Context · Growth motion
Marketing-led
Marketing owns the journey from awareness through to conversion.
What changes here
The same four questions, and what each one runs into in this context.
Attribution
The assumptions built into most attribution tools fit here better than anywhere else, which makes overconfidence easy.
Incrementality
The cleanest place to run holdouts, because marketing controls the intervention end to end.
Allocation
Channel mix is the main lever, so mix modeling and marginal return analysis earn their cost.
Decisioning
The optimization event is a marketing choice, and it is usually set too shallow.
Written for this context
Attribution
-
Reading Platform Discrepancies Without Losing Your Mind
Two systems report different numbers for the same campaign. Four causes account for nearly all of it, and checking them in the right order turns a week of investigation into an afternoon.
- Worked example
Leads Versus Incremental Qualified Pipeline
A B2B lead program that hit every MQL target, measured by a staged rollout across territories. Leads went up by half. Opportunities and pipeline did not detectably move, the leads converted at two thirds the rate, and the design could never have seen the pipeline effect it was asked about.
Allocation
-
Adstock, Saturation, and Honest Response Curves
Lagged effects and diminishing returns are where most mix models smuggle in their conclusions. How to tell a fitted curve from an identified one, and what variation would identify it.
-
Calibrating an MMM to Experiments
Which experiment to run, how to carry its estimate into the model, and how hard to lean on it. Anchoring a channel's level drags its slope down with it, and the slope is what the media plan runs on.
-
Marginal Return, Not Average Return
The channel with the best cost per acquisition is often the worst place to put the next dollar. Averages describe money already spent. Budgets are decisions about money that has not been spent yet.
-
Paid Search and SEO Are Not Independent
Pause branded paid search and most of those conversions come back through organic. The paid channel's cost per acquisition describes a transfer between two of your own channels, not a purchase of new demand.
-
What a Marketing Mix Model Can and Cannot Do
A mix model is a good allocation tool and a weak causal one. Where its identification would have to come from, why a Bayesian version does not create any, and what makes one worth acting on.
- Worked example
An Experiment-Calibrated Marketing Mix Model
A mix model that fits three years of weekly data almost perfectly and gets the channel contributions badly wrong, and what one geo holdout does about it.