The Attribution Strategy Every Marketer Should Use | Bathroom Break #95

0:07Welcome to a new special series called The Bathroom Break. That extra 10 minutes, you either have to listen to marketing tips or use the bathroom or both. But I don't recommend both, but that's your choice. This collab is going to be super fun. We have Daniel Murray from the Marketing Millennials and me, Jay Schwetelson, from the Do This Not That podcast and subjectline.com. Each episode in the series, we are going to go over quick tips about different marketing topics. And if you want to be in the bathroom, fine, just don't tell us about it. Thanks for checking it out. We are back with another bathroom break.

0:42And for those who can't see the camera right now, Jay is literally in like this puffer jacket and he has like a hot toddy in his hand with a beanie on. And he's in some cold place, but he won't tell me where he is because he's on the road doing some weird stuff. but like he's really looks like he's gonna get bundled up i don't know what he's doing you might be the stupidest person alive first of all i'm on the road in colorado and i'm not bundled up i don't have a hot toddy although i would have one if i knew what the hell it was but i will tell you this it's two hour time change from where you know south florida it is crushing me at like 7 p.m i'm so tired and they scare the hell out of me i i drink so much water though like you're gonna i've gotten altitude sickness before and colorado's like high and i don't want to throw up so i'm like drinking water and taking advil like do you get any of that when you go to high altitudes yeah especially i've been to i went to salt lake city once and i went like up to park city and just like quick ascent i'm like i needed to get that tea there's like special tea that you're supposed to drink to help you with that yeah i've got some bad headaches in altitude i feel like we're weak being on sea level oh i i'm very weak i it was funny i was at a meeting in utah and i didn't realize the altitude was like five or six thousand feet in the middle of the meeting i had this crashing headache i went to the restroom i threw up in the middle of the meeting like i had and then we had to go back to the meeting i didn't know what was going on it was terrible it was so funny i was with my friend one time and we were walking in this place and that's like 10 years ago and he's he's walking and he's getting so tired and he goes what's the altitude here and i'm i'm like turn around and he's like it's he i'm like it's sea level dude he was just like sweating because he was just so tired there's an ocean behind him you thought i was i was dying uh that's amazing um all right so let's get into what what we're talking about today so attribution there's not a market on the planet that doesn't focus on attribution but um there are some tricks to actually getting attribution sort of right but in general attribution measurement is complete garbage daniel are you on the garbage train yeah i i think i've always said this and i've been a marketing ops person before i decided to like go full content and social but um i always said attribution should be seen as like a compass where you directionally can find some answers but don't use it as like a gps and a lot of people use it as i need to turn right turn left turn this way turn that way to get to my destination because that's what attribution is telling me and i think that is the wrong way to use directionally it could tell you these channels might be doing better than this channel but i don't think people who use it just as the roadmap, it's the wrong thing to do.

3:43Well, especially last touch attribution, right? I mean, are you on the train that last touch attribution is the worst? Before we get into ideas on what you should be doing. Yeah, I mean, the modern day buying cycle is most people have done the research before they get to your site. And the problem is that I've seen it, most companies have been at it, is when they do that, they automatically put more money in Google search because that's usually like the last touch attribution because someone's branded searching you or they're searching you online or they come in straight to your website. But there had to be an action before they came to your website.

4:20And people don't want to dig deeper into that. And they just say, oh, here, executive team, look, we can put more money in Google because Google is doing so good for us. Yeah. And I do believe with all the, uh, the LLMs and all the AI tools, and they all will eventually start taking ads. I don't care what Claude says that there's going to be more last touch attribution assigned to these AI tools, even though it's the same stupidity as assigning it to Google search. And so there's one, there's one tactic that we do a lot with our clients that don't think enough marketers do, which is holdout groups.

4:52So what a holdout group is, let's just use a round number and say you have a hundred thousand people in your database, right? And you have a whole campaign, you're pushing whatever it is you're pushing, you know, to get new demos of your new SAS product, or you could be a consumer product where you're trying to push some sort of new offer or whatever. And you take, you can do this 5 % if your big file is big enough or 10 % and you take 10 % of your database and you hold it out. You don't allow it to get any of the emails. You don't allow it to be used for retargeting or remarketing. You do the best that you can to have those 10 % to not be exposed to any of the media that you are aggressively pushing out there.

5:33And then what you do is after the campaign concludes and you take all of your net new customers that you've got, and you can do it over a window of time. So say, okay, I'm going to take all the customers we got 30 days post the end of the campaign and all the customers we got during the campaign, and then you match it back to your complete database, right? Um, and you say, okay, the people that we marketed to versus the holdout group, what was the actual lift that we got by doing the marketing or was there no lift? Did our marketing have absolutely no impact because the holdout group performed exactly the same and the delta between your holdout group and your, and the people you marketed to is your real performance.

6:14Now people, it's not an exact science. There's a lot of moving parts there, whatever, but it does give you a much better view on how effective your marketing is. I don't think I have people to do that. Yeah, I think two things that I used to do is, one is geo-based. So what I would do is pick a geo that, and just concentrate, let's say, out of home there or radio there or connect a TV there and just see, like get a baseline of what it is now and for the last year and see if there was a lift in that area, like doing that one tactic. And there isn't a lift, you will know, but usually you could tell there should be an incremental like branded search lift or some lift.

6:57That's one thing I try. I've done a lot when I've done is geo-based attribution testing because that will really tell you if something is lifting up in that area. It's more expensive, though. So that's like the negative part of geo-testing. but it's helpful to see like, does my tactics work in that area or not? Yeah. And I think just in general, if internally you're assigning a lot of value to one channel and you're doing multi-channel marketing or multi-platform marketing, that should be your red flag. Like, wait a minute. We think that, you know, we're driving all this on Instagram, but really simultaneously we're running campaigns on Facebook.

7:39We're doing email, we're doing this all to the same people. it's silly to just assign complete value to wherever it is that ultimately the person's converting in that last moment. And a lot of people now are going to multi-attribution models. They have multi-touch attribution, they have media mix models, they have incrementality testing, they have a bunch of things that zero in on what... And that's actually a better way to do it to have multiple things going at one time because Facebook's a wall of guard and Google's a wall of guard and they're going to make it look better because that's how you spend more on those platforms so actually having multiple things going at a time and comparing but the easiest thing that I like the easiest thing to do is just add like where did you hear about us on your form that's like a simple thing to just get someone to like at least start getting directly and And that's how a lot of people, we used to do that.

8:43And we used to get, oh, we heard it in your YouTube channel. We heard it in this. And then we could now invest more into those channels because they're actually telling us where they're hearing us from. So it's not exact science, but it works sometimes. I'm curious about something since I'm in cold weather right now. Are you an Olympics guy? Are you like all in on the winter Olympics? I am because it's like something I didn't grow up in cold. So it's so interesting to me how good people are on these things. Because I know how hard it is to ice skate. And I know how hard it is to ski. And when I see these people going 90 miles an hour, I just think how I would die if I went one second off that.

9:24I just thought about these drops are insane. I read the funniest tweet the other day. had said um the winter looks so so crazy because there's people going around with knives on their feet and jumping off of um hills and then there's curling i feel bad for the curling people because they always get so much hate or whatever here's my problem with curling and all of it i watch the curling people and then i say i don't believe those are the best curlers in the world because it's not like you know Michael Jordan ever tried curling these are just the people that tried curling so I know they're very good I'm sure they worked very hard but they're not probably the best in the world that is just they're the only ones who did it smart I mean that's that's the way to do capitalize on a market that is not being able to do but there you go I feel like you would be a good curler well thank you thank you very much i really i appreciate it's the nicest thing you ever said to me uh well with that i hope everybody goes out there in curls if that's what you say i don't even know what is that what is that actually i don't know the verb i don't know i think it's curls uh let us know leave it in the uh leave us a comment uh we'll see you at the next one daniel come on man i gotta get back to work get out of there all right while he's still in there This is Jay.

10:57Check out my podcast, Do This, Not That, for marketers. Each week, we share really quick tips on stuff that can improve your marketing. And I hope you give it a try. Oh, here's Daniel. He's finally out. Back from my bathroom break. This is Daniel. Go follow the Mark and Millet podcast. But also, tune into this series. It's once a week, the bathroom break. We talk about marketing tips that we just spew out. And it could be anything from email, subject line, to any marketing tips in the world. We'll talk about it. Just give us a shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear. Peace out. Later.