Category: marketing
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DMA-CPA: a proposed margin-based acquisition budget heuristic
The DMA-CPA approach is a proposed budgeting heuristic: estimate the contribution available from a customer, reserve part of it, and use the remainder as an acquisition-spend ceiling. I find that more useful than chasing the lowest possible CPA without asking what a customer is worth. It is not a validated forecasting model or a guarantee…
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Brand Impact Index: a proposed brand measurement framework
The Brand Impact Index (BII) framework presented here organises brand measurement into three connected areas: brand tracking, customer experience and business impact. Its purpose is to help a team decide what to measure and how findings should inform action. It is a proposed framework, not a validated industry index or a demonstrated predictor of growth.…
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What marketing mix modelling can and cannot measure
Marketing mix modelling (MMM) estimates how marketing activity and other factors contribute to an aggregate business outcome, such as sales. It can help answer questions about channel contribution, diminishing returns and budget allocation. It does not recreate individual customer journeys or automatically tell an advertiser which person, interest group or creative asset to target. Substantively…
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Planning a marketing mix modelling project: data, checks and decisions
A useful marketing mix modelling project starts with a decision, not a promise to recover every conversion lost to tracking restrictions. MMM uses aggregate data to estimate how marketing and other factors relate to a business outcome. The practical work is deciding what the data can support, checking the assumptions and turning uncertain estimates into…
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AI in advertising: a 2022 perspective
This is a perspective on the advertising possibilities discussed in 2022. I have kept that historical framing rather than presenting old predictions as current news. Targeting is a prediction problem Advertising systems can use observed signals to estimate which impressions or audiences are more likely to meet an objective. That does not mean the system…
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12 marketing automation predictions from 2021
These are twelve things I wanted to see more of in marketing automation when I wrote this in 2021. They are personal predictions and wishes, rather than a report on what subsequently happened or a list of capabilities every business needs today. Yes, I wanted machine learning and AI to take on more of the…
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Data quality checks for marketing automation
Data quality can determine whether a marketing automation workflow does what you intended. Clean-looking records are not enough: the values need to be correct, relevant to the task and mapped to the right fields. Consider a lead form. If a phone number arrives in the first-name field, a personalised message can immediately reveal the mistake.…
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A simple ecommerce remarketing automation workflow
Browsing, saving an item and starting checkout give a retailer different signals about what a visitor might want. Those signals can guide an automation workflow, but they do not tell us exactly what someone intends to do. Here is a basic example using three visitors to the same online shop. It is an illustration of…
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How to choose, launch and measure a marketing automation workflow
Marketing automation can take repetitive work off a team’s hands. Whether that produces a worthwhile business result depends on the task, the implementation and the ongoing cost of operating it. I would start with a workflow that is easy to explain and inspect. “Improve marketing” is too broad. “Prepare a weekly report from approved data…