How To Measure Your Marketing Efforts (And Why Click Attribution Is Dead)

You know, it's a Wednesday, started off with a customer call, which is fun. We're trying to figure out how to get some of their influencer data. People's influencer data is really messy. So that's something that.

What does that mean with influencer data?

So they work with a couple of influencers to promote their product and they've had sort of relationships for about a year. And the tracking for these influencers is pretty, pretty weak. Even though their self reported attribution will say something like 5% is contributed by this one particular influencer. And we're trying to get them to be more precise in how they track things and follow through and all that fun stuff. So we'll cover some of that today. But that was fun. And then helping them think through their campaign taxonomy and stuff like that.

You're, you're like a customer today. You're customer, Pranav. You're, you're mostly customer. Well, actually this is, this is a little bit marketing now. You're in the marketing hat but I noticed that a bunch of people have just hopped in so just Pranav and I were just, just chatting a little bit as we let people roll in. So I'm Dave, I'm the founder of Exit 5. This is Pranav. He's the founder and CEO of Paramark. Today we're going to talk about marketing measurement. The the evergreen most popular topic in marketing, which I'm excited for. But do me a favor. If you us right now go into the chat, I already see Erica and Mitch and Tass like sass in the mix. Go in chat and just write in like who you are and where you're coming in from and what do you do? Like what, what's your role at work? So I'm gonna be like Dave. Burlington, Vermont founder and everyone writes in. Jennifer is in sunny Burlington, Vermont. Jennifer, check this out. I'm going to tell you this. I, I looked at a venue last week. We're doing an Exit 5 event in September in Burlington, Vermont and I hope that you come because if nobody else travels from out of state, at least we can, we can hang out. But I'm really excited for that. So spoil spoiler alert. More, more to come on that. But check this out. Look at this, man. We got everybody in here today. Ellen's in the burbs of New York City. Megan is in Baltimore. Go Ravens. A little bit, little bit bitter, but I love the attitude. Scott's in Vancouver, Keith is in New York. This is awesome. Yeah, this is awesome. We Got people from all over. Exit 5 audiences is repping. Mitch Wehner's here. He's the co founder of DigitalOcean, and now he's building a new SaaS marketing product based in Miami, Florida. Shout out to you, Mitch. I love this. This is my favorite part. So, all right, here's the deal. A little quick housekeeping. Before we we get going, two things I want to say. Number one, the chat is really important to me on these live sessions. It's not a webinar, Pranav. It's a live session, damn it. All right, so don't you say webinar a couple things, couple housekeeping items. Number one, yes, this will be recorded. If you ask if it will be recorded, you have to immediately leave the webinar and go do 1 mile and 100 burpees and send me a video of that. Okay, this will be recorded. Number two, the best part of these is actually everyone here is a marketer. And so don't just sit back and listen to what Pranav is saying today. Like, be in the chat. I've seen Pranav in the chat before in other sessions. Be in the chat, push back, ask questions, help each other out. Like, the chat is. Is what makes this awesome. And thank you for showing up live. And then the third thing is we are going to have this as a future episode of the Exit 5 podcast. And so Pranav, you know, we're going to help everybody the best that we can today. But also, there'll be a future audience here listening. You know, somebody might be listening right now in the future on a run or on a walk. So with that, I'm going to shut up. Oh, my last detail. Put the questions. You have questions for Pranav, put them in the Q and A. Not in the chat, in the Q and A. If you go to the Q and A, then there, what we can all do is we can upvote the most popular comments, and so then I can get to them. And as I play lovely host here today, I can figure out which questions to bring in and out. All right, so without further ado, Pranav, I'm going to turn it over to you. Let's kick things off. All right, here we go.

Thank you, sir. Hello. Hello, everyone. This is amazing to see all of you from everywhere around the globe. This is going to be a fun session. So as Dave mentioned, this is not going to be a boring webinar. This is going to be an interactive session. I'm going to make sure of that.

Hold on that's because it's not a webinar. You said it. I'm just kidding.

Okay, so the top. And I heard from Dave, right? This is a popular topic around how to measure your marketing efforts. This is the evergreen topic. Everyone's always talking about it. And I'm particularly excited because I'm going to tell you it is not that hard. It is not that hard. This is something that you can achieve, like today and tomorrow and make it really practical. And we're going to talk about that stuff today. So that's the quick sort of intro to the session. I'll tell you a little bit about myself. So who am I? I have spent the last 15 years working at companies like PayPal, Dropbox. You can see the logos here all across strategy, product growth, and then marketing. So I was one of those weirdos who thought, oh, yeah, marketing, that's easy, I can do that. I raised my hand and said, yeah, let's go figure out how to do marketing. And then really learned how hard it is. The combination of the creative and the art and then being able to stand in front of your executives and your board and talk about what business did you drive for your company and realize that that's hard and we can make it easy. And that's what I'm here to do for all of you, hopefully. So based in Burlingame, California, and if you're in the neighborhood, you know, say hi, we'll catch up over coffee and what have you. So the first thing that I like to talk about when we're talking about marketing measurement is investor first, marketer second. So what does this mean? All of us when we are thinking about marketing measurement, are thinking about, well, this is what I can do for the business. This is what I have done for the business. This is what my team has done for the business. We deserve more. We deserve more credit. We should be celebrated more. But you have to take a giant step back and think about what is the goal of the business and the people who are funding that business, whether it's bootstrapped, whether it's VC backed, whether it's a public company. At the end of the day, there are shareholders and investors and board members and executives who think about things like return on investment. And you have to think about investment first and investor first mentality before you think about all the amazing creative ideas you have as a marketer. And that's a very important starting point because it reframes how you think about measurement. So that's, you know, step number one is Think about and put on your investor hat. And as an investor, if you wouldn't invest in a certain business strategy, whether it's marketing or sales or product or you know, a distribution method, then everything else doesn't really matter. Right. So also that's step number one. Yeah.

What you said is like this is also step number one in just like there's a discussions come up a lot in exit five or just beyond. A lot of the audience here are folks that want to or are move into a marketing leadership role. And oftentimes we'll ask what's the difference between you know, mark individual marketer or maybe like small team manager into marketing leader. And I think it's this. It's marketing is the thing that you own, but you are responsible for the business. You have to understand the business strategy first. And I feel like at least in my career, anytime I felt misaligned it was because I didn't fully understand like the company strategy. When I was really tight with the CEO, my life as a marketer was much, much easier. Just removed all the bullshit and like helped me focus on what matters. So I love this frame of investor first, marketer second. Nice.

Yeah, I completely agree. And now don't get me wrong, there are many companies where the strategy might be messed up or non existent. So I'm not saying that you're going to just get it right if you think about investment first. But if that is the case, you need to call it out or go find a different job where the strategy is sounder, where you can have an actual impact with marketing. So that's step number one in my mind. Step number two, and this is something that I will talk about a lot, we use these words, right? So justify investments, right? Marketing, sourced marketing, influence, marketing attributed. We use these words. But if you take a giant step back and think about what are you trying to achieve with marketing, it's going from a smaller business to a bigger business. Pretty simple. And at the heart of that conversation is this word called incrementality. This might be new to some of you, this might be new to many of you. It was new to me a few years ago when I first sort of encountered this word. And what this means is are you adding incremental net new business for that company and not just fighting over credit because that is not important if the business isn't growing, if your new sales aren't growing, if your new leads aren't growing, if your new traffic isn't growing. And that's another sort of important reframe it's not about the credit and the attribution. What it is about is are you adding net new on top? That would not have shown up at the business if you weren't doing your job. And if you reframe it that way, it all comes full circle to that investor mentality. I'm going to pause and see Dave, if you have any thoughts on this word. I know incremental can sometimes be perceived as this. Like oh, it's just like you know, doing, doing small things. But, but that's not really the meaning of the word. It's incremental means that it's on top of the baseline, on top of what's already coming in inbound.

Yeah, I think it's easy to just get caught up in trying to have the perfect end to end solution for measurement, for marketing strategy. Like I, I love this idea and some of the most fun that I've had in marketing is at a smaller is at a smaller company when you can shrink things down to what are we working on this week? And I think it gets hard as you stretch those things out. But I love the idea of incrementality and just thinking of like, look, we're trying to get here, we don't have all of the data, we don't have perfect answers. But like every day, every week, every quarter, we going to get closer and like look at how, look at what we'll be able to do now. I think about, excuse me, I cough right in the mic. I hope nobody gets that. I, I think about HubSpot a lot as an example only because I happen to work there early in my career and to see where they are now, I just recently did a podcast with Kip, who's the cmo. It's like every problem or challenge they had like seven years ago when I worked there, they've solved or iterated on and these things just take time when the longer you have smarter people working on the, the, the business. So I love this approach also anytime you can, you can throw Mario in the, in the deck. I recently bought my, I spent 150 bucks on eBay to get my kids a Nintendo 64 so we could play Mario Kart. So well done.

Yeah, I, I got my 7 year old the Nintendo Switch. So she's all about exploring the Mario.

Just right now just to build on that. So I went, I went like super, you know, early days OG so I said we can get a Nintendo 64. We went to my cousin's house, they had Mario Kart and the Switch. And my son looked at me, he's like, dad, what is that they're playing? I'm like, it's the Same game, just 30 years of graphic advancement.

Yep. Hey, don't change what, what's not broken. Right? Okay. Okay. So when we talk about this concept of incrementality, getting more specific, what does it mean? What is incremental? And I boiled it down to this like graphic and this is a really important one and hopefully it'll help you as you think about sort of your marketing measurement challenges. Think of it this way. If a prospect would have become a buyer regardless of what marketing that you did, then that marketing isn't really incremental and vice versa. If a prospect would have never become a buyer I until and unless they saw a piece of marketing, then that piece of marketing is super incremental. That is the heart of the marketing measurement problem. And the question that your CEO, that your board is trying to answer is that campaign, is that channel bringing in incremental net new leads or sales that would not have come to us anyway. And if you think about it that way, everything else will figure itself out. Now I will add something here. It doesn't matter how many clicks you get, how many impressions you get, how many people say what on your self reporting forms, all of those I get, I get what you're trying to do. But at the end of the day, the discussion is, would those people have come to you anyway or not? And if you can answer that, that is the holy grail. So again, I'm going to pause and see Dave, if you have any thoughts on this.

I just screenshotted this and I sent it to our team internally because we're trying to figure out how to repeatably grow Exit 5 right now. And we've just hired a team, we've just invested and we're trying to start new channels and we have this big.