether it’s click, we’re not going to differentiate, because the decisions we’ve been making for the last year haven’t resulted in the growth that we really want. So we’re going to go back, and we’re going to reevaluate how we’re measuring this thing. And we did that we went through this process of developing what I’ll call kind of an in house MTA model, you know, we would consider kind of a world-class measurement system. And what we ended up with was that we found we were we were way under-spent in the upper funnel, when you step back, and you get outside of last click attribution, and you go toward, you know, what I’ll call including display impressions in your attribution model, when you go to a cost base accounting type of attribution model, where you’re not allocating all of the benefit to the last click, but you spread it across clicks, right? in sort of a linear cost based attribution model, what we found is that we were all a way underspend our our portfolio was way out of balance. And We made adjustments to that. And from there, we’ve just seen tremendous results from it, you know, when we started to be able to balance the portfolio, but in order to be able to do that, like I said, you have to be able, you have to be able to show the benefit of the different funnels. And until you can do that it will be almost impossible from a cultural standpoint of a company that wants and that needs to show return on investment, to be able to invest that way. Right. And and, you know, I think that’s, that’s the one of the biggest challenges is how do you show the benefit of the ad spend. Attribution plays a role in that, and then I’ll call, I’ll call what we call the ad dollar journey plays a big role in that as well. The ad dollar journey is wildly important. There’s a huge misconception that happens inside of of marketers were under some of these canned attribution models, and some of these canned measurement systems. Advertising is one of the only places that I see the return on investment being measured against a cost that did not generate the return. And I’ll give an example I’ll come in. We did this every week. We have a with digital marketing every single week. We come in and we’d say, give me the last week or last 14 days of results. What did I spend In the last 14 days, what did it generate? For me? The reality is when you step back and think about that theory, so this was another part of this process, right? We said, attribution is one piece. But then let me step back. And like, if I’m going to have all my measurement system, I’m going to think about advertising theory. In general, when we spend advertising dollars, it does not generate an order today, or even in the next seven days, it generates a future order. There’s a future order stream, when I spend $100,000. It’s a future order stream that I’m looking to generate, or a future customer stream, or future conversion stream, if you want to think about it like that, right? It’s your spending dollars today to generate future conversions. And they may not all happen in seven days, they may not all happen in 14 days. In fact, only a fraction of them happen within seven to 14 days. Right? And so when I sit here, and I met and I come in, and I say what did I spend in 14 days, what did I get as my return in 14 days, or even seven days what I spent last week, versus what I generated last week, it’s really a miss your it’s totally just misinformation. The dollars I spent last week didn’t generate the orders that I generated last week, the orders that were generated last week, or the conversion events that were generated last week, are a function of many previous weeks spends, okay. And in reality, if you take it from a financial point of view, I should measure my return on investment against the cost that actually generated the orders. And it becomes really important in two cases, okay, if you have a long-term sustained spend, that’s pretty stable, it kind of equals out, okay. But when you’re testing new campaigns, I’ll give you two cases where it kind of Wildly Important. The first one is when you’re testing new campaigns, if you’re testing new campaigns, and you’re ramping them up, let’s say I decide to turn on, you know, to take an extreme example here, right, I decide I’m going to I’m going to turn on a campaign at 50,000 a week, I’m gonna just turn it on. Your CFO is going to be breathing down your throat in two weeks, or three weeks to say, how is my my spend doing how’s that new, I’ve spent $150,000, how’s it doing? If you try to measure the return on that investment in the first three weeks against $150,000, and spend, they will tell you to turn it off almost 100% of the time. But the reality is that money you’re spending generates a future revenue stream. So So you better do a cost allocation, that you’re only measuring part of the benefit that will actually occur, okay. So it’s, it’s a fraction of the benefit in that first two or three weeks, it’s a fraction of the benefit that will actually occur. So you better adjust your cost accordingly, you’re not getting $150,000 worth of benefit in that first two or three weeks, you will long term, but not in the first two or three weeks. And so when you’re when you’re presenting in your executive team, you’re in your marketing teams, right? Trying to measure against that full cost, you’re going to turn that thing off. So that’s one case is wildly important. The second, the second case was actually more relevant in today’s world, you start to get into, say, a recessionary environment. And everyone’s looking at cutting budgets, right? They’re looking at cutting budgets, they’re saying, okay, you know, let’s, an easy place in a corporate world to attack is marketing budgets. So it’s, it’s just simply put, it’s just an easy place, because it’s very flexible. You can turn things on and off really fast. It’s easier than headcount. It’s easier than long-term contracts. Right? And there’s always this, I’ll say that sometimes there’s this overarching doubt about the effectiveness of marketing, am I really getting the incremental dollar, right? So one of the places that gets attacked is in a recession environment is marketing dollars, it happens every every single time. When you reduce budgets, this encase when you reduce budgets, if you are under traditional old school, measurement and attribution models, you’re going to look like a genius for the first six to eight weeks. Because if I come in and say, What are my results for this period of time versus the cost in this period of time, and let’s say I had a million dollar a week marketing budget, and I’m gonna cut it in half, and I come in the next week, and I spent $500,000. And I’m gonna say, I’m gonna measure my results against that $500,000. That’s those first few weeks of results, it’s going to look amazing. You’re gonna say, Oh, I’m I’m spending half the money, I’m still getting the same amount of orders, I’m still getting the same amount of conversions. But in reality, those conversions are driven off of a higher spend level, like the cost that generated the conversions when you’ve cut your budget is not the new budget, that’s gonna hit you in six to eight weeks. It’s the old budget that’s generating the order still today. And so when you don’t have your cost allocation, right, in your in your attribution, right, what starts to happen is in a recessionary environment, I start cutting budgets. I look really smart for a period of time. And then it hits me and six to eight weeks. I wonder what happened? What happened to my business? Why why is my business struggling now? Well, you looked really smart because you were measuring the return on investment against a car costs didn’t generate the investment. And when you cut your budget, it makes you look really smart. But in reality, what’s happening is you have this delayed impact in your business, that you’re not really accounting for upfront. And so, you know, that’s a critical piece, I think in this in this, you know, attribution is one piece, what I call the ad dollar journey is another piece, trying to allocate your cost correctly, so that you’re actually measuring the return on your investment against the cost that generated the investment is critical, especially to case when you’re ramping up campaigns, and when you’re cutting budgets, because you can cut your foot off without even knowing that you’ve cut your foot off and marketing.
Sneha (00:20:38)
And I have a question very specific to attribution models and how somebody can make a choice for their particular business. What is the method to approaching an attribution model that fits your business? And how would you go about this, especially if you’re just starting off?
Ryan (00:20:57)
Yeah, I think I think when you in the marketplace, when you, you know, if you’re, if you’re like me, and I need to evolve out of out of my current methodology, right? I think the most important thing is to think about AD theory. So when you think about advertising theories, such as attribution, and you say, okay, really attribution should be defined as any impression that leads to an order. Because there’s really no hard data out there that says the display is less important than a click, or my hit my, my view through on a CTV, for example, is less important than the click, or my hear through if I’m doing radio is less important than a click right? If you think about, you should think about AD theory in general, such as attribution, you should think about AD theory as it relates to cost allocation that we talked about. And the third piece is the return on your investment, how you’re measuring the return on investment. There’s some business theory behind that, that I think we can get into next, but you should really think about those three pieces, and then say, How can I build a marketing measurement? And attribution model that matches? Those the closest? Or how can I start to get to that environment? Right? Like, if I’m a heavy, like, for example, if I’m a heavy radio advertiser, or, you know, how can I build a hear through model, right? Like, for example, can I partner with my advertisers and say, you know, I need I need to see when you have hear through, you know, hear through attribution, and you’re seeing orders, like, How can I go measure that, right? Like, how do I how do I do that, versus the last click, I see on my website, right. Or if you’re in the programmatic space programmatic plays a huge role for us, when you’re able to measure the upper funnel correctly. You know, programmatic is a lot more beneficial than what people give it credit for. And it is because they’re trying to measure this, you know, this kind of thing on a last-click basis. But when you think about, if you’re a heavy programmatic buyer, like we are in the digital space, you know, how can I partner with my advertiser, for example, and get the true attribution feed, so I can start to study that and get it closer to matching ad theory. Right. Last-click attribution is very far from matching ad theory. And I think you have to be able to take the steps and what it all depends on your capabilities as a company as well, like, what resources do you have available? Do you have an analytics team? For example? Can you partner with somebody to help you get there? Right. But I think you have to, you have to think about the steps necessary to get as close to to matching the ad theory as possible, right? A utopian environment would be you match at theory perfectly right across all your providers. That’s, that’s probably not realistic environment. But you can certainly get there closer by partnering with your advertisers, such as StackAdapt, for example, we have great partnership. And we have some great data feeds that go back and forth, for us to be able to measure this and be able to get closer to advertising theory, then last click attribution, or some of these canned first-party models. I think if you’re using just first-party data, you’re you’re limiting yourself tremendously, and being able to measure advertising the right way. You know, I think I think the third piece, which I’ll talk about a little bit more about the business theory. So in the in the business theory behind what companies are trying to do. So this is especially true with b2c, but it’s really true with almost any model, whether you’re a SaaS model, whether you’re b2b, really the end goal, the utopian environment for any company, what they’re trying to achieve, is maximizing and incrementally increasing their customer lifetime value. Now, I’m using customer very broadly here, for StackAdapt. It’s going to be b2b, right, like, they have a customer, the customer is the different clients, they have the different retailers. And what you’re truly trying to do is maximize the lifetime value that somebody spends with you, right? In a retail environment, our customer actually individuals buying jewelry, and we’re trying to maximize the customer lifetime value that somebody spends with us. Right. And I think, you know, every single almost every single business serves the client, right? They serve a customer. And what you’re really trying to do is maximize and grow the total lifetime value of the business, the lifetime value being defined as the kind of that future book of business that I have available. Right. And, you know, I think this a great example, like why Amazon grew for so many years without actually making a profit, really, what they were doing is just building this gigantic, gigantic customer lifetime value base, which eventually they’re gonna be profitable on, right. But for for two decades, you know, they showed almost no profitability, and then engine, but really what they were doing is just building and building and building this gigantic total customer lifetime value. And in business theory, that’s the ultimate hedgehog metric. Like if you can show that you’re growing and incrementing, your lifetime value, that that, that puts you in a really nice place as a business, right. And there’s all these secondary metrics such as revenue, and gross margin, and all these, there’s all these secondary metrics, but really, at the end of the day, the hedgehog for every business, if they’re going to be profitable, and they’re gonna grow, and they’re gonna have investors and they’re gonna, they’re gonna grow their equity as a company, is to maximize and grow lifetime value. So when you think about that as business theory, now, let’s think about that, how that applies to advertising. Right? The reason you advertise is to grow your lifetime value, right. And, in the most utopian environment, you would be able to track changes in lifetime value to advertising spend, right? The reason people do retargeting, for example, it’s a very lower funnel metric, generally targeting existing customers. It’s really a retention play. Retention plays a critical piece and lifetime value. Right, the more engaged you can get your existing customer base, the higher the lifetime value, right? And so that’s why people do retargeting. Generally speaking, we measure retargeting, with a return on adspend, generally speaking, right, your, your, that’s your proxy for I’m increasing or decreasing lifetime value, like my efficiently generating a return on my investment, the lower funnel, what you’re really doing is you’re saying, hey, if they come spend with me, I think they’re going to be worth more in the future. Now, whether your company can directly measure that impact and how much it actually increases lifetime value is a different thing. But that’s a lower funnel, when you think about the upper funnel is actually where I see the biggest impediments in measurement. So even if you get the attribution model, right, even if you get your cost allocation, right, what is your return on investment metric in the upper funnel, a lot of companies still go back to row as they tried to measure all their funnels with a row as what you’re generating in the upper funnel, if you want to think about it. Most companies spend in the upper funnel for brand awareness and new customer growth, what you’re really generating is a future revenue stream. When you generate a new customer, you’re generating a future revenue stream, you’re not generating. You’re not You’re not consuming existing revenue stream, you’re generating a new revenue stream. So let’s say your average order price point as a retailer, say, $50, right? We’ve got a $50 average order, order price point, in the upper funnel, when I haven’t conversion, am I really going to say, What am I willing to spend for $50? Order? Like that’s your return on ad spend? Right, I see I see $50 come through, and I spent X amount to get that $50? If you were to ask a team of executives, what are you willing to spend to generate an order, there’s a very, there’s a very big difference between what I’m willing to spend to generate a $50 revenue, video, I’ll order versus, say, a $500 revenue stream. Really, what you’re generating is a new customer, which is worth a certain amount of money, right? And they’re worth a certain amount of money in the future. And so ask a team of executives, what are you willing to spend for $50? Order? Or what are you willing to spend four or 500 on revenue stream, they’re very different answers, I might be willing to spend 200, or $250, to generate that $500 revenue stream, there’s no way I’m willing to spend $200 to generate a video or order. And so until you adapt your measurement in the upper funnel, your return on ad spend, the return should be measured off of lifetime value, not the order value that gets generated. And I think that’s a critical piece. Like I think as you as you as marketers out there start to explore, like how they evolve from their current measurement and attribution models. Try to get to where you’re matching ad theory and business theory. Right and think about it as from a theoretical standpoint, from a conceptual standpoint, what would be like this utopian what what should be my end goal, right? My end goal should be when I generate new customers, how do I measure multiple lifetime value bases? There’s a lot of problems associated with just you know, cost per acquisition or cost to acquire customer you know, CPA or cost to acquire customer because you’re not taking into account what they’re actually worth. You know, companies may say, Hey, I’m willing to spend $100 per customer. Well, what are they actually worth? Right? Like lifetime value is actually a better metric than, than, say, cost to acquire. And so, you know, I think you got to get to a place where you’re getting closer to add theory, and you’re getting closer to business theory. And I think that’s, that’s a critical piece is, is how do you get to where you’re matching, if you can get to a place where you start to match out there, and you start to match business there to start making a lot better decisions with your ad spend, how its allocated, how much you’re invested, etc.
Sneha (00:30:33)
That sounds like a lot of things to consider, and it’s probably easy to go very wrong. Especially if there’s a lot of data available. How does the marketer know they’re not looking at the wrong side of things?
Ryan (00:30:44)
Yeah, I think a critical piece, a critical business, you know, when you start to get a lot of in, they are large datasets, right, you start talking about display impressions, you start, you start to increase your, your dataset. Massively, right. The other thing about digital media is big tangled web, right? There’s, there’s all these different impressions across all different tactics that lead to an order and they go, Okay, well, I’m spending here on the order I’m spending here on the order, I’m spending all these different multiple places on the same order, right. And it can get it can start to get confusing, I think a critical piece and trying to get through that confusion is trying to measure incrementality. Okay. So at the end of the day, you’re spending these ad dollars to generate orders, right? And testing fluctuations in spend is critical. That really helps you measure and current data, once you have your measurement in place, and you feel comfortable with the measurement model, you know, I would suggest that you test incrementality, right? Verify spend, increase it, decrease it, increase it, decrease it, and start to try to get a sense of what is the incremental benefit I gain? Because it’s not necessarily just about hitting some efficiency metric? It’s not, it’s not just, oh, what’s my row as in the lower funnel? For example, like if I’m in a $5? Row as in the lower one? Oh, that’s great, right? But what happens if you double your spend? Is it scalable? For example, if I double my spend in the lower funnel, and I’ve got a really nice measurement system in place, does my $5 Roll has dropped to 250. And I generated no incremental orders? Or does my ro s stay at $5. And now I just generate a whole bunch of incremental business because I’m doubling my spin, right. And I think once you get a really nice measurement system in place, start to test new things. Don’t be afraid to test things. If you’ve got the right measurement system in place, you can test things without over allocating the cost and turning it off too soon. Right? Test things and try to measure angles and think about increment, I would say, think about incremental measurement theory, right? And how do I, how do I know if I spend more money on generating incremental orders? And try to do that that’ll help cut through some of the confusion? Because there’s gonna be a ton of confusion around? Oh, well, there’s always these debates that happen like, well, I’m spending over here and they generate an order this, this providers claiming the same order this provider is claiming the same? Which one, it actually leads to the order? Well, you’ll never know. I mean, like, literally, you don’t know, because you don’t know, oh, if I just cut one of those people out, do I still land the order? Or were they the important impression that leads to the order, but you can start to test that by scaling spins, and testing increments and measuring incrementally? You know, I would test the scale of your campaigns and measure the incremental benefit coming from those campaigns. You know, if you double the spend, do you get less efficient? Or do you get more efficient? Do you stay the same? Right? Are you generating incremental business? I think I think that’s a critical piece, too. It’s not just about, oh, I’m hitting this really nice, you know, efficiency metric. But as I scale it, does my efficiency metric hold? Am I generating, incrementally efficient benefit to my business? Awesome.
Sneha (00:33:44)
That’s a lot of expertise speaking and just curious about how you keep yourself updated? What are the resources you consume, and maybe even recommend these resources to somebody who’s been in the industry for a while? Or maybe even somebody who’s starting off?
Ryan (00:34:00)
Yeah, I think I think, you know, I would do I do quite a bit of trade shows and just learning about what people measure what’s out there. You know, I think just general research on on what is available in the space to measure and just really, no, I would say, just really studying out there like, go, go read about advertising theory, if you don’t have a background in it, and kind of how it should work. Be up to date on all the different ad units that are available, so you don’t get left behind. Right. Like, there’s constantly new ad units and new ways to reach individuals. You know, you have this proliferation.
Sneha (00:34:36)
Amazing. Thank you so much, Ryan, your expertise, your experience, it just comes through when you speak. I’m sure each and every single person listening to this has taken a lot of insights away from this episode. I for one learned a lot. So thank you so much for joining us and giving us your time. And to you the one who stuck around till the very end listening to this. Thank you for staying. And if you found value in this podcast, share it. And you know, tell your teammates about it. It could be a cool resource to share on your work chat and subscribe to the podcast, download our episodes. If you haven’t listened to the previous ones, and we release episodes every alternate Wednesday. So stay tuned, and I will see you in the next episode. Until then, this has been the How Agencies Thrive podcast. Thank you for listening.
Episode Outro (00:35:30)
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