thoughts.xavierdecarvalho.com

Tag: data

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • Measuring social media ROI with experiments and modelling

    Social media measurement works better when the question comes before the dashboard. Are we trying to establish whether a campaign increased purchases, whether a message changed brand perceptions, or whether the programme produced a financial return? Those questions need related but different evidence. Substantively reviewed and updated: 22 October 2026. This article replaces fixed holdout…

  • Planning a marketing mix modelling project: data, checks and decisions

    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…

  • Four checks for effective data visualisation

    A useful data visualisation helps someone answer a question. Looking polished is helpful, but it cannot rescue a chart that uses the wrong data or makes a comparison hard to understand. I find it useful to check four things: accuracy, clarity, design and practical use. They overlap, but asking about them separately can reveal problems…

  • 12 marketing automation predictions from 2021

    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…

  • Data quality checks for marketing automation

    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.…

  • A simple ecommerce remarketing automation workflow

    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…

  • How to choose, launch and measure a marketing automation workflow

    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…