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Recast APIs are Here Recast now connects to everything – your AI agents, planning tools, data warehouse, and more. We just shipped API access to Recast. Your AI agent can now run a Recast optimization, your budget spreadsheet can trigger forecasts, and your Tableau dashboard can pull Recast outputs on a custom schedule. We're launching API access to Recast's core planning and optimization tools, so that Recast can fit into how your team already works. We’ve heard from many teams that want to go further with their measurement and forecasting tools. They want to run 20 optimizations in a loop, pipe forecasts into internal planning tools, automate weekly budget generation, or build entirely custom workflows that we haven't thought of…
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Introducing Precision Preview in GeoLift by Recast
Precision Preview is live in GeoLift by Recast, and it’s already changing how teams think about designing lift tests. Here’s…
Why should you care to leave the comfort of your spreadsheet?
A reader asked: “Why should I use a geo testing tool when I can just do the analysis in google…
The Winner’s Curse: Why Underpowered Experiments Are Likely to Be Extra Wrong
It is a paradox of statistics that experiments with small sample sizes are more likely to find larger effects of…
Don’t Be the Turkey: An Intro to Causal Thinking
Data can show you what happened and be used to project into the future with some degree of confidence, but…
You Don’t Need Permission to Learn Causal Inference
A redditor recently asked us how to break into causal inference when their current company doesn’t offer opportunities to work…
Understand & Manage Multicollinearity in Your MMM: A Guide for Technical & Non-Technical Practitioners
How to use this article: While preparing for your work day, you start to make your morning coffee and realize…
Goodness of Fit: Moving Beyond R-Squared and MAPE in Complex Models
At Recast we spend a lot of time thinking about how to evaluate whether or not a model is “good”.…
Why Recast’s Synthetic Control Methods are Better
Not every lift-testing or incrementality experimentation platform is created equal. Customers have used GeoLift by Recast to design and analyze…
How to Reanalyze Past Incrementality Experiments with GeoLift by Recast
If you’ve already run geographic-based incrementality experiments using other tools or methods, you can use GeoLift by Recast –– to…
Considerations When Designing GeoLift Tests
GeoLift by Recast is built to help you design and analyze rigorous geographic incrementality experiments. However, when using GeoLift or…
Using CRPS to Evaluate Recast Models
What are probabilistic forecasts? We care about two things when we’re making forecasts: how “correct” is the forecast (how far…
Designing Incrementality Experiments During the Holidays
Designing incrementality experiments can be tricky for businesses that have substantial amounts of natural or induced seasonality in their business. …
Gaussian Processes for Time Series
Time series data is special because the order in which observations occur is meaningful. For example, looking at sunglasses sales…
What to Do When Your Marketing Experiment Isn’t Statistically Significant
If you’re treating p < 0.05 as the litmus test for your marketing experiments, it’s going to be really hard…
How to Use Lift Tests to Calibrate an MMM
There’s a lot of confusion from marketers about the right way to use lift tests or incrementality experiments to calibrate…
How to Prioritize Experiments When You Can’t Run Them All
Most marketers want to test everything. But you don’t have unlimited budget, time, or team capacity. So you need to…
Recast Model Performance Metrics Explained
Model transparency and accountability are foundational to our work at Recast. We openly publish model performance metrics to customers and…
Fact and Fiction in Marketing Experimentation
“Incrementality testing” is extremely hot right now. And while I am personally extremely enthusiastic about this type of experimentation and…
Automated Data Quality Checks at Recast
Garbage in, garbage out. If a media mix model has any chance of working, the model has to be fitted…
Introduction: How to Build an Incrementality System
Setting the scene Marketers have been given an impossible task. They are being asked to grow the business in the…
The MMM Checklist
At Recast, we often speak with practitioners who are trying to build their own MMM in-house. While we think there…
Product Update: Multi-Stage Models
Many businesses face tough challenges when it comes to measuring marketing incrementality because the nature of their product implies conversions…
How Omnichannel Brands Leverage Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM)
In today’s rapidly evolving retail environment, it can be a real challenge for omnichannel brands to measure the incremental impact…
The Hidden Pitfall in Marketing Experiments: Understanding Uncertainty
“I ran an incrementality test showing positive lift but didn’t see the results in the bottom line.” Sound familiar? I…
Carry-Over Effects: Why They Don’t Limit Media Mix Model Updates
Does the carry-over effect problem mean you can’t refresh your media mix model more than once a quarter? No. Sadly,…
The Hidden Truth Behind Incrementality Testing Results
Is your incrementality testing partner hiding something from you? We’ve seen it too many times: brands come to us very…
Recast Validation: Model Stability
“There is nothing so stable as change” – Bob Dylan Why Measure Model Stability? Media mix models (MMMs) need to…
How do Causal Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) work in Marketing Mix Modeling:
Correlation vs causation is a huge marketing measurement problem that traditional methods often fail to account for and can lead…
The Replication Crisis: Challenges and Lessons for Modern Statistical Practices
Over the past few decades, the scientific community has grappled with what is now known as the replication crisis—a widespread…
Evaluating Media Mix Model Accuracy: The CRPS Score in Backtesting
Can you trust your media mix model? That is an obvious but not asked enough question that everyone using MMM…
What should be in your Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) Request For Proposal (RFP)?
We see a lot of media mix modeling RFPs here at Recast. Unfortunately, a lot of them don’t emphasize what…
Google Meridian MMM: Features and Limitations
Last updated: March 11, 2024 Google’s Meridian MMM platform was just announced last week and is currently in closed beta…
Recast vs LightweightMMM vs Robyn
If you’re considering working with a marketing mix modeling vendor, you’ve probably heard of Google’s open-source MMM tool, Lightweight MMM,…
How Geo-Testing Enhances Marketing Mix Modeling Accuracy
Now that digital tracking is breaking and brands are using alternative measurement methods, we will see much more “triangulation” and…
Burn In: How Recast Handles Carry-over Effects
One of the ever-present problems with marketing mix modeling is that you always have to choose some start date. And since you always need to choose a start date, there’s always some period before the start date that’s impacting your results. Here's how Recast handles these carry-over effects.
Consideration period is not the same thing as advertising effect length
In the context of marketing analytics in general and marketing mix modeling in particular I often encounter confusion about the…
Should you set a non-marketing baseline in your marketing mix modeling for exogenous factors?
There are thousands of non-marketing factors that can make an impact on your company’s base sales. Consumer sentiment, GDP growth,…
What are Halo Effects and how do they impact MMM?
We live in an omni-channel world, and that has drastically changed the way consumers buy. It’s no longer a linear…
Revolutionizing Marketing Measurement: Recast’s Journey to Building Modern Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM)
It is said that the best product ideas come from having to scratch your itch – from facing a big,…
Integrating Marketing Mix Modeling Into Your Decision-Making Process
What channels drove our revenue last week? What happens if we 2x our spend on Meta? What happens if we…
Integrating Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) with Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA): A Guide by Recast
Brands looking for 100% clarity in marketing measurement by using just one method won’t find it. Multi-touch attribution won’t give…
How Negative Underwear Found Their Measurement Source of Truth
Negative Underwear is a women’s underwear company that believes all women should feel confident and comfortable in their own skin.…
How Mockingbird Measures True Incrementality with Recast
Mockingbird empowers parents with premium, well-designed baby gear like their signature Single-to-Double Stroller. With a complex buyer’s journey and an…
How to do holdout accuracy and backtesting for your MMM (and why it matters)
You don’t just want an MMM model. You want a model that can be trusted. But since MMM models are…
Why is validation challenging in MMM? What are the different ways to validate?
“How do we know if the model is right?” That’s one of the most important questions in MMM. Most MMM…
How to use MMM for planning and forecasting
Marketers hate planning season. It can often feel like an impossible task: you’re being asked to predict the future in…
How is Recast so Fast?
People who have been around the world of marketing mix modeling (MMM) for a while are often shocked that Recast…
How Recast handles “lower funnel” channels
It’s a question as old as Adwords: is my branded search spend truly incremental? Branded search ads are those that…
How to Measure YouTube Ads
YouTube is a powerful advertising platform with over 2 billion active users. However, measuring the effectiveness of YouTube ads can…
How to Measure Affiliate Marketing
Affiliates are really hard to measure. Brands that do affiliate marketing will often face these three main challenges: 1 –…
Traditional MMM vs Modern MMM
When we talk to consumer brands about MMM, the concerns about its capabilities are sometimes slightly outdated. MMM has historical…
Recast’s Lift Test Calculator [Download + Video Walkthrough]
Today, we introduce the Lift Test Calculator – an open-sourced tool designed by Antonio Vargas, a senior data scientist at…
How we do holdout testing at Recast
The central modeling challenge for an MMM is the following: given any set of marketing inputs (budget decisions, promotion dates,…
Recast vs LightweightMMM
People often ask us about the differences between Recast’s next-generation MMM platform and Google’s open source MMM tool, Lightweight MMM.…
Why should we refresh our MMM every week?
Quite often we encounter people who have been working with legacy MMM vendors for 15+ years who are shocked when…
The 4 phases in the marketing measurement journey:
Marketers are in a tough spot when it comes to measurement: iOS14 made everyone conservative about tracking, performance marketers are…
Recast vs Robyn: Feature Comparison
People often ask us about the differences between Recast’s next-generation MMM platform and Facebook’s open source MMM tool, Robyn. In…
Understanding How MMM Works
When we talk to folks who are new to Media Mix Modeling (MMM) and tell them there’s no pixel or…
The Evolution of Privacy: A Timeline of Events Reshaping Identity-Based Tracking and Analytics
To prepare for the future, we must understand the past. This stays true in marketing, and it is particularly appropriate…
How Marketers Should Think About Attribution at Different Stages of Growth
Coca-Cola does not think about attribution the same way an early-stage D2C brand thinks about it. Everything is different: budgets,…
‘How did you hear about us?’ survey and the limitations of current measurement techniques
In the world of website analytics, the concept of “dark social” has emerged as a significant challenge for accurate channel/source…
Why You Can’t Trust Google Analytics
Google Analytics has recently gone through significant changes that have sparked concerns among marketers around its bias and validity. As…
Why You Need to Stop Controlling for GDP Growth (and what to do instead)
Your marketing performance doesn’t live in a silo and it’s not independent of external factors. One of those that will…
Should You Be Using the GeoLift Library to Run Geo-Testing Lift Tests?
With privacy concerns on the rise and digital tracking becoming less reliable, marketers need advanced tools to measure the impact…
How to fix heteroskedasticity in your Marketing Mix Model
Disclaimer: This blog post was written by an external contributor about detecting and addressing heteroskedasticity in marketing mix models. The…
Who is talking about using MMM?
Brands have been using models to understand the effectiveness of their marketing activities since the ‘Golden Era’ of advertising in…
Adventures in Brand Health Modelling
Disclaimer: This blog post was written by an external contributor about their experience attempting to work with brand health data. This…
Diminishing Returns: Accounting for Channel Saturation
You cannot double spend and expect sales to double. Advertising on auction-based platforms like Meta or Google exhibits diminishing returns,…
Validation Through Testing
Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) is hard. The core difficulty is that MMM is trying to solve a causal inference problem…
Is Recast Just a Regression?
MMM is about Causation not just Correlation At the highest level, the idea behind MMM is to look at the…
Do Data Clean Rooms Really Solve the Attribution Problem?
With digital tracking breaking since iOS14, the death of the cookie, and new privacy laws like GDPR and CPRA, media…
Unraveling the Impact of Pull Forward Promotions: Are They Really Incremental?
Sales and promotions are a tricky concept and many ecommerce brands struggle to measure them correctly. We’ve all seen the…
The Conundrum of Brand Search: Is it Incremental and Actually Driving You That ROI?
Knowing whether brand search is incremental for your brand or not is often a question worth tens of thousands, hundreds…
Shining a Light on the Dark Funnel: Overcoming Attribution Challenges with MMM
How can marketers track what cannot be tracked? The ‘dark funnel’ is one of the main challenges we all face…
Halo effect: measuring the impact between different marketing channels
Marketing efforts in one channel can impact traffic and attribution in other channels. This positive or negative interaction between different…
MER is a Road to Ruin
As a former agency owner, I know first-hand the importance of measuring marketing performance accurately. In the world of Direct-to-Consumer…
Is Less Really More? The Art and Science of Experimenting with Channel Cuts
Airbnb famously turned off their paid media and argued it turned out to be a successful decision. But was it?…
How to Measure Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is the technique of compensating a celebrity or someone well-known in your industry for promoting your product or…
The incrementality test that got my boss’s boss fired
Early on in my career, I learned a valuable lesson in incrementality that I’ll never forget. Ever since I had…
Vanity metrics vs actionable metrics: Quantifying quality
Any metric that doesn’t have a strong causal link with sales outcomes is a vanity metric. For example while Clickthrough…
Recast Model Validation Process
At Recast we believe that in order for our customers to get value out of Recast, the model needs to…
Why “Brand Effects” are so difficult to measure in MMM
Updated: August, 2024 Many brands want to know what the long-term effects of their marketing efforts are. The theory is…
Marketing Mix Modeling for Scenario Planning
Scenario planning or demand forecasting decides everything an enterprise does. Right from quantities of raw material sourced to the inventory…
You’re losing more traffic to ad blockers than you probably realize
As the use of ad blockers continues to grow, ad buyers are losing visibility on the effectiveness of their marketing…
The right way to cross-validate your Marketing Mix Model
Disclaimer: This blog post was written by an external contributor about techniques for validating marketing mix models using cross-validation. The…
The History of Econometrics in Marketing
Marketers are often very focused on the future as their jobs rely on anticipating and meeting the needs of consumers…
The case against using impressions in MMM
At Recast we generally recommend using spend — not impressions — to represent channel activity in a marketing mix model.…
The Problem with Modeled Conversions
We’ve been seeing more and more advertising platforms promote some form of “modeled incrementality” estimates and often marketers aren’t sure…
Lift analysis for taking back the credit SEO is stealing from your campaigns
I once ran a new PR campaign for a website that I knew did not have any previous backlinks. The…
Predictive Modeling in Marketing: The What, Why and the How
Disclaimer: This blog post was written by an external contributor about applications of predictive modeling in marketing. The approach laid…
How confounding variables and company silos can ruin your analysis
You can boost revenue by scientifically optimizing your marketing spend. What could go wrong? Statistical mistakes could de-optimize your marketing…
The ADPPA — Data Privacy Comes to the USA (and how not to lose sleep over it)
In July 2022, the American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA) became the first bicameral and bipartisan online privacy bill…
Make a business case for TOFU channels via first-touch attribution
As a content marketer working on top-of-the-funnel channels like social media, PR, podcast, etc. one of the top challenges you…
Monte Carlo Simulations: A Tool for Predictive Analysis and Informed Decision Making
Monte Carlo simulations are a powerful tool for doing predictive analysis. By running multiple simulations with different input variables, analysts…
The pitch deck we used to raise $3 million
I’m happy to announce we just raised $3.4 million at a $25 million post-money valuation! This year, a slowdown in…
MMM Template
We made this template because honestly it’s a lot of work to do MMM manually if you don’t have the…
Measuring the Long Term Effects of Brand with MMM
Brand vs. Performance marketing has been a growing battle online since digital advertising grew to be the dominant share of…
Adstocks: Accounting for the Lagged Effect of Advertising
One of the core problems to solve when doing marketing mix modeling (MMM) is handling how the results from a…
Meta Sustainable Measurement Summit
The team at Meta did another Marketing Mix Modeling summit last week, and given the popularity of the last one…
Why Marketing Mix Modeling doesn’t work for new channels (and how to fix it)
Disclaimer: This blog post was written by an external contributor about approaches for measuring new marketing channels with marketing mix…
Meta Marketing Mix Modeling Summit Highlights
The Marketing Science team at Meta set the Marketing Mix Modeling world alight when they released Robyn, their open source…
Your email open rates aren’t as good as you think they are
In the advertising world the impact of iOS14 has been apocalyptic. Offering users the ability to turn off tracking, has…
Some Testing is a Waste of Time: Making Business Cases for Big Bets
This is our second feature in the much exalted Reforge blog, this time talking about how to make big bets…
How to Measure Podcast Advertising
Podcast advertising is a form of digital advertising that allows companies to place ads in podcasts. This type of advertising…
Brand Incrementality Testing in Practice
Business environments are messy; people with different responsibilities need to work together on decisions quickly and without perfect information. That…
Recovering 300% More Revenue by Matching Online Activity to Offline Sales
When setting up e-commerce conversion tracking, you’ll often find that most of the events worth tracking are online such as…
Not all revenue is created equal
A few years ago I was running Facebook advertising for an eCommerce store selling print-on-demand products across Europe: think posters,…
How to Measure TV Advertising
TV advertising is the process of promoting a product or service on television, across broadcast, cable, or satellite. This can…
Google’s Data-Driven Attribution: a $40,000 mistake
For years after I left my agency I described myself as a “recovering agency owner”, and it would always get…
Attribution is opinion, canonical conversions are fact
Ad platforms use their attribution models to tell you which campaigns contributed to conversions (leads, sales, subscriptions or whatever is…
The difficulty measuring ‘dark social’ traffic and word of mouth
There’s a commonly cited Neilsen study that revealed that 92% of consumers trust referrals from family or friends more than…
Are you wasting money on Branded Paid Search?
The Search Advertising Market has been valued at 178 Billion in 2021 and is expected to grow at an 8.5%…
Limitations of GeoLift Experiments
At Recast, we generally believe that most brands should be running more experiments, including geographic lift tests. However, we think…
Is there a good way to do a test of statistical significance for ROAS?
Someone posed the following query in a marketing measurement slack I’m in: At first, this question seemed really easy. Hubristically,…
Cleaning URLs for Accurate Channel Attribution
Anyone who’s ever run an online marketing campaign has encountered URL parameters. These are an additional section you add at…
Google Analytics Channel Attribution Made Us Switch Off Our Growth Engine
Nobody sits down to make a channel investment decision they hope will immediately lose millions of dollars and get them…
How much data do you need for your Marketing Mix Model?
One commonly asked question from clients just getting started with Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM), is how much data they need…
What does ‘Incrementality’ mean?
In the context of marketing measurement, marketing analysts and marketing scientists use the term “incrementality” to refer to causality. Incrementality…
Limitations of R-Squared
At Recast I have the privilege and challenge of introducing advanced statistical concepts to people who have a strong desire…
When Promo Codes Aren’t Enough: Measuring Influencer Campaigns with Marketing Mix Modeling
This post talks about how to do Marketing Mix Modeling when you’re investing heavily in influencer marketing. We teamed up…
How Uber Orbit Works
Disclaimer: This blog post was written by an external contributor about Uber’s open-source Orbit library for time series forecasting and…
Media Mix Modeling for Mobile: What Data is Needed?
We teamed up with mobile growth agency Phiture to create this post for those in the mobile space looking to…
The brand-direct response spectrum
One of the biggest misconceptions holding back marketers to day is the myth of the brand–performance marketing dichotomy. Many newer…
Why Recast Doesn’t Control for COVID
Occasionally, prospective customers react with shock when we tell them that we don’t “control for the COVID pandemic”. “The pandemic…
Being Thoughtful About “What’s My Email ROI?”
For many businesses, email programs are a huge revenue generator. For every $1 marketers spend on email marketing, they receive…
Marketing in Times of Uncertainty
Introduction The macro-economy in the US is tough right now. Inflation is up (driven in large part by insane gas…
How to automate marketing mix modeling with an MMM data feed spreadsheet
We partnered with Supermetrics to bring you this post on how to build an MMM feed automatically in Google Sheets.…
Calibrating Your Marketing Mix Model With Post-Purchase Survey Data
In this post we cover a common way to make your marketing mix model work with your other attribution methods:…
How Google LightweightMMM Works
Disclaimer: This blog post was written by an external contributor about Google’s open source marketing mix modeling tool LightweightMMM. The…
Setting Realistic Expectations Between Marketing and Finance
One of the hardest things to do is get buy in from the finance team when requesting marketing budgets. This…
How to make a marketing report that accounts for macro trends
In this post we collaborated with Funnel.io to show how you could use their various ad platform connectors to do…
Marketing Mix Modeling Software: Build vs Buy Calculator
Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) has been around since the 1960s, where it was used to correlate spikes and dips in…
The Best Marketing Attribution Software For 8 Measurement Methods (2022)
The global marketing attribution software market is set to grow by 14.4% to USD 3.6 billion by 2023. However the…
The Attribution Stack: How to Make Budget Decisions in a Post-iOS14 World
In this post we cover the attribution stack, and how it relates to the impact of iOS14. This is a…
Why MMM is so hard
Marketing mix modeling is hard. Trust us. When we were starting Recast, we thought it’d be easy: we’d use some…
What is Linear Regression?
Linear regression is one of the most well known and well understood algorithms in statistics and machine learning. Anybody with…
Causal Inference: Where does it sit in the hierarchy of evidence?
If there’s one thing everyone knows about statistics, it’s that ‘correlation is not causation’. Ice cream sales and shark attacks…
Creative performance drives 47% of sales: why is it missing from most models?
In 2017 Nielson conducted a study of 500 advertising campaigns across all major media platforms: TV, digital, magazines and radio.…
The Four Pillars of Media Measurement
In the marketing world, there are four main ways to measure marketing effectiveness. Each of these approaches have their strengths…
The Attribution Stack
The Attribution Stack was featured in our post on Reforge: “The Attribution Stack: How to Make Budget Decisions in a…
Negative ROMI: Lose money to make money
In 2014 McKinsey published a study entitled “Grow Fast or Die Slow”, which examined thousands of software and services companies…
Decomp RSSD: Optimizing for Politics
Most people aren’t aware that Facebook (Meta) invented a new ‘accuracy’ metric. Their own documentation calls it a ‘major innovation’…
How Facebook Robyn Works
Facebook (Meta) bet on Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) to save their ads business, after Apple’s iOS14 update gave users the…
You’re probably modeling seasonality the wrong way
Nearly every business has an annual cycle: seasons where the business waxes or wanes, or specific dates like Cyber Monday,…
What does “Bayesian” mean and why is it better?
Elon Musk believes we live in a simulation. His argument goes: “If you assume any rate of improvement at all,…
What is attribution?
At the highest level, marketing attribution is about estimating the relative effectiveness of different advertising channels. While the term is…
Introduction to Bayesian Methods for MMM
Introduction Note: this post was developed in partnership with Mike Taylor over at Vexpower where they’re working to educate marketers on how…
The Recast Philosophy
Last updated: August, 2024 At Recast, we hold strong views about the right way to do Media Mix Modeling (MMM)…
Shifting from Legacy to Modern Marketing Mix Modeling
The popularity of Marketing Mix Modeling (sometimes known as Media Mix Modeling, or simply MMM) has increased rapidly over the…
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