Finance teams often misread paid search as the sole demand driver, missing how brand channels like TV and display ads fuel it. Without clear attribution models and honest data caveats, companies cut the wrong budgets and kill the traffic that paid search depends on.
What are some examples of places where you really have to educate the finance team on, hey, this is what this means, this is how we should be thinking about it or modeling it? Do you have any good examples or things that you think other marketing practitioners should focus on if they're having this conversation?
Yeah, and I, I don't think they'll be surprising to anybody on the call. Attribution models are number one, I think. I feel like a lot of finance teams, when you say, hey, we know that paid search didn't create demand, we know that it's capturing demand, they wouldn't have known to search for our brand keyword if we hadn't done all this other work beforehand. And when you say things like that, you're like, look, all of this revenue is being attributed to paid search, but if you cut my display, if you cut TV commercials, if you cut billboards, whatever else you're using, my paid search traffic, it's going to stagnate and decline. But I can't easily show you the revenue that display is driving. It's, it's a little harder to measure that brand awareness work, right? That's like the holy grail of marketing at the moment. Noting it in the data caveats whenever you're presenting to finance, being upfront about the data that believe in yourself on the report compared to the data that like, hey, you know, this is the best we've gotten, but it's flawed. It's flawed. And we know we're at the mercy of what our vendor partners can give us or the tech that we have currently today.
The Continuous Testing Loop That Separates Great Marketing Teams From Average Ones
