Broken Tracking

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 when it comes to digital tracking and analytics. D2C/ecommerce brands have often trusted their attribution and budget allocation decision-making on tracking people across the internet – but that has changed as privacy concerns and legislation …

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‘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 reporting. It refers to web traffic that is incorrectly attributed as “direct” in analytics when, in reality, it is driven by social networks and other hidden referral sources. This phenomenon has far-reaching implications for marketers …

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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 of thousands, or millions of dollars. It directly impacts your overall marketing strategy and your budget allocation.  The answer to that question is often brand-specific and we can’t tell you whether it is incremental for …

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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 when it comes to attribution. Over the past decade, marketers have relied on digital tracking and following consumers across their entire buying journey. However, there were “blind spots” where you’d lose visibility and they’d become …

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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 marketing channels is called the halo effect. Here are some common examples: Measuring this impact between channels is extremely important to optimize the media mix: Heads of marketing usually allocate the budget per channel based …

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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 (DTC) marketing, the gurus you follow on Twitter will tell you that the Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) is the overriding measure of success. However if you blindly follow their advice, you’re going to run into …

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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 this experience, I carefully avoided making the mistake of trusting an advertising platform’s reporting without independently verifying the sales they claim wouldn’t have happened anyway. Hopefully you can learn from this example, and avoid it …

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