In this article, I’ll walk you through how to build a scalable and easily maintained data infrastructure that will form the foundation for your future growth.

Customer Data Platform (CDP)

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) centralizes the management of your customer data flow. It collects data from your digital products and forwards it to third-party services and databases that power your product. The CDP enables precise control over which user data is shared with each ad network, service, and database. Their SDK dramatically simplifies implementations, allowing new SDKs to piggyback on your existing events rather than requiring duplicative implementations. The CDP handles user and device-level information collection, event batch, retry logic, and much more.

Key Benefits of Using a CDP:

1. Enormous Opportunity Cost Savings: Building and managing the infrastructure yourself is a massive undertaking. Trust me - I’ve done it, and it was a headache, especially during spikes in usage. Don’t do it yourself. The opportunity cost is enormous. Focus on your product instead. 

2. Simplify Your Code Base and Speed Development: Integrating a new partner requires minimal to no engineering resources. A CDP forwards existing events to partners, reducing code complexity, bundle size, and resource requirements while at the same time collecting standard user and device information and providing event batching, retry logic, and much more, all of which are time, resource-intensive, and error-prone to build.

3. Data Forwarding: Seamlessly forward collected user data to a wide array of services, often without client-side modifications.

4. Error Reduction: Without a CDP, engineering teams tend to duplicate analytical events for every SDK and service, which undoubtedly leads to errors and inconsistent metrics due to the spaghetti code. A CDP centralizes events, minimizing mistakes.

5. Replayability: In fast-moving startups, you will break systems, causing data loss. A CDP allows replaying and resending missing data, ensuring all relevant data is captured.

6. API Data Pull: CDPs support pulling data from your ad networks, CRM, and other services and sending that data to your database.

While a CDP adds to your budget, the savings in engineering resources, time, and error reduction make it a worthwhile investment.

Recommendation: Segment

Data Movement Platform (DMP)

A Data Movement Platform (DMP) efficiently manages the API connections and schemas for hundreds of providers and services. It lets your team quickly load detailed performance data from hundreds of ad networks, CRM tools, and cloud spreadsheets into your internal database. Without a DMP, you may either miss out on critical data or take on the costly, time-consuming, and error-prone task of maintaining this infrastructure internally. Having done the latter, I do not recommend it. With no prior experience, I was able to set up a custom schema within a DMP from Meta’s ad API to our analytics database in under 10 minutes.

Why Not Just Use a CDP?

While a CDP is excellent for moving customer data, it only provides access to a limited portion of the data available via APIs. For instance, valuable ad metrics related to video performance or ad quality are typically only accessible through full API pulls, which aren’t available via a CDP. This limitation makes a DMP crucial for comprehensive data analysis.

Key Benefits of Using a DMP:

1. Free Engineering Resources: Building and maintaining the integrations with every ad network is time-intensive. Your resources are better spent focusing on internal priorities and product development.

2. Reduce Downtime: Outsourcing API and schema maintenance minimizes downtime and errors, which can cost hundreds of thousands in marketing misallocations.

3. Quick Data Integration: Establishing a new data connection is remarkably fast, often taking as little as five minutes.

4. Google Sheets Integration: Easily load Google Sheets into your database, enabling marketers to track and merge manually tracked metrics or creative information with other datasets seamlessly.

5. Real-Time Data Streaming: Stream data from production databases to analytics databases in real-time, allowing your team to focus on data analysis rather than data management.

Incorporating a DMP into your data infrastructure ensures you have access to detailed and valuable performance data without the headache of maintaining numerous API connections and schemas. This strategic move saves time, reduces errors, and enhances your ability to make informed, data-driven decisions.

Recommendation: Fivetran

Mobile Measurement Partner - Attribution (MMP)

If you have a mobile app and plan any paid marketing or need to track the source of your users, a Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP) is a must-have. While a CDP and DMP can load raw tracking data into your database for analysis, they can't handle the complexities of mobile attribution, especially considering Apple’s SKAdNetwork privacy program, which I’ll cover more in-depth in a future article.

Key Benefit of Using an MMP:

1. Essential for Mobile Attribution: Accurate mobile attribution isn’t possible without an MMP. These platforms are designed to track and attribute user interactions from various sources, ensuring you understand where your users are coming from and how your marketing efforts are performing.

Recommendation: Adjust or AppsFlyer

Both Adjust and AppsFlyer offer nearly identical services. Choose the one that best fits your budget.

Cloud Database (CD)

Choosing a suitable database is crucial for your business’s long-term success. With experience using MongoDB, Redshift, BigQuery, and Snowflake, I can confidently say that selecting the wrong database can create persistent issues, including premature hair loss. While Redshift and other solutions have significantly improved, Snowflake stands out as the clear winner.

Key Advantages of Snowflake:

1. Eliminates Nightly Job Locking: Snowflake’s scalable architecture ensures that nightly jobs don't lock due to insufficient server resources, a common problem with many databases.

2. Prevents Slow Queries: Snowflake efficiently handles peak-hour queries, ensuring that data is readily available for business reviews without delay.

Snowflake's ability to scale based on usage has resolved these issues, saving hundreds, if not thousands, of personnel hours.

Opting for Snowflake as your cloud database solution ensures scalability, efficiency, and reliability. Snowflake helps your team focus on analysis and decision-making rather than troubleshooting database issues by addressing common pain points such as job locking and slow queries.

Recommendation: Snowflake

Modern ELT (formerly known as the ETL) using dbt

The rise of modern database solutions that can handle raw data and transformations at scale has transformed how companies manage their data pipelines. The paradigm shift is toward ELT (Extract - Load - Transform), where the database handles the bulk of data transformations.

Extract & Ingest

The first and most important aspect is keeping all raw data in its original, unaltered form. Regardless of the source source, all raw data should be stored in your database or a storage solution such as Amazon S3, which can then be loaded into the database.

Bugs will happen—whether it’s type-casting a field incorrectly, passing the wrong data, or accidentally deleting a table. A proper architecture will prevent data loss, ensure data integrity, and allow quick recovery. While at the same time providing the crucial training data for any future AI systems. One of the two main limiting factors to the quality of any AI system is the volume and quality of training data. You do not want to lose any data that might become the linchpin of a future AI strategy.

dbt

Your business runs on data. To build a competitive advantage, you must integrate datasets, transform them into actionable insights, and deliver them to stakeholders quickly and accurately. The challenge is to do this without creating a system that becomes a giant, untraceable, and unscalable mess.

This is coming from experience making giant messes. I’ve written rollup scripts that were thousands of lines long to clean purchase and marketing data containing multiple SQL blocks, pulling from several external sources. Failures occur if one source table doesn’t update properly or runs a tad slow. There’s nothing like getting a dozen Slacks Monday morning because the weekend jobs crashed for one reason or another. With dbt we broke those multi-thousand-line SQL files into smaller, retryable blocks, dropping the error rate to nothing.

dbt helps manage this complexity in a way that’s modular, scalable, repeatable, and governed—all directly inside your data platform. Instead of completing transformations before loading the data into your warehouse, you load raw data and perform transformations using dbt within the warehouse itself.

Using dbt, data teams can build, test, and deploy analytics code using software development best practices (like portability, CI/CD, observability, documentation, etc.) to create production-grade analytics pipelines that scale. This results in modular, clean data models that can be delivered into BI tools, LLMs, and APIs, ensuring stakeholders have accurate data when and where they need it. 

Raw Data Storage - S3 vs Data Warehouse

With the drop in storage costs, loading all your raw data directly into your data warehouse is now viable. However, there are times when a lower-cost solution or an intermediary before loading the data into your database might be desirable. This is where Amazon S3 and similar solutions provide value. For instance, if you have an external API to append user information or get the geolocation of a user’s IP address, you can write the information to S3 as an intermediary before loading it into the data warehouse in case of loading issues.

Key Benefits of Using an ELT Process:

1. Fix Errors Fast: Correcting an error is straightforward—just adjust the transform step and rerun the script.

2. Near Real-Time Access To Live Data: With these tools, your team can access data as soon as 10 minutes after events occur, giving executives the most recent data possible.

3. Minimize Lost Data: By storing raw data, you can recover as much data as possible when errors occur, ensuring no valuable information is permanently lost.

Recommendation: Snowflake in combination with Amazon S3 using Kinesis or Kafka Streams

Note: These recommendations are unbiased and uncompensated.

That’s what happened to Solo Brands. They launched a marketing campaign featuring Snoop Dogg that every marketing publication hailed as one of the top 20 of 2023. Despite the viral buzz and extensive media coverage, their sales remained flat, leading to the CEO's termination and a staggering 50% plummet in their stock price.

Why did this happen? 

It's a classic case of prioritizing brand awareness over sales conversion. In today's oversaturated market, where the average consumer is bombarded with 3,000 brand messages daily, mere awareness isn't sufficient to boost sales. 

You must effectively grab the audience’s attention and pitch your product. While Solo Brands grabbed attention, their pitch fell flat. They stated their value proposition without explaining why we should care. Was it any surprise no one bought their product?

Effective marketing isn't just about grabbing attention; it's about convincing customers your product will improve their lives. Here’s how you can ensure your campaigns don’t just catch eyes but open wallets.

The solution begins with first-principles thinking, popularized by Elon Musk, to break an advertisement into its fundamental components.

1. The Art of the Pitch

The pitch is the heartbeat of your ad campaign. It's not just about stating what your product does—it’s about convincing potential customers that they need it. This is where many campaigns falter and why they struggle to generate sales; they highlight features without tying them back to real benefits. Remember, your pitch should address the following:

• Target Persona: Who is your ideal customer?

• Relatable Problem: What specific problem does your product solve for them?

• Value Proposition: How does your product solve this problem?

• Reason to Believe: Why should the audience trust you?

• Call-to-Action: What step should they take next?

Solo Brands, for instance, presented a value proposition but didn’t create a relatable problem or a compelling reason to believe, leaving potential customers unengaged.

2. Storytelling that Sells

Next, frame your pitch within a captivating, memorable story. This narrative should be crafted with your target persona in mind, ensuring it resonates and holds their attention. Structure it to:

• Illustrate the value: Show, don’t tell, how your product benefits the user.

• Engage: Keep it interesting to ensure viewers watch through to the end.

• Establish Identity: Position your brand’s traits and values clearly.

• Be Memorable: Be aware of the 95-5 rule, which shows that 95% of your potential buyers aren’t ready to buy today. These 95% are “out-market” today, but will be “in-market” sometime in the future. Memorable ads keep your brand top-of-mind.

You do this by including the following elements:

• Who: The actor communicating your message. 

• What & Why: What are you selling and why?

• Where: Location of the story, target a place with an emotional connection.

• Brand Identity: What are the traits of your brand?

• Emotional Appeal: What emotion do you want to trigger in the audience?

3. Mastering the Hook

Your ad’s hook is its initial appeal. It’s the ability to get the audience to stop and pay attention. Effective hooks can include:

• Celebrities & Intellectual Property: Leverage star power or popular media.

• Attractiveness: Utilize appealing and cute visuals.

• Emotional Scenes: Draw on feelings and locations with strong emotional attachments.

• Shock Value: Sometimes, a surprise can go a long way.

A well-crafted hook is crucial for grabbing attention, but the seamless integration of the pitch and the story will create a memorable experience, turning viewers into customers.

Results that Speak

Consider an ad my team produced—over 500,000 likes, thousands of shares, and comments. This wasn't just about social media metrics; it was proof of a narrative that resonates, a pitch that persuades, and a hook that grabs attention. This ad was liked by 1 out of every 600 Americans, with about 5% of the country watching it. That’s the power of a campaign that perfectly blends a hook, story, and pitch.

To watch the ad, visit TikTok’s ad library here: https://ads.tiktok.com/business/creativecenter/topads/7154038538488627202/pc/en?rid=lvmfia1mcx9

To transform a flashy campaign into a revenue-generating engine, start with a solid pitch, amplify the message with a memorable story, and hook your audience immediately. This is how you convert viewers into buyers and truly capitalize on your marketing efforts. Don’t just aim for the eyes; aim for the heart and the mind. That’s the path from a good campaign to a great one.

The Art of the Pitch: Crafting Messages That Convert

In the complex world of marketing, crafting an effective pitch is less about using intricate jargon and more about an elegance of simplicity coupled with a deep understanding of your audience's needs. 

Your pitch has one goal. To convince the audience to buy your product. Here’s a refined approach to constructing a pitch that resonates and converts.

Understand Your Audience

Target Persona(s): Begin by painting a detailed picture of your target. Understand their educational background, family life, career, income level, and deepest needs, wants, and fears. This comprehensive profile aids in crafting messages that speak directly to them. Create more than one persona; try to create one for every consumer segment.

For a more tangible connection, visualize your persona using an AI image generator to create a photo representing the persona. Paste their description into an AI image generator like Midjourney or OpenAI’s Dalle. This helps you visualize who you're speaking to when crafting your campaigns.

Identify the Problem

Relatable Problem(s): Clearly define the specific problems your product solves. Approach this from the perspective of someone completely unfamiliar with your industry or product to ensure clarity. For example, Solo Brands highlighted its smokeless stove without adequately addressing the specific problems it solves, like reducing health risks associated with smoke inhalation or the convenience of not having to shower after a cookout because you don’t reek of smoke.

Clarify the Value

Value Proposition(s): Communicate your product's benefits in the simplest terms. A message that a first grader could understand is more likely to resonate with a broader audience. Remember, how you frame your value proposition can significantly affect its appeal. For price-focused pitches, try combining low-price positioning with a non-price value proposition to make your offer more compelling and help it stand out in a competitive market.

How you frame your value proposition completely changes the appeal. A 60% off message appeals to a higher-end consumer versus “starting at $20”. A lower price and higher discount do not always equate to higher conversion. When offers are too good to be true, the audience believes they are being scammed.

Establish Credibility

Reason to Believe: In a market flooded with similar offerings, explain why your product differs and why consumers should trust your claims. This is crucial for distinguishing your product from competitors, especially in commodity-like industries such as bottled water, where differentiation is essential to avoid competition solely on price. Do not discount the impact of the reason to believe on performance and convince your audience to try your product.

Direct Action

Call-To-Action (CTA): Specify what action you want your audience to take, whether visiting a website, downloading an app, or purchasing. This directive should be clear and compelling; a vague or missing CTA can lead to lost opportunities for conversion.

Overall Tips for Effective Communication:

• Create Multiple Versions: Don’t focus all your efforts on a single persona. You might be surprised by what works and what works will change over time. Tailor your pitch to different channels.

• Simplify Your Language: Avoid complex terminology, especially in sectors like B2B and SaaS, where clarity can often be overshadowed by an unnecessary display of sophistication.

• Be Direct, Clear, and Concise: Ensure your message is easy to understand and remember. Simplicity builds trust and aids recall, making your product more likely to be chosen when decision time comes.

By integrating these refined strategies into your marketing efforts, you can transform a standard pitch into a compelling reason for customers to engage with and ultimately choose your product. Remember, in marketing, clarity and relevance in your communication are just as critical as the quality of your product.

The Story: Crafting Content That Connects

In the digital age, where every scroll, click, and tap brings a new barrage of content, standing out is about more than just crafting ads; it’s about creating compelling content. Consumers are inundated with over 3,000 brand messages daily. Standing out requires a paradigm shift. The goal is to produce material so engaging that people choose to watch it—not because it's an ad, but because it's as captivating as any other content they consume. This shift from traditional advertising to content creation is essential in a world where you compete not just with other brands but with every content creator on the planet.

Core Elements of Storytelling in Marketing:

1. Illustrate the Value: Your story should clearly show the value of your product, as stated in your pitch. This isn't about blatantly promoting the product but integrating its benefits into a natural and memorable narrative.

2. Entertain: Keep your audience engaged. The content should be as entertaining as anything they might find on their favorite streaming service. This means using humor, drama, or any engaging elements.

3. Establish Brand Identity: You need to instill long-term loyalty, recognition, and recall. Your story is a powerful tool for building brand identity. It should lay a foundation that resonates with your audience, making your brand memorable and distinct. Consider how brands like Old Spice reinvigorated their image by embracing humor to target a younger demographic. They didn't just advertise; they entertained. Which had the fun benefit of doubling their sales within a year.

4. Be Memorable: Be aware of the 95-5 rule, which shows that 95% of your potential buyers aren’t ready to buy today. These 95% are “out-market” today, but will be “in-market” sometime in the future. Memorable ads keep your brand top-of-mind, increase mental availability, and improve recall.

Be open to modifying and changing your brand. Don’t be too rigid. As you craft and experiment with different ads, you’ll find certain styles trigger higher engagement. Embrace those learnings throughout your brand.

Crafting Your Story:

Who:
The choice of actors and talent can dramatically affect the performance of your content. Testing different actors within the same concept can reveal surprising variations in audience engagement. 

What, Why, & How:
This is where you integrate your pitch seamlessly into the narrative. What are you offering? Why should the audience care? How does it improve their lives?

Where:
The setting of your story can significantly influence its emotional impact. Choose locations that evoke feelings, memories, or aspirations relevant to your target persona.

Emotional Appeal:
Decide on the emotion you want to evoke—whether it’s aspiration, joy, surprise, envy, or nostalgia. Effective stories often hinge on strong emotional connections that make the narrative memorable and shareable.

Innovative Story Development:

Seeding Ideas:
Begin by clearly understanding your persona, their challenges, and how your product addresses them. Match this with an emotion to create the seed from which your story can grow. Looking through social media, aspiration, and envy are key drivers of engagement. 

Trend Integration:
Keep an eye on platforms like TikTok to identify current trends and interests. Integrating these elements can make your content feel fresh and relevant.

Impact Daily Lives:
How can you insert your brand into the audience’s daily life? What part of their life can you improve?

Conclusion

Transitioning from making ads to creating content requires a shift in mindset but results in a more profound connection with your audience. By focusing on storytelling that’s memorable, entertains, builds brand identity, and illustrates product value, you craft content that stands out in a crowded digital landscape. Remember, the best content doesn’t just sell. It resonates and remains memorable long after the viewer has scrolled past.

The Hook: Capturing Attention in a Crowded Marketplace

In a world flush with a never-ending stream of engaging content. A strong hook is required to break through the noise and not only capture attention but pique interest, setting the stage for your audience to engage with the rest of your content. Here are five proven strategies to ensure your hook makes an impact.

1. Celebrities: The High-Cost, Unknown-Impact Gamble

Celebrities are insanely expensive—so expensive that the increased performance rarely pays off. To be effective, the celebrity must be subconsciously recognizable by the majority of your audience. The right celebrity brings a well-known face that instantly grabs attention and builds trust, increasing performance at a rate commensurate to their cost. Few celebrities fit the bill, and few campaigns are large enough.

For those considering this route, platforms like Cameo offer a cost-effective way to test celebrity impact. By starting small, you can gauge the effectiveness of a celebrity without committing a significant portion of your budget.

2. Intellectual Property: Aligning with Fan Bases

Leveraging popular intellectual properties (IP) can dramatically boost your ad's appeal, especially if there's a natural link between the IP and your product. My experience with the "Game of Thrones" mobile game during its cultural peak demonstrated how a beloved series can drive down acquisition costs and increase virality. The key is ensuring the IP resonates with your product and audience.

3. Attractive People: More Than Just Looks

Attractiveness in advertising goes beyond physical appearance. It's about balancing beauty, relatability, appeal to the target persona, and genuine acting skills. The right actor is not necessarily the most attractive one, but the one who embodies the pitch and story and can authentically convey the message.

4. Animals: Unleashing Universal Appeal

Whether it's the wide-eyed innocence of a puppy or the comedic antics of a cat, incorporating animals can evoke a range of emotions from an audience, making the ad memorable and shareable.

5. Emotional Scenes and Shock Value: The Power of Feeling

Creating emotional scenes can forge a deep connection with the audience, making your message resonate on a personal level. Meanwhile, incorporating elements of shock and awe—whether through unexpected visuals such as an airplane falling from the sky as seen in a recent Mr. Beast video, surprising twists, or intense emotional triggers—can make your ad hard to ignore. This approach taps into the human instinct to be drawn to the extraordinary or dramatic.

Crafting Ads that Resonate and Convert

Mastering the art of the hook is essential for cutting through the noise of a crowded media landscape. Each type of hook offers unique benefits and challenges, and the right choice depends on your product, target audience, and marketing goals. As you refine your approach to hooks, remember that the goal is to capture attention and seamlessly transition viewers into the core message of your ad, leading them towards a meaningful engagement with your brand.

Conclusion

In our next few pieces, we'll delve into optimizing the components of your ads—from pitch to story to hooks—and discuss strategies for scaling your advertising efforts across various platforms, from social media to television and beyond. This framework will help you consistently produce high-quality content that captures attention and performs effectively across diverse media landscapes.

(and driving hundreds of millions in revenue).

Properly naming your campaigns and meticulously tracking every creative.

It may seem silly, but it can dramatically enhance your marketing performance. Here’s why it’s not just a trivial task but a pivotal tactic for successful digital marketing.

Unifying Your Marketing Data

Adopting a systematic approach to naming your campaigns and meticulously tracking each creative result in a cohesive dataset encompassing everything from ad conceptualization to revenue generation. This comprehensive data aggregation enables you to thoroughly examine how various elements—such as the pitch, ad length, or even the inclusion of background music and captions—impact performance. With this level of detail, you can precisely determine what is effective and what isn’t, streamlining the identification of bottlenecks and optimizing production processes. Ultimately, this enhances your ability to fine-tune strategies and maximize your return on investment.

A Case Study in Success

Consider this approach's impact on one of my clients: upon revisiting their data tracking strategy, they uncovered that a specific group of content creators outperformed others by a staggering 40%. This insight led to strategic shifts that potentially added millions to their net income.

What We’ll Explore Next

We're set to dive deeper into the mechanics of:

• Mastering the Art of Naming Campaigns, Ad Sets, and Ads: Establishing a systematic naming convention that aids data analysis and strategic adjustments.

• Implementing Effective Creative Tracking: Documenting every aspect of the creative process to aid in future analysis.

• Loading Data into Your Database: Efficiently transferring your detailed tracking data into a structured database for advanced analysis.

• Joining Creative, Performance, and Revenue Data for In-Depth Insights: Integrating creative tracking with ad performance and revenue data to uncover actionable insights.

• Developing Insights: Crafting visual representations highlighting key trends and performance metrics to guide future strategies.

Each of these steps is crucial for turning ordinary campaign management into a powerful tool for business growth. Implementing these practices ensures that every decision is data-driven, maximizing your marketing spend and boosting your bottom line.

Mastering the Art of Naming Campaigns, Ad Sets, and Ads

Effective naming is the cornerstone of robust marketing analytics, enabling you to swiftly decipher the configuration of each ad and uncover opportunities to enhance performance. A systematic naming convention is vital for streamlined analysis and decision-making for marketing teams juggling various content types, objectives, targeting, and creatives.

Example Naming Convention:

• Ad Name: 24040001_runway_amber-video-best_deal

• Creative Name: 24040001_runway_amber

• Creative Type: video

• Headline: best_deal

Using dashes (-) as delimiters allows for the separation and tracking of multiple attributes within a single name, making data parsing straightforward in tools like Excel or SQL. For instance, you can use the SPLITTEXT function in Excel, and in SQL, the SPLIT_PART function to dissect these elements.

Advantages of Systematic Naming

Identify Opportunities: Once the names are parsed, leveraging tools such as pivot tables in Excel or the GROUP BY clause in SQL enables you to aggregate performance statistics across campaigns by creative type or other attributes, facilitating a deeper understanding of how different factors influence your campaigns without running a costly and time-consuming A/B test. This strategic approach to data handling allows for creating numerous charts, each highlighting the performance variations across objectives, targeting, and creative types—making it easier than ever to spot both opportunities and inefficiencies.

Reduces Time & Errors: This enables you to swiftly decipher the configuration of each ad without clicking on the details and double-checking that you have selected the correct campaign. 

Hierarchical Structure of Digital Ads

Digital ads typically follow a hierarchical structure where campaigns contain multiple ad sets, each consisting of numerous ads. This meticulous naming captures all pertinent details, many of which are inaccessible through APIs or other sources. It's vital for maintaining the integrity and traceability of your data:

• Campaigns: START_DATE – CHANNEL – PLATFORM – CAMPAIGN_TYPE – OBJECTIVE

• Ad Sets: START_DATE – GEO_TARGETING – LOCATION – AUDIENCE – AGE_AND_GENDER – PERFORMANCE_GOAL – PLACEMENT

• Ads: CREATIVE_NAME – CREATIVE_TYPE – HEADLINE

General Rules for Naming

• Consistent Delineation: Always delineate each trait with a dash.

• Formatting: Ensure all information is in lowercase and devoid of special characters or spaces; use underscores as substitutes for a space.

Detailed Examples for Each Level

• Campaign Level:

  • Format: START_DATE – CHANNEL – PRODUCT – PLATFORM – CAMPAIGN_TYPE – OBJECTIVE

  • Example: 240312-meta-pants-ios-evergreen-install

• Ad Set Level:

  • Format: START_DATE – GEO_TARGETING – LOCATION – AUDIENCE – AGE_AND_GENDER – PERFORMANCE_GOAL – PLACEMENT

  • Example: 240312-country-US-LA_highvalue_05-b18:55-conversion-all

• Ad Level:

  • Format: CREATIVE_NAME – CREATIVE_TYPE – HEADLINE

  • Example: 24040001_runwayunder100_airplane-static-40off

By adhering to these naming conventions, you not only streamline the tracking process but also empower your marketing team to harness the full potential of your data, leading to smarter, data-driven decision-making. This methodology is essential for anyone looking to optimize their digital marketing efforts and achieve measurable improvements in campaign performance.

START_DATE

• Purpose: Serves dual functions; it quickly identifies the campaign's age and acts as a unique identifier to prevent merging different campaigns.

• Format: YYMMDD (Year, Month, Day)

• Example: 240312 for a campaign launched on March 12, 2024. This date format facilitates automatic sorting and aids in historical analysis

CHANNEL

• Purpose: Specify the ad network, such as Meta, TikTok, Google, Spotify, or Twitter.

• Utility: Eases analysis of campaign performance by the network, allowing for refined media spend analysis.

PRODUCT (if applicable)

• Context: Used predominantly in sectors like gaming and e-commerce, where different products may have dedicated campaigns.

• Note: Exclude if not relevant to your company structure.

PLATFORM

• Purpose: Identify the user’s target device.

• Options: iOS, Android, Web

CAMPAIGN_TYPE

• Purpose: Identify the purpose of the campaign.

• Options: Include 'Evergreen' for ongoing campaigns, 'Test' for trialing new creative concepts or targeting strategies, and 'APlus' (formerly automated app ads).

OBJECTIVE

• Purpose: Clearly state what the campaign aims to achieve, such as installs, reach, or clicks.

GEO_TARGETING

• Purpose: Enables local, regional, country-wide, or continent-wide marketing strategies.

• Options: Country, DMA (Designated Market Area), or region.

LOCATION

• Purpose: Identify the specific location-based targeting for the ad set.

• Format: Use a concise 2-5 letter code for geographical representation.

• Example: 'US' for the United States, 'LA' for Los Angeles, and ‘EUW’ for Western Europe.

AUDIENCE

• Purpose: Tailor audience segments with identifiers like:

• Format: Audience Type _ Audience Name _ Percentile (if applicable)

• Examples: 

  • Custom Audience: CA_SEEDAUDIENCE (e.g., CA_highvalueover100)

  • Look-a-Likes: LAL_SEEDAUDIENCE_PERCENTILE (e.g., LAL_highvalueover100_05)

  • BROAD

  • Interest-based categories using descriptive keywords.

AGE_AND_GENDER

• Purpose: Provide details on the age and gender being targeted.

• Format: Indicate targeting specifics, such as b18:55 for both genders, ages 18 to 55, with a colon denoting the range. Use a “+” for no upper range, b18+. 

• Options: First letter denotes gender (male, female, both), followed by age range.

PERFORMANCE_GOAL

• Purpose: Optimization parameters specific to each ad network.

• Note: If the network doesn't specify, use ‘none'.

PLACEMENT

• Purpose: Include specific placements like feeds, stories, or reels on platforms like Meta.

• Note: Use 'all' if placements are not predetermined or selectable.

CREATIVE_NAME

• Purpose: Facilitates detailed tracking and analysis of creative performance across variations.

• Components: Unique Creative Identifier, Creative Name, and Creative Variant.

• Format: [UNIQUE_CREATIVE]_[IDENTIFIER_CREATIVE_NAME]_[CREATIVE_VARIANT]

• UNIQUE_CREATIVE_IDENTIFIER

  • Format: YYMM0001; represents the year and month of production followed by a four-digit sequential number.

  • Example: 24040001 for the first creative produced in April 2024.

• CREATIVE_NAME

  • Purpose: Represents the internal name of the creative without underscores to avoid confusion in data parsing.

• CREATIVE_VARIANT

  • Purpose: Identifies different versions of a creative for A/B testing or hypothesis evaluation.

• Example: 24040001_runwayunder100_airplane

  • UNIQUE_CREATIVE_IDENTIFIER: 24040001

  • CREATIVE_NAME: runwayunder100

  • CREATIVE_VARIANT: airplane

CREATIVE_TYPE

• Options: Static, video, UGC (user-generated content), carousel; add external content creator or agency if applicable.

HEADLINE

• Purpose: While headlines may not significantly impact performance due to low user engagement with text, they should be tested and optimized for potential influence.

Implementing Effective Creative Tracking

Creative tracking is essential to enhancing team performance, improving creative quality, and reducing costs. Here's how to implement a robust creative tracking system to improve your marketing efforts significantly.

Setting Up for Success

Start by creating a Google Sheet or any collaborative spreadsheet tool that can be loaded into your database. This spreadsheet will be the central repository for all creative tracking information, structured into two primary tabs: Briefs and Concepts.

Briefs Tab: This section records the comprehensive strategy for each advertisement, including all preliminary information that guides the production process.

Concepts & Variants Tab: This tab tracks the execution details of each creative concept, ensuring that every piece of content is accounted for from inception through completion.

Key Components to Track

1. Briefs:

   • Name: Identifier of the brief.

   • Link to the brief: URL for easy access.

   • Origin of idea: Which team member was responsible the concept.

   • Primary network: Platforms where the ad will run (e.g., Meta, TikTok, TV).

   • Request date: When the brief was requested.

   • Brief date: When the brief was finalized.

   • Estimated completion dates: Scheduling and tracking of production timelines.

   • Cost estimates: Budget planning and tracking.

   • Casting and shooting details: Specific requirements for production.

2. Concepts & Variants:

   • Name and Variant: Ensuring each version is uniquely identifiable and correlates with campaign data. Corresponds with the naming convention used in live campaigns to allow the joining of all ad information from conceptualization to revenue.

   • Link to file: Direct access to the creative asset.

   • Creative specifics: Ad length, type, primary actor or creator, and key message components such as the hook, persona, value proposition, and call-to-action.

   • Production details: Including dates for post-production, reviews, and final handoff.

   • Performance features: Whether the creative includes background sound, subtitles, and the actors involved.

   • Revision and error tracking: Maintaining a log of revisions and identifying error sources for continuous improvement.

Utilizing Creative Tracking for Optimization

With this tracking setup, you can:

• Improve Ad Performance: Combining these details with campaign performance data helps determine the impact of various creative elements on overall campaign success. Aggregation can identify trends and patterns associated with high- and low-performing creatives.

• Identify production bottlenecks: Measure the time spent on each production phase and identify which team members or processes may be causing delays. This visibility allows quick interventions and adjustments to streamline operations and reduce inefficiencies.

• Cost Optimization: Calculate the return on investment from creative investments and whether those investments should be increased or decreased.

• Visualize the Data: Leverage the data collected in your tracking sheets to create visual representations of production timelines or performance analysis. These visuals can help quickly communicate status updates and insights during team meetings or executive reviews, ensuring everyone involved is informed and aligned with the current strategies and outcomes.

Ensuring Continuous Improvement

By maintaining a disciplined approach to creative tracking, you not only enhance the operational efficiency of your marketing team but also foster an environment of continuous improvement. This methodical tracking enables your team to learn from each campaign iteration, making informed decisions that progressively enhance your marketing efforts' creative quality and effectiveness.

In summary, effective creative tracking is not just about keeping records; it's about creating a dynamic system that supports strategic decision-making, enhances team collaboration, and drives marketing success through detailed insights and continuous refinement.

Loading Data into Your Database

Loading your creative tracking and ad network performance data into a central database is crucial for creating a comprehensive view of your marketing efforts. Here’s how you can consolidate these datasets effectively to facilitate deeper analysis and more informed decision-making.

Choosing the Right Integration Method

There are generally two main approaches to data integration in digital marketing analytics: direct API pulls or the use of third-party data integration providers. Each method has advantages depending on your needs, resources, and technical capabilities.

1. Direct API Pulls:

   • Definition: This method involves setting up API connections directly from the marketing channels you are using (like Google Ads, Facebook, TikTok, etc.) to your database.

   • Advantages: Offers complete control and can be more cost-effective over the long term.

   • Considerations: It requires a high degree of engineering investment for setup and maintenance. You'll also need technical know-how to manage API changes and data discrepancies.

2. Third-Party Providers:

   • Definition: A service manages the API connections, loading the data into your database.

   • Advantages: It simplifies the integration process with pre-built connectors maintained by the service, ensuring consistent and reliable data transfer.

   • Considerations: This method is likely to be more expensive.

   • Recommended Provider: Fivetran

Benefits of a Unified Database

By integrating both your creative tracking data from Google Sheets and performance metrics from various ad networks into a single database, you gain several key advantages:

• Holistic View: Centralizing data allows you to see the full picture of your marketing efforts, from creative conception to final performance outcomes.

• Enhanced Analysis: With all data in one place, you can more easily perform complex analyses, identify trends, spot inefficiencies, and understand the impact of specific creatives on campaign performance.

• Streamlined Reporting: Generate comprehensive reports that provide insights into both creative production processes and their outcomes, enhancing transparency and enabling faster strategic adjustments.

• Data Consistency: Reduces the risk of data silos and inconsistencies, which can lead to misinformed decisions.

Moving Forward

Once your data is successfully integrated, the next steps involve ensuring the accuracy and consistency of the data flowing into your database. Regular audits and checks should be conducted to maintain data integrity and adapt to any data structure changes from your sources.

Joining Creative, Performance, and Revenue Data for In-Depth Insights

Integrating and analyzing diverse data sets provides a comprehensive view of how creative elements, campaign performance, and revenue are interlinked. Here's how you can effectively join these datasets to extract actionable insights.

Preparing for Data Integration

1. Data Sources to Combine:

   • Creative Tracking Data: Includes all details about the creatives used in campaigns.

   • Ad Network Performance Data: Metrics from digital advertising platforms, such as impressions, clicks, conversion rates, and view-through rates.

   • Acquisition Data: The unique user ID and the network, campaign, ad set, and ad that acquired the user.

   • Internal User Behavioral Data: How acquired customers behave when using the product.

   • Internal Revenue Data: Financial outcomes attributed to specific campaigns, ad sets, and ads.

2. Identification for Joining Data:

   • Campaign, Ad Set, and Creative Name or ID: These are key identifiers across datasets. For accurate joining, it's essential that the names are consistent across all records across your data sources.

   • Internal User ID: This is a unique identifier that identifies the user. It links internal data with marketing campaign data.

Steps for Data Joining

• Step 1: Standardize Creative Names

  • Ensure the creative names in your tracking sheet match those in the ad network and acquisition data. As mentioned earlier, this might involve parsing names from structured strings.

• Step 2: Use URL Parameters and Integrate Mobile Measurement 

  • Implement URL parameters for tracking online campaigns. This involves appending identifiers to URLs that track users' interactions with ads across digital platforms like Meta, TikTok, and Google.

  • For mobile campaigns, particularly on Apple devices, integrate with a mobile measurement partner (MMP) to capture campaign-related revenue data. MMPs can provide granular data down to the level of individual ad sets or ads, depending on user permissions for app tracking and the number of users engaging with the ad.

• Step 3: Extract Campaign Identifiers

  • For ad network data, extract the campaign, ad set, and ad identifiers using the parsing methods outlined in the previous steps. Ensure these identifiers are captured for internal systems when users interact with your digital environment. This is crucial for linking user actions directly to the specific advertising efforts.

• Step 4: Performing the Join

  • To merge these datasets, use SQL queries or data manipulation tools in your database or data analysis software. Typically, you'll perform joins based on the creative name and campaign identifiers.

Analyzing the Combined Data

Once the data is joined, you can perform various analyses to understand the effectiveness of different creatives, the ROI of various campaigns, and identify which elements drive revenue.

• Group By and Pivot: Use techniques like grouping by various attributes (e.g., creative type, campaign objective) or pivoting data to compare performance across different segments.

• Visualization: Create visualizations such as dashboards and charts to make the data more accessible and digestible for stakeholders across the organization.

• Optimization: Use insights from the data to optimize ongoing and future campaigns, focusing on the most profitable or high-performing elements.

Ensuring Data Integrity

Maintain regular checks and updates to ensure that all data sources are synchronized and that the data integration process correctly handles new and updated data. Regular audits will help maintain the accuracy and reliability of your analyses.

By effectively joining your creative tracking, ad network performance, and internal revenue data, you equip your team with the knowledge to make informed decisions that can significantly enhance marketing strategies and campaign outcomes.

Developing Insights

Here are a few of my favorite charts.

1. Creative spend by the age of creative

Creative effectiveness is gauged by how much ROI positive marketing budget can be deployed. Over time, the performance of a creative will decline due to creative fatigue as the audience becomes overly familiar with the content. Keeping the ad lineup fresh is essential by periodically introducing new, high-performing creatives to combat this. Ideally, the majority of a marketing budget should be directed towards recently launched ads, mirroring the approach seen in the chart below with Meta, where newer ads receive more funding. However, as seen below for TikTok, when a significant portion of the budget is still being spent on older creatives. This pattern indicates an underperforming creative team that needs to be addressed to enhance channel performance.

2. Spend, Revenue & Production by Creative Type

This chart serves as a quick indicator of whether creative resources are effectively allocated to the right projects. We observe that there has been a significant increase in production resources and marketing budget directed towards in-house static ads. However, the revenue generated from these ads has not corresponded with the increased investment, suggesting that these resources might be better utilized elsewhere. Based on this data, it would be advisable to reconsider the current strategy and potentially reduce the allocation towards in-house static ads to better align spending with revenue outcomes.

3. Spend & Revenue by Targeting (or Objective, Pitch, etc)

To enhance campaign performance, it's important to identify areas that are either overperforming or underperforming continuously. This analysis provides comprehensive charts covering targeting, objectives, pitch types, and other diverse variables. In the current data, broad targeting is shown to be underperforming compared to other strategies. Based on this insight, it would be wise to reduce investment in broad targeting and reallocate those funds toward targeting options that deliver better results.

4. Time From Request To Launch

Speed is key for rapid experimentation and enhancing performance. By analyzing how long different creative types take to be delivered, we can quickly pinpoint potential problem areas. In this case, it's important to investigate why most video edits take a month or longer to complete and why many creatives take more than six weeks to deliver. Understanding the reasons behind these delays will help implement solutions to speed up the production process, thereby improving our marketing efforts' overall efficiency and effectiveness.

A Strategic Overview for Multi-channel Marketing

1. The Benefits of Multi-Channel Marketing

2. When to Consider Expansion To New Marketing Channels

3. Measuring Multi-Channel Marketing Success: Tools and Techniques

4. Understanding the Response Curve in Multi-Channel Marketing

5. Optimizing Marketing Spend Across Multiple Channels

Expanding into new marketing channels requires great ads, robust measurement, and strategic budget allocation to ensure success. Whether you're a seasoned marketer looking to refine your strategy or a burgeoning entrepreneur eager to make your mark, this article is designed to equip you with the knowledge and tools to effectively think about, measure, produce, and market across an ever-expanding array of channels.

The benefits of multi-channel marketing

In today’s diverse media landscape, sticking to a single marketing channel limits a brand's reach and impact. Eventually, a company must expand into the unknown. Below are the key benefits of adopting a multi-channel approach:

1. Increased Reach: Consumers have varied media habits, often limiting their consumption to a few preferred sources. Brands can connect with a broader audience by diversifying marketing efforts across multiple channels. This expansion is crucial because relying solely on a platform like Meta will not capture the full spectrum of potential customers.

2. Enhanced Trust: The prestige associated with certain channels, such as television, confers additional credibility to your brand. When consumers see a product or service advertised across multiple respected platforms, their trust in that brand typically increases. This perception can be particularly potent in channels like TV, which are perceived as more traditional or authoritative.

3. Improved Performance of Existing Channels: Advertising across multiple channels boosts the performance of the existing channels. For instance, a compelling TV ad increases engagement and conversion with the brand's digital ads. Broad-reach channels often introduce or remind a wider audience about a brand, subsequently making targeted digital efforts more effective. Essentially, these channels complement each other, with more expansive mediums like TV amplifying the impact of online ads.

4. Optimized Marketing Efficiency: Not all marketing dollars are equal in terms of the return they generate. The law of diminishing returns suggests that each additional dollar spent in a channel yields lesser returns beyond a certain point. Multi-channel marketing allows for the strategic reallocation of budgets across different channels, each with its own cost-effectiveness and reach potential. This method enables marketers to maximize overall returns by dynamically shifting resources to where they perform best based on real-time data and performance analytics.

5. Improved Retention: Multi-channel marketing strategies help acquire new customers and significantly contribute to retaining and reactivating them. Regular exposure across different platforms helps keep the brand top-of-mind, encourages repeat purchases, and strengthens customer loyalty.

Strategic Implementation for Maximum Impact

To leverage these benefits effectively, businesses need to:

• Align Channel Messaging: Ensure all channels align with the overarching marketing goals and key aspects of the brand message. This coherence ensures that each channel reinforces the others, maximizing the cumulative impact.

• Continuously Monitor and Adjust: Use analytics to monitor the performance across channels and adjust strategies as needed. This dynamic approach allows for real-time optimization based on actual performance data.

• Experiment and Innovate: Regularly test new channels, marketing approaches, and modified messaging to find untapped opportunities. This helps find new avenues for growth and keeps the marketing strategy flexible and adaptive to changes in consumer behavior.

When to Consider Expansion To New Marketing Channels

Expanding your marketing into new channels should be a strategic choice supported by specific criteria. Here’s a three-step checklist to help you assess readiness for channel expansion:

1. Substantial Marketing Budget: Ensure that your marketing budget is robust enough to support expansion without detracting from the effectiveness of existing channels. A benchmark of at least $10 million annually in marketing spend indicates sufficient resources to explore additional channels effectively. Prior to a $10 million budget, Meta and Google are likely to outperform new channels.

2. Measurement Infrastructure: Have the necessary tools and systems in place to track and analyze the performance of new marketing efforts. Effective measurement is crucial to managing spend and optimizing strategies across multiple channels.

3. Refined Messaging: Before expanding, have a solid pitch that has proven to drive consumer purchases in your current channels. This pitch should be compelling, clear, and thoroughly tested to ensure it resonates well with your target audience.

4. Experience Creating Memorable Stories: Most channels require an effective pitch and an engaging story for success. Due to the expense of TV, podcasts, and other similar channels, it’s best to gain that experience through digital advertising on social media before expansion.

5. Understand Channel Requirements: Different channels have varying levels of forgiveness and cost implications. For example, television may require a higher level of polish and a more universally appealing message than digital ads.

Here’s an illustration from my perspective on the requirements for each channel:

Measuring Multi-Channel Marketing Success: Tools and Techniques

Measurement lies at the heart of every scalable marketing strategy—a diverse array of tools and techniques designed to decode the performance of channels and advertisements. It's crucial to understand that there's no "one-size-fits-all" metric; a singular measure of success is a myth. Instead, teams must adeptly navigate various metrics, each with unique insights and limitations, to paint a comprehensive picture of performance.

Diving deeper into the data can unveil insights that might initially seem counterintuitive but are incredibly revealing upon closer examination. Consider the scenario where the user clicks on a TikTok ad, yet during the post-purchase survey, they credit TV as the discovery channel. This discrepancy results not only in revenue being attributed to two different channels but suggests a nuanced consumer journey, where the immediacy of a TikTok ad click was likely spurred by heightened awareness from a TV campaign—a testament to the multi-touchpoint nature of modern consumer engagement.

Key Measurement Tools and Techniques

1. Pre- and Post-Purchase Surveys: Direct feedback from the consumer about how they discovered your brand is arguably the most valuable tool in a marketer's arsenal. This method is effective across every channel and provides insights that help correct misattributions and refine marketing strategies. If you don’t currently have one, add it now.

   • 'How Did You Hear About Us?' Surveys: This survey presents users with a randomized list of marketing channels to identify which channel led them to your product. Including a 'dummy' option where you aren’t currently marketing to help filter out noise by identifying random selections. Providing an 'other' option with a textbox can capture data on channels you might not have considered or are less common, offering deeper insights into your audience's journey.

   • 'When Did You Hear About Us?' Surveys: These surveys ask customers to recall when they first encountered your brand, which shows the time between ad exposure and consumer action. This data is crucial for understanding the delayed effects and forms the foundation for the response curve, how long a user takes to try your product based on the channel.

2. URL Parameters:

   • Essential for digital marketing, URL parameters track the specific campaign, ad set, or ad that brought a user to your website. Proper configuration is necessary to ensure accurate data collection. In the URL, www.amazon.com?AffiliateID=49&AdID=568437485, the first parameter is after the question mark, and each subsequent parameter is preceded by an ampersand.

3. SKAdNetworks and Device IDs: 

   • On iOS, SKAdnetwork aggregates data to maintain user privacy, while Android uses UTM parameters combined with device IDs for more granular tracking. iOS also allows you to collect user-level information if the user accepts the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) prompt after opening the app for the first time.

4. Device Fingerprinting:

   • This method involves collecting data about a device at the time of an ad click and matching it with actions like app installs. However, its accuracy diminishes over a matter of hours, leading to false attributions.

5. Minute Level Lift:

   • For broadcast channels like TV or radio, analyzing traffic impact in the minutes immediately before and after an ad airs can illustrate the direct impact of the ad. When aggregated over multiple spots, this method helps quantify the immediate response to ads, which can be used to calculate the longer-term impact.

6. IP Sampling on Connected Devices:

   • Direct attribution is a method where the IP address from a smart TV ad view is matched with a device on the same network to track subsequent actions like website visits or app downloads. It bridges the gap between digital engagement and traditional media consumption. While IP matching only matches a small percentage of users, the team can use the limited data to verify the minute-level lift and model the behavior for the entire population.

7. QR Codes

   • QR codes link physical ads directly to digital actions, providing clear and direct attribution paths from out-of-home advertising efforts while improving conversion rates.

8. Promo Codes and Share Codes:

   • Unique promo codes can track conversions directly from specific ads or users, which makes them especially useful in influencer marketing, podcasts, and word of mouth. However, watch for the spread of codes on deal sites, which can distort performance metrics. To combat the issue, create unique discount codes yourself and publish them so individuals searching for a code find the general-purpose code instead.

Best Practices for Multi-Channel Measurement

• Minimum Per Channel: Use a minimum of two methods to validate the performance data from each channel. Aim for three. This approach helps mitigate the risks of misattribution and enhances the reliability of the data.

• Holistic vs User Level: Successfully optimizing across channels requires a holistic measure that identifies overall channel performance and a user-level sample to measure user quality compared to other channels.

• Data Integration: To ease and automate data analysis, have the data loaded into your data warehouse.

By employing various measurement techniques, marketers can uncover nuanced insights into how different channels influence consumer behavior and contribute to the overall marketing objectives. This detailed understanding is crucial for optimizing strategies, allocating budgets efficiently, and driving sustained business growth.

Understanding the Response Curve in Multi-Channel Marketing

The response curve helps advertisers understand the timing of consumer interactions following exposure to an ad. It maps out the distribution of how long it takes for users to engage with a product after initially viewing an advertisement. Most measurements occur at a single point in time, leading to biases in the data. 

How is the Response Curve Measured?

To construct a response curve, data is typically gathered through pre or post-purchase surveys where consumers are asked:

1. Where did you hear about us? – This question lists various marketing channels to identify where the customer learned about the product.

2. When did you hear about us? – Customers select from a range of time options (e.g., this week, this month, last 3 months, etc.), providing insights into the timeline from ad exposure to action.

3. Other measurements – Each measurement represents a specific point or set of points in time that can be used to plot points on the curve.

These data points allow marketers to plot the response curve, showing the time lag between ad exposure and consumer action across different channels.

Importance of the Response Curve

The response curve is crucial for several reasons:

1. Time Window of Effectiveness: Traditional attribution methods often have a limited effective time window, potentially undervaluing channels where consumers take longer to respond. For example, a customer might see an ad on a platform like TikTok and take weeks to act, whereas Meta drives quicker actions. Without a response curve, the delayed responses on TikTok might be overlooked or misattributed.

2. Accurate Attribution Across Channels: It helps correct the skew in perceived performance across channels by providing a more comprehensive view of each channel's effectiveness over time. This broader perspective prevents premature budget reallocations based on incomplete data.

3. Improved Financial Forecasting: Understanding the timing and rate of consumer responses aids in more accurate financial forecasting and budget allocation. The response curve informs how long it takes for marketing spend translates into consumer action, which is critical for predicting the revenue impacts of future marketing strategies.

Real-World Application and Considerations

Consider a scenario where two channels, Meta and TikTok, are used for advertising. Immediate device-level attribution might show Meta outperforming TikTok. However, early data would be misleading if TikTok users typically take longer to respond but eventually do so at a higher rate. The response curve would reveal this delayed and potentially greater effectiveness, arguing against a hasty budget shift from TikTok to Meta based solely on initial returns.

This example highlights the potential pitfalls of relying solely on immediate or short-term metrics. The response curve provides a more nuanced view that captures the delayed impacts of marketing efforts, allowing for more strategic decision-making.

Optimizing Marketing Spend Across Multiple Channels

Optimizing marketing spend across various channels is inherently complex and requires a nuanced approach to data analysis and budget allocation. While it might be tempting to simplify the issue by focusing on a single metric, such simplicity often fails to capture the full picture due to each measurement method's unique strengths and biases. Here’s a comprehensive strategy for analyzing marketing data and adjusting your budget to account for these biases effectively.

Establishing Accurate Attribution

1. Baseline Attribution with Surveys:

   • Use the "How did you hear about us?" survey to gather initial data directly from your customers. Many customers will respond, providing a reliable baseline that you can then extrapolate to the wider customer base.

2. Compare Survey Data with Direct Measurements:

   • Each marketing channel should employ at least one direct attribution method, where a customer is directly attributed to their origination source via click, URL parameters, promo codes, or IP matching. Compare these hard data points with survey responses to identify discrepancies, such as customers who report discovering your brand on TV but who are tracked via a social media ad click.

3. Account for Response Rate Variability:

   • Consider whether certain channels might produce lower survey response rates and adjust data interpretation accordingly. This step is crucial for avoiding skewed data that might misrepresent a particular channel's effectiveness.

Analyzing Revenue Impact by Channel

4. Aggregate Net Revenue:

   • Calculate the net revenue (gross revenue minus variable expenses associated with selling and delivering your product) generated by customers acquired from each channel. This figure represents each channel's effective direct return on investment relative to its marketing spend.

5. Assess Virality Effects:

   • Determine the viral coefficient for each channel using share codes or URLs. This helps in understanding how many additional customers are acquired through word-of-mouth.

   • Estimate the revenue impact of these organically acquired customers. If direct calculation is challenging, use the average value of an organic customer across all channels.

6. Calculate Reactivation Impact:

   • Ads do more than attract new customers; they also re-engage existing ones. Evaluate which channels are particularly effective at reactivating past customers and include this in your overall channel valuation. Every measurement method can aid in this process.

Estimating Customer Lifetime Value

7. Total Average Net Customer Lifetime Value (NCLTV):

   • Combine the net revenue from all sources—direct acquisition, virality, and reactivation—over a customer's lifetime by channel. This comprehensive metric helps determine the long-term value provided by each channel.

Determining Proper Allocation

8. Channel ROI Analysis:

   • Analyze the return on investment for each channel. Determine the discount rate where your Net Customer Lifetime Value equals the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

9. Marginal Return Analysis:

   • Understanding the marginal return of each marketing channel is essential for optimizing your marketing budget effectively. This involves examining the returns on investment for each incremental customer acquired. Such analysis can reveal significant inefficiencies that average returns might mask.

   • What is Marginal Return? Refers to the return on investment from acquiring an incremental additional customer. It provides a granular view of the effectiveness of each marketing dollar. This approach is particularly useful for identifying the point at which the cost of acquiring new customers begins to outweigh the benefits.

   • The Importance of Analyzing Marginal Returns

     1. Identify inefficiencies: Determine which segments of their spending are yielding diminishing returns.

     2. Optimize budget allocation: Shift resources from less efficient to more efficient channels or within channels to maximize overall ROI.

     3. Avoid over-saturation: Prevent overspending in channels that no longer contribute positively to the bottom line when scaled.

   • Example: The chart below illustrates the dangers of comparing average and marginal returns. On average, the channel generates a slight return. However, when analyzing the marginal return, it becomes apparent that half of the customers acquired have a negative return. The optimal course of action is to reduce spending and acquire only 40 customers.

• This analysis is not limited to digital marketing but can be applied across various channels, including:

  1. Social Media Platforms: Use look-a-likes to conduct a donut hole analysis, which you can read more about here.

  2. TV, Radio, and Podcasts: Measure the performance of individual shows, spots, and channels, then cut the worst performing.

  3. Influencers: Use promo codes to judge the marginal performance of individual content pieces.

Implementing Adjustments

10. Make Necessary Adjustments:

• Based on the insights gathered, adjust the marketing spend across channels to maximize efficiency.

Optimizing marketing spend across multiple channels is about allocating funds and understanding the complex interplay between different marketing strategies and their impacts on consumer behavior. By employing a detailed and data-driven approach, marketers can more accurately attribute value to each channel, adjust strategies in real-time, and ultimately drive greater ROI from their marketing investments.

Pitfalls of Mixed Media Modeling and Multi-Touch Attribution

Mixed media modeling and multi-touch attribution are advanced analytical approaches used in digital marketing to allocate budgets and measure the effectiveness of different channels. While these tools can offer deep insights and help optimize marketing strategies, marketers must understand their significant limitations to avoid misguided decisions.

Understanding the Limitations

1. Correlation Does Not Imply Causation:

   • Both models work by fitting or correlating the model to the actual data. A classic example of correlation that does not imply causation is the high correlation between ice cream sales and shark attacks. This is not because one causes the other but because higher summer temperatures increase swimming, shark encounters, and ice cream consumption. In marketing, similar patterns arise where two variables move together but are influenced by a third factor that the analysis can’t control.

2. External Influences:

   • Models often struggle to account for external, non-predictable variables that can significantly affect the demand for a product. Factors such as a sports team's win record or weather conditions can all influence consumer behavior independently of marketing efforts. When these are not correctly accounted for, the model's predictions will lead to incorrect conclusions about the effectiveness of different marketing channels, as the variance can not be explained.

3. Quality of Data:

   • The principle of "garbage in, garbage out" holds particularly true in the context of mixed media modeling and multi-touch attribution. The accuracy of these models heavily relies on the quality of input data. Faulty data, such as incorrect sales attribution or engagements to the wrong channels, can skew results. It's essential for marketers to ensure their data sources are reliable.

4. Time Lag Issues:

   • The delay between marketing exposure and customer action can vary significantly across channels and campaigns. This lag complicates the attribution process and the math itself, as variations in the lag introduce a variable susceptible to overfitting.

Critical Considerations

• Transparency and Understanding: Marketers must clearly understand how these models work, their assumptions, and what biases they might introduce into the decision-making process. Without this understanding, there is a risk of misinterpreting the data, leading to suboptimal marketing strategies.

• Comprehensive Analysis: These tools must be used as part of a broader analytic approach, incorporating them alongside other metrics and observations. Relying solely on one model or data set can lead to overconfidence in flawed insights.

• Continuous Validation: Regularly testing the predictions of mixed media models against actual outcomes can help identify and correct biases or errors in the model. This practice is vital for maintaining the accuracy and reliability of marketing analytics.

While mixed media modeling and multi-touch attribution can provide valuable insights into the complex dynamics of multi-channel marketing, they are not foolproof. Marketers must approach these tools critically, understanding their limitations and integrating them with a holistic view of marketing performance. By recognizing these pitfalls and working to mitigate them, marketers can more effectively use these advanced analytical tools to refine their strategies and improve their return on investment.

Conclusion: Navigating the Complexities

As the digital marketing landscape evolves, the tools and techniques we use to measure and optimize marketing spend must also adapt. These tools offer sophisticated insights that can significantly enhance budget allocation and channel effectiveness. However, these tools are not without their challenges. The opportunities for those willing to learn the art and science of marketing are enormous. Let’s embark on the journey together. Subscribe to learn more.

Traditionally, ad creation involves lengthy research, large budgets, and a hope-for-the-best approach, often leading to underwhelming outcomes. There are countless examples, with Solo Brands being a recent example. Where an award-winning campaign failed to generate sales, resulting in the CEO’s firing and their stock price dropping by 50%. 

In contrast, I scaled the third-fastest-growing company in the country through rapid, cost-effective experimentation. This modern method uses analytics to pinpoint what captures your audience's attention and drives sales, ensuring every dollar spent is an investment toward measurable success.

A Strategic Blueprint for Ad Success

1. Measure Key Metrics: Begin by pinpointing the metrics that reflect the ad’s granular performance.

2. Compare to Historical Benchmarks: Compare these metrics against historical data from your current and past campaigns. This analysis helps identify areas of over and under-performance.

3. Develop Hypotheses: Based on the available data, craft hypotheses about what changes could enhance ad performance. Whether switching the value proposition, replacing the talent, or refining the problem, each hypothesis will guide your creative iterations.

4. Craft the Creative Brief: Transform insights and hypotheses into a detailed creative brief. This document should outline every aspect of the ad campaign and what you seek to test. 

5. Review and Refine: Once the brief is set, it’s time to review and refine. The brief ensures all teams are aligned and clear on the campaign’s goals.

6. Produce the Ads: With a solid brief in hand, move into the production phase. Here, creativity comes to life, shaped by the boundaries of your data-driven strategy.

7. Run Controlled Experiments: Test your ads in a controlled setting to measure the effectiveness of each variant.

8. Finally, Repeat

In the era of digital marketing, leveraging advanced analytics is non-negotiable. High-performing ads are the product of both innovative creativity and rigorous analytics. By systematically applying these principles, you can create compelling ads that generate sales and develop your brand. In the fast-evolving landscape of digital advertising, those who leverage both the art of storytelling and the science of analytics are best positioned to thrive.

Step 1 - Measure Key Metrics to Determine Ad Performance

Understanding and refining ad performance is crucial. It’s essential to focus on what really matters: creating ads that captivate your audience and convince them to buy your product. Success in this endeavor requires metrics that tell you why some ads work and others don’t.

Utilizing First-Principles Thinking 

Before delving into metrics, it's important to approach ads with First-Principles Thinking. This method involves breaking down complex systems into their foundational elements and reimagining the solution from the ground up. For ads, this means focusing on three key components:

• Pitch: Your core message that convinces the audience to buy your product.

• Hook: The element that captures the audience’s attention within the first few seconds.

• Story: The narrative that memorably illustrates the product's value and defines your brand.

My article, The Winning Formula To Engaging Ads That Generate Millions, breaks down an ad's components into its foundational elements.

Defining and Measuring Key Metrics 

Each component of an ad can be analyzed with specific metrics to assess its effectiveness:

1. Hook Metrics:

   • 3-second view rate: Measures the percentage of viewers watching your ad for over three seconds. A low rate indicates a lack of attention-grabbing in the first few seconds.

2. Pitch Metrics:

   • Click-through rate (CTR) Gauges interest by measuring how many viewers click on the ad after seeing it. It indicates whether the pitch is compelling enough to provoke action. However, be warned: CTR can be artificially inflated through clickbait. That’s why we use the aggregate pitch metrics to balance the effect.

   • Install rate: Specifically for mobile apps, this measures the percentage of visitors to your app store page who proceed to install your app, reflecting how well your ad communicates the app’s value.

   • Downstream event rate: This tracks how far users engage with your website after clicking the ad. It is useful for non-app advertisements, as it serves the same purpose as the install rate. Choose a conversion funnel event that occurs 20-40% of the time a new user visits your site or app.

3. Aggregate Pitch Metrics:

   • Installs per thousand impressions (IPM): The product of CTR times the install rate. This metric helps clarify the overall effectiveness of an ad by balancing the click-through rate with the audience demonstrating genuine interest.

   • Actions per thousand impressions (APM): The product of CTR times the downstream event rate. This metric helps clarify the overall effectiveness of an ad by balancing the click-through rate with the audience demonstrating genuine interest.

4. Downstream Pitch Metrics:

   • First session length: How long users engage with your app in the first 24 hours is the best non-purchase metric I’ve found to indicate initial user satisfaction and likelihood of future value.

   • Conversion rate: The ultimate measure of an ad’s success, indicating the percentage of impressions that result in a sale.

5. Story & Pitch Metrics:

   • Video view rate curve: This curve tracks how long people watch your ad. This metric helps pinpoint where viewers lose interest, allowing you to refine the storytelling aspect. Combine the absolute measures of view rate at 3, 10, and 15 seconds with the percentiles at 25%, 50%, 75%, and completion. You can create the chart by multiplying the percent view rates by the overall length of the ad.
     
     In the below example, I’d review the 5-10-second portion of the video to see what occurred at that point, as it’s likely responsible for the drop in performance.

• Engagement metrics (Likes, Shares, & Comments): These indicators measure how viewers enjoyed your ad, offering insights into its entertainment value and emotional resonance.

By meticulously analyzing these metrics, marketers can gain a profound understanding of what aspects of their ads are working and which areas need refinement. This approach streamlines the ad creation process and ensures that each ad works towards achieving higher conversion rates and better overall performance. This scientific approach to creative advertising ensures that your ads are seen and effective in driving measurable business outcomes.

Step 2 - Compare to Historical Benchmarks

In digital marketing, continuously evaluating and benchmarking ad performance against historical data is crucial. This process helps understand which elements of an ad campaign are effective and which need refinement. Let’s delve deeper into how to effectively utilize benchmarks and set control ads during experimentation to optimize ad performance.

Creating Benchmarks 

Start by establishing benchmarks based on the performance of your past ads, particularly those that have driven significant spend and engagement. These benchmarks will serve as a standard to measure new ads against and should include key metrics like:

• 3-second view rate

• Click-through rate (CTR)

• Install rate or downstream event rate

• Installs per thousand impressions (IPM) or Actions per thousand impressions (APM)

Using a Control Ad 

For accurate experimentation, use a control—a top-performing ad from a currently or recently active campaign. This ad will help account for variability in performance due to factors such as time of day, audience segment, and how the ad is delivered to the audience. Comparing new ads against this control provides a clear picture of performance deviations.

Comparative Analysis Example 

Consider the following example with set benchmarks and results from two different ads:

• Advertisement A: This ad shows a lower 3-second view rate but a higher CTR than the benchmark. When combined with the significantly lower install rate, the data suggests the use of clickbait tactics, which attract users but fail to convert. This indicates a need to improve the ad to reflect the product offering.

• Advertisement B: Exhibits a strong hook with a higher 3-second view rate than the benchmark but underperforms in CTR. The high install rate suggests that users are highly likely to install once they click, indicating a strong alignment between the ad content and the app’s value proposition. Future ads should refine the pitch to increase CTR while maintaining the quality of the hook and story.

Benchmarking against historical performance and a control ad offers a structured approach to understanding ad effectiveness. Marketers can make informed decisions about modifying their ad strategies for better engagement and conversion by analyzing where ads overperform or underperform relative to benchmarks. This continuous loop of testing, learning, and optimizing is essential for driving success in dynamic digital advertising landscapes.

Step 3 - Develop Hypotheses Behind Ad Performance

After identifying the strengths and weaknesses in an ad's performance through key metrics, the next step is to develop hypotheses on why certain ads underperform or overperform. This involves a deeper analysis using First-Principles Thinking to break down each ad component and evaluate its effectiveness.

First-Principles Thinking in Ad Analysis 

First-principles thinking requires us to deconstruct the ad into its foundational elements and question each part's role and effectiveness. This approach ensures a thorough understanding of the ad’s mechanics and interactions with the target audience.

Hypothesis Development Process

1. Break Down the Ad Components:

   • Pitch: Evaluate whether the pitch effectively convinces the audience to buy the product. Analyze its clarity, relevance, and persuasive power.

   • Story: Assess how well the story supports the pitch, entertains the audience, and aligns with the brand identity.

   • Hook: Examine the initial elements that capture the audience’s attention, such as visuals, sounds, or spokesperson.

2. Identify Problem Areas: Identify potential problems based on performance data for each component. For example:

   • If the problem lies in the Pitch, determine if it might be due to targeting the wrong audience, tackling an irrelevant problem, offering a value proposition that fails to resonate, lacking a compelling reason to believe, or failing to communicate what action to take.

   • For the Story, consider whether it fails to enhance the pitch, fails to be memorable, or doesn’t trigger strong emotion.

   • With the Hook, check whether the talent fails to connect or the scene fails to build interest.

3. Formulate Hypotheses: Based on the identified issues, develop specific hypotheses about what might improve performance. Examples include:

   • Hypothesis for Pitch: "Refining the target persona and altering the problem will improve relevance by targeting a more real issue the persona faces on a daily basis, thereby increasing the click-through rate.” Then, list three alternative personas and problem statements.

Practical Example

Suppose an ad for a fitness app features a pitch that isn't resonating well with the audience, indicated by low engagement and conversion metrics. Here’s how you might develop a hypothesis. Let’s use Solo Brand’s failed Snoop Dogg ad campaign for their smokeless outdoor stove.

Solo Brand’s Original Positioning

• Persona: Unknown.

• Problem Statement: Smoke bad.

• Value Proposition: Smokeless

• Reason to Believe: Snoop Dogg is going smokeless.

Solo Brand’s Revamped Positioning

• Persona: Individual who loves spending time outdoors with their friends.

• Problem Statement: Bonfires are dirty, unhealthy, and make you smell like smoke.

• Value Proposition: Have a clean, healthy outdoor adventure with your friends.

• Reason to Believe: Some technical reasoning explaining why it works.

• Hypothesis: Refined targeting of the pitch to individuals who would benefit from the stove and highlighting immediate user benefits will improve the click-through and conversion rates.

Developing hypotheses based on detailed analysis allows marketers not just to speculate but drive informed experimentation. By understanding the why behind an ad’s performance, you can make direct changes that have the best chance of significantly impacting effectiveness and ROI. This methodical approach to hypothesis generation ensures that each element of your advertising strategy is optimized for maximum engagement and conversion.

Step 4 - Craft the Creative Brief

The creative brief is a foundational tool in advertising that ensures all stakeholders are aligned on the project’s goals, strategies, and expectations. This document facilitates clear communication across diverse teams and serves as a reference point throughout the campaign’s lifecycle. Here’s a guide on how to craft an effective creative brief for your ad campaigns.

Essential Elements of a Creative Brief

1. General Information

   • Requestor: Identify who made the request or who is the lead on the project.

   • Target Channels: Specify where the ad will be displayed (e.g., Meta, TikTok, TV).

   • Medium: Define the ad format (static, video, user-generated content, carousel).

   • Estimated Cost: Provide a preliminary budget estimate.

   • Casting, Location, and Talent: Details about the people and places involved.

   • Submission and Delivery Dates: Important brief and final deliverables deadlines.

2. Sign-offs

   • This section is crucial for accountability. Include dates for when sign-offs are required and who is responsible for each (creative lead, marketing team).

3. Campaign Goals

   • Purpose: Clearly state what the campaign intends to achieve.

   • Expectations: Outline what outcomes are expected from the campaign.

4. Production Type

   • Define whether the campaign will involve iterations of previous ads, evolution of existing concepts, or experimentation with completely new ideas.

5. Hypothesis Overview

   • Variables Being Tested: Detail what aspects of the hook, pitch, and story are under examination.

   • Target Metrics: Specify which metrics you aim to improve.

   • Baseline Rates: Document the current performance levels for these metrics.

   • Estimated Effects: Predict how the changes might improve these metrics.

   • Desired Confidence Level: Indicate the statistical confidence level needed (typically 80-95%).

   • Sample Size and Cost: Estimate the sample size required to achieve the desired confidence level and the associated costs.

6. Creative Outline

   • This section should describe the core components of the ad:

     • Pitch: What is the main message?

     • Target Persona: Who is the ad aimed at?

     • Relatable Problems: What issues does your audience face that your product can solve?

     • Value Propositions: How does your product solve these problems?

     • Reason to Believe: Why should the audience trust your product?

     • Call-to-Action: What do you want the audience to do?

     • Story Elements: Who, what, why, where, and the emotional hooks.

     • Brand Identity: How the ad reflects the brand’s traits and values.

     • Hook: How are you going to grab attention?

The Importance of the Hypothesis Overview in a Brief: Do not underestimate the importance of outlining the hypothesis. Let’s consider a scenario where you want to improve the IPM for a mobile app’s advertising campaign. 

• Baseline IPM: 0.2%

• Target Improvement: Increase to 0.22% (a 10% improvement)

• Statistical Confidence: 95%

• Ad Variants: Three different creative approaches

• Cost: $12,000 based on a required sample size of 300,000 impressions at $10 CPM per variant.

Using Bayesian statistics to calculate the required sample size based on the scenario requires 300,000 impressions for each variant. For a total cost of $12,000. The team then aligns on whether a $12,000 cost is worth the potential gain. Completing the math beforehand avoids wasting time and money on experiments with limited impact.

By meticulously outlining every aspect of the campaign, from hypothesis to execution, you prevent miscommunication, align expectations, and set the stage for a successful ad campaign.

Step 5 - Review and Refine the Creative Brief

It’s the final checkpoint before resources are allocated and production begins. This step ensures that only promising advertising concepts are pursued, optimizing both creative impact and budget efficiency.

Evaluating the Briefs During the review, each brief should be evaluated against several key criteria to determine whether it should be approved for production:

1. Strategic Alignment: Does the brief align with the brand's overall marketing goals and objectives? Ensure it supports broader company initiatives and targets the right audience.

2. Innovation vs. Iteration: Assess whether the brief proposes genuinely innovative ideas or merely iterative tweaks. Prioritize creative concepts that offer new approaches rather than small modifications to existing ads. This differentiation is crucial as:

   • Iteration: Small tweaks and changes to an existing concept or idea. These should be limited to less than 5% of resources and only applied to already successful ads to refine further that are early in their life cycle. As the audience gets used to seeing the ad, it loses its effectiveness. New ads must be different from your existing ads to counteract the decay. An iteration will not have the desired effect if done late in its life cycle. Do not waste your time iterating unsuccessful ads. Iterations rarely have a significant impact. I’ve seen companies spin their wheel, never improving, as they focus on color changes and other small tweaks. 

   • Evolution: Allocate 40% to 60% of resources. This involves evolving a successful concept with new twists, talent, stories, or visual elements that refresh the appeal without straying from what made the original successful. These ads are less risky and have a higher probability of success at the trade-off of rarely opening up new audiences or significantly improving performance.

   • Experimental: Also accounting for 40% to 60% of resources, this category is for entirely new concepts that modify the pitch with respect to a key element. Successful experiments don’t occur often, so expect a high failure rate. But when they do, they deliver large gains.

3. Resource Allocation: Review the proposed resource allocation to ensure it is proportional to the expected impact. As the guidelines suggest, invest heavily in new concepts that have the potential to outperform existing ones and are supported by a strong hypothesis.

4. Cost Analysis: Consider the total cost, including production and testing, which should make sense relative to the potential scale and return on investment. High-risk experiments should have the potential for high rewards that justify the gamble.

5. Hypothesis Strength: The brief must include a well-defined hypothesis about what changes will improve performance and why. This should be based on data-driven insights from previous ad performances and market research.

This stage is crucial for cutting through the clutter of routine iterations and focusing on truly transformative advertising strategies.

Step 6 - Produce new ads

Much of my success in scaling products is due to my creative teams’ ability to produce unbelievably great content. Understanding and optimizing ad production will greatly enhance a company's competitive edge. Here's an overview of the different ad production methods and how to optimize each for maximum efficiency and impact.

1. In-House Production

• Graphics Design and Motion Design: This method involves the company’s own team of graphic designers and motion artists producing digital ads. Direct control over the creative process ensures brand consistency and quick turnaround.

• Live-Action Video Shoot: This method utilizes the company’s own writers, directors, and production staff to cast, direct, and produce video content. It is highly collaborative and can be tailored to your exact needs. Outsourcing casting and directing to an independent contractor or agency is advisable when internal resources are limited.

Optimization Tips:

• Don’t Try to Deliver Everything at Once: Start by choosing the best raw footage from a video shoot. Complete the ads individually or in small batches to minimize turnaround time.

• Streamline Communication: Ensure clear, direct communication channels between all creative team stakeholders to minimize misunderstandings and delays.

2. Content Creator or Influencer Collaboration

• Working with content creators or influencers allows brands to tap into the creator's audience and creative expertise. This method is governed by a set of loose guidelines the brand provides to ensure the content aligns with the targeted message.

Optimization Tips:

• Clear Guidelines: Provide simple briefs that include brand guidelines, campaign goals, and specific deliverables to ensure the content meets expectations. Don’t over-constrain your content creators by limiting their creativity.

• Regular Feedback: Implement a structured feedback loop to address any issues early in production.

• Pre-Negotiate Revisions: In the initial contract, agree on a maximum number of revisions to the content. It’s cheaper and easier to come to an agreement at the start.

3. External Production (3rd Party Ad Agency or Production Studio)

• External agencies bring specialized skills and fresh perspectives to ad production. They handle everything from research and scriptwriting to post-production.
  
  I strongly believe the use of external firms is a mistake. A talented, internal creative team is a competitive advantage. While I understand why companies rely on external agencies and production studios, it’s a missed opportunity to improve their economics versus the competition. Outperforming the competition, even by small margins, delivers enormous economic gains.
  
  My one exception is for television ads. Due to their unique demands, including specific technical requirements and higher budgets, TV ads often necessitate specialized resources that are best managed by external studios or specialized in-house teams. However, that doesn’t mean your team shouldn’t be intimately involved in writing, casting, direction, and production.

General Best Practices for Efficient Production

• Turnaround Time: Reducing the time from idea to launch is crucial to tighten the feedback loop. My gold standard is 14 days for in-house statics, 30 days for live-action videos, and 14 days for content creator-led projects.

• Resource Allocation: Employ a casting director on retainer to streamline the casting process and ensure a talent pool is always available.

• Production Efficiency: When possible, film multiple ad concepts in a single shoot of 6-10 hours to save time and reduce costs. Consider all logistical elements to avoid delays, such as the specific timing for outdoor lighting.

Each ad production method has its strengths and challenges, but the key to success lies in choosing the right approach for the specific campaign needs and optimizing the process to reduce bottlenecks. By strategically managing these elements, a brand can enhance its market responsiveness, significantly accelerate the learning rate, and improve its return on advertising.

Step 7 - Run the experiment

Running experiments to measure the effectiveness of your ads is essential for optimizing performance and ensuring that the most effective ads reach the widest audience. This step goes beyond traditional testing methods to produce a testing approach that is faster and cheaper than traditional A/B testing.

Primer to Ad Experimentation

• Only scale your best ads: A 20% improvement for a company with a $20M marketing budget delivers an incremental $4M in value. Small changes in value have huge impacts on performance.

• Speed and efficiency are key: Tests should be completed quickly and cheaply.

• Expect to fail. A lot: The performance of your ads will mimic a bell curve. You want to scale the outliers, those ads that are roughly two standard deviations better than the average. That means 95+% of the ads you produce will never run at scale.
  

Phase 1: Setting Up the Experiment

1. Choose the Channel: Meta (Facebook) is preferred for its ability to find a responsive audience regardless of ad quality and robust analytics.

2. Select Key Variables: Determine which metrics are most important for your campaign's success. Common choices include:

   • 3-second view rate

   • Click-through rate (CTR)

   • Install rate

   • Downstream event rate

3. Control Selection: Use a current ad being run at scale as a control to compare against new creative variants. This helps in establishing a baseline for expected performance.

4. Choose Creative Variants: Choose 3-4 different creatives produced in the previous step.

5. Set Up the Campaign & Ad Sets: Align the campaign and ad set with your current ads' objectives, targeting, and parameters so they are tested on the same audience.

Phase 2: Run Initial Experiment To Remove Under Performers

1. Goal: 80-90% of the new creative will underperform the current control. You need to identify the underperforming creatives cheaply and quickly. Thus saving thousands of dollars and days of waiting per creative.

2. Choose the Metric:

   1. Click-through Rate (CTR)

   2. Installs per thousand impressions (IPM)

   3. Actions per thousand impressions (APM)

3. Determine Confidence Interval: I suggest using a confidence interval of 90% for initial creative testing. Establish a baseline from the control.

   1. Bayesian Statistics vs. Two-Sided Z-Test: Depending on your team's expertise and resources, you have two statistical methods to choose from. While I began with the traditional two-sided z-test, I later switched to Bayesian statistics.

   2. Automated Analysis: Use tools, such as embedded Python code, to integrate statistical analysis directly into your dashboards, streamlining the process and reducing manual errors.

   3. Example Explained: In an experiment where $300 was spent on each ad, and the control achieved a 1% click-through rate, you are 90% confident that an experimental creative with a CTR of 0.9% is worse than the control or that a CTR of 1.1% is better than the control. Furthermore, doubling the test budget to $600 delivers only a slight increase in confidence at the cost of an additional $300 per creative. I recommend a budget of $250-$400 per creative.

4. Monitor the budget allocated to each ad variant: Adjustments might be necessary to redistribute budgets if certain ads dominate due to early traction. This helps maintain balanced exposure for all tested creatives. Meta frequently experiences this issue.

Phase 3: Expand To Evergreen

1. What is Evergreen? Evergreen campaigns are ongoing, scaled campaigns that reach a wide audience.

2. Review and Decision Making: At the end of the testing phase, evaluate which ads meet the performance thresholds and have the potential to be scaled up. Those that underperform should be phased out.

3. Promote To Evergreen: Ads that equal to or outperform the controls on the desired metric can be integrated into ongoing evergreen campaigns, ensuring that successful strategies are continually capitalized on. Do not add too many ads to an ad set, as this will result in a suboptimal budget allocation. Further testing continues within evergreen campaigns as they behave differently than test campaigns.

4. Prioritization of Creative Addition: Decide which creatives to add to the campaign based on their uniqueness, audience reach potential, and performance during testing.

5. Choose Revaluation Threshold(s): Once running in Evergreen, choose one or more spend levels to reevaluate the performance compared to the other ads running at scale. Use IPM, APM, ROAS, or conversion rate. Make sure to compare the prior 3-7 days' performance, as longer time comparisons can cause bias from higher earlier performance in long-running campaigns. You want to choose the thresholds ahead of time to avoid experimental bias.

Effective ad experimentation is a sophisticated process that requires careful planning, rigorous testing, and analysis. By following a structured approach to experimenting with ad creatives, marketers can significantly enhance the effectiveness of their campaigns, ensuring that only the most impactful ads are scaled up for broader audience engagement.

And… Repeat

The comprehensive approach to crafting, testing, and refining advertisements combines systematic creativity with analytical rigor. That can be continuously repeated to drive the desired results. This iterative process not only enhances the effectiveness of individual ads but also refines the overall marketing strategy. The key takeaway is that a blend of creativity, rigorous testing, and strategic iteration leads to more effective advertising, capable of achieving significant returns on investment and driving brand growth in competitive markets.

There are two ways to improve a look-a-like’s performance.

1. Improve the quality of the source audience

2. Calculate the optimal size of the audience

What is a look-a-like?

They allow you to reach people who are similar to your existing customers. Increasing the probability of affinity for your product increases conversion and revenue.

There are two inputs when building a look-a-like:

• A source audience

• The desired final audience size 

The ad network uses the source audience to create a new, broader audience to expand your reach to the desired size, between 1-10% of a country or region's total population.

How do they get made?

An algorithm scores the network’s users based on their similarity to the source audience. The look-a-like is made of the highest-scoring users. The number of users is based on the size you request, 1-10%.

How do you properly seed the custom audience?

Many advertisers use dynamic audiences, where the network tracks who visits and purchases and then updates the source audience in real-time. They then regenerate the look-a-like based on this dynamic audience.

While fast and easy. There are two massive issues with this approach.

1. Not all visitors and customers are made equal. Some are worth far more.

2. Any skew within the data will produce a skewed output that will underperform. This problem commonly arises when a company expands from its initial audience to the broader population. Imagine you start on the West Coast but are expanding into Middle America and the East Coast. There will be a considerable divergence between your current audience’s interests and the target for expansion. The geographic skew will create a look-a-like heavily skewed toward the West Coast as a high degree of shared regional interests will skew the output.

Thankfully, you can adjust the source audience and minimize these issues.

• Compensate for skew within the data by sampling your user base to mimic the general population. For example, if your userbase is heavily concentrated in a single geography—20% of the overall population but 50% of your userbase—limit users from that region to 20% of the source audience. 

• If there is a large difference in behavior, segment the user base into separate source audiences. Begin by focusing the sample on high-value customers who generate the highest gross profit.

• Include a more significant proportion of recent customers in the source audience. While you don’t want the source audience to be entirely new customers, recent customers should share more traits with future customers.

What’s the optimal look-a-like size?

I’ve seen two approaches to selecting the size of a look-a-like. Either the company randomly chooses a size and see if it performs. Or they produce 2-3 different-sized look-a-like to compare performance.

Neither is right.

The correct approach. The Donut Hole. Create three different sized look-a-likes: 2%, 5%, 8%. Then, you build 3 ad sets within the same campaign with the targeting like this:

• 2% LAL

• 5% LAL and excluding the 2% LAL

• 8% LAL and excluding the 5% LAL

You are cutting out the center of the look-a-like by excluding the smaller one. This format calculates the marginal performance change of expanding the look-a-like. Without the exclusion, you’re measuring the overall look-a-like performance, not the marginal performance of the expansion.

People hate reading. They don’t do it. You’re not changing this reality, so you need to adapt.

Take a look at the first image. Go and read it. I’ll wait.

The differing font sizes directed your eyes through the page in an ordered manner. That’s typography. You can use this technique to pitch your product better.

My team at Gametime excelled at this technique. Look at the following image.

Where is your eye drawn? What does each piece represent:

Problem: Wicked Tickets
Hook - attention-grabbing image
Value Proposition - 25% off
Reason to believe - last-minute tickets
Call to action - Get tickets

Use typography to communicate a simplified pitch in a quick and effective manner. It will pay dividends.

One client improved their performance by following these simple steps, generating millions in additional revenue.

Writing & Production

1. Write your script pitching your product as a direct response (DRTV) ad if your goal is to generate revenue. Pitch your product to the audience clearly and succinctly. The message needs to be easily understood. For your first ads, prioritize direct response over brand to increase your probability of success. 
   
   Gametime’s first ad was a hard-core DRTV spot:

   
   Compared to later shoots where we added more brand elements:
   

   
   

2. Don’t be boring. Grab and hold the audience’s attention. Have the actors speak directly to the camera. Include humor to make more engaging ads.

3. Write the script for a 15-second ad. Standard practice is to cut down 30-second ads to 15s. However, it costs twice as much to run a 30s ad vs a 15s ad. Rarely does the longer length double the response rate and conversion. When cutting down an ad key elements of the pitch and story often get lost, reducing performance. You’ll get better results with similar yet separate reads for 15s and 30s.

4. Shoot multiple ads at the same. Most production costs are set up, tear down, and getting everyone onsite. I aim to fill a 10-hour shoot day by filming 2-3 ads to take advantage of the lower incremental cost.

5. Keep experimentation in mind. A/B testing isn’t limited to digital advertising. You can test variations of your pitch or hook with a minimal increase in cost. The primary constraint is ensuring all variations are roughly the same length. Speeding up or slowing down a read or action in post-production can make them all the same length. Then, launch the variations and prune down the low performers.
   
   Measurement
   

6. Use multiple attribution methods to triangulate the actual revenue driven by TV: minute-level attribution, where you look at the 5-10 minutes before and after an ad airing, how did you hear about us survey, and QR codes. 

7. Unlike digital advertising, TV ads have a significant long-tail effect, where users respond months after an airing. A proper agency or an internal data science team can calculate the lag effect. That said, minute-level attribution is strongly correlated to long-term performance.

8. Don’t discount how much TV improves overall marketing performance. TV improves the effectiveness of Meta, TikTok, and every digital channel by lowering the barrier to an ad click. While at the same time improving your retention overall, I gave a presentation at MAU, a mobile marketing conference, on this very subject.
   
   Buying TV Ads
   

9. Start with remnant inventory, the unbought inventory that’s available at a fraction of the cost.

10. Have patience. You won’t see great results immediately. Ads need to air for 3-6 months before performance achieves a steady state.

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