Linear regression is one of the most well known and well understood algorithms in statistics and machine learning. Anybody with access to Excel or Google Sheets can use linear regression, but don’t let its simplicity and accessibility fool you – it’s unreasonably effective at solving a long list of common problems, making it the workhorse …
If there’s one thing everyone knows about statistics, it’s that ‘correlation is not causation’. Ice cream sales and shark attacks both rise in the summer, but one doesn’t cause another. The hot weather gets people both buying ice cream and swimming in the sea in greater numbers. If we’re advertising our ice cream brand in …
Causal Inference: Where does it sit in the hierarchy of evidence? Read More »
In 2017 Nielson conducted a study of 500 advertising campaigns across all major media platforms: TV, digital, magazines and radio. They found that a remarkable 47% of the campaign’s contribution to sales was attributable to Creative. A further 15% came from Brand, which we can think of as the culmination of past creative efforts. Despite …
Creative performance drives 47% of sales: why is it missing from most models? Read More »
In the marketing world, there are four main ways to measure marketing effectiveness. Tracking, which focuses on telemetry, and has the goal of assigning customers, orders, and even order items, to specific channels that get “credit” for the conversion. Experiments, which involves — you guessed it — running an experiment, with control and treatment groups …
The Attribution Stack was featured in our post on Reforge: “The Attribution Stack: How to Make Budget Decisions in a Post-iOS14 World“ We’re in the media measurement space, so our inboxes and dm’s are full with requests for help navigating the murky world of marketing attribution (especially since iOS14). Every vendor promises a ‘single source …
In 2014 McKinsey published a study entitled “Grow Fast or Die Slow”, which examined thousands of software and services companies between 1980 and 2012. As the title suggests, they found that growth trumps everything else as a predictor of long-term success, even Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI). Companies with 60%+ annual growth, “Super Growers”, had …
Most people aren’t aware that Facebook (Meta) invented a new ‘accuracy’ metric. Their own documentation calls it a ‘major innovation’ of Robyn, their Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) library. It’s both genius and controversial. The metric we’re talking about is “Decomp RSSD” and it’s a measure for how much the model agrees with your current budget …
Facebook (Meta) bet on Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) to save their ads business, after Apple’s iOS14 update gave users the right to choose if they’ll accept tracking. Because it uses aggregate data, MMM doesn’t need to invade anyone’s privacy to work, so it’s future-proof to any changes in the rules, whether they come from Apple …
Nearly every business has an annual cycle: seasons where the business waxes or wanes, or specific dates like Cyber Monday, Memorial Day, or Mother’s Day, which see enormous spikes in sales. Imagine you have a business that sells hot wings — when do you think the busiest time of the year would be? Football season …
You’re probably modeling seasonality the wrong way Read More »
Elon Musk believes we live in a simulation. His argument goes: “If you assume any rate of improvement at all, games will eventually be indistinguishable from reality” — Elon Musk, Founder PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX What are the chances someone beat us to it? With the potential for many simulated realities, the odds are low we’re …
