This is a YouTube video titled "How Recast models lower funnel marketing channels | Recast Incrementality Platform Demo" created in February 2024. It features Tom Vladek, co-founder of Recast, explaining how their media mix modeling platform treats lower funnel marketing channels such as branded search, affiliate, and retargeting. The video focuses on the importance of modeling these channels as both inputs and outputs to optimize marketing spend and improve decision making. It is a product demo and educational presentation about marketing analytics.
Hi, I'm Tom Vladek, co founder of Recast, a media mix modeling platform where the world's most sophisticated brands measure and optimize their marketing spend. Today I want to talk to you about lower funnel channels, something that is often overlooked but that we think is critical for an MMM to do right. A question that we often get from marketers is, is my branded search actually incremental? We know that people are coming to Google and searching for my brand name. Is that ad doing anything other than stealing credit? A follow up question that we often get is, assuming it is effective, how do I spend more into it? I don't control exactly how much I spend because it depends on the number of people that are searching for the brand. The way that we handle both of these issues is by treating lower funnel channels as both an output and an input. Now what I mean by that is that we don't treat the spend as a given. We model lower funnel spend exactly as we model the actual output of the model, like total sales or the number of acquisitions. So the model is actually not just trying to predict how many sales you'll do, but also how much you will spend into branded search and then in turn how much that will affect your total sales. What this looks like on the dashboard is right here. So we have just one lower funnel channel. Although other kinds of lower funnel channels could be things like affiliate and in some cases Facebook retargeting. Apple branded search ads in the App Store certainly qualify as well. So just like we would break down your total sales into its contributions by various other components, we have that done here as well. Except the waterfall is breaking down the contribution of other channels into what explains the lower funnel spend. So in this particular case, the intercept or the amount of branded search spend you would have if you were to turn off all your other marketing very low, meaning most people are coming to search for your branded keywords because of other marketing that you're doing. In this demo case, we can see that your spend into Facebook prospecting is driving most of your branded branded search spend. And linear TV is driving quite a bit as well. And so we break this down and if you had other lower funnel channels, you'd see them here as well in other tabs. And then down here we have further breakdown. So we have the total spend driven. So Facebook Prospecting drove approximately $9,000 worth of spend into branded search. And what we have here is the driving rate, meaning for a dollar of Facebook prospecting spend, we estimate that this demo client will be spending an additional $1.33 into branded search. This is critically important to get right because when you spend a dollar into Facebook prospecting, your ROI needs to account for both the direct spend and the indirect spend and the direct effect. And the indirect effect. Recast accounts for all of this in the app. You don't have to worry about that, but this is critically important to do right when you're thinking about optimizing your spend both for the direct and indirect costs and effect. Now, I've talked a lot about how Recast treats it in the model and why it's important for good decision making. But another area where it's critically important is invalidating your model and then doing holdout tests and backtests correctly. It is not appropriate to treat lower funnel channels as given when you're doing backtests and forecasts. The simple reason is that you simply don't know how much you'll be able to spend into that channel in the same way that you can decide how much to spend into channels like Facebook prospecting or Linear tv. We have some writing on this, how we do holdout testing at Recast, which goes into this and some other things. I highly encourage you to take a look if you want to a media mix modeling platform that has a more sophisticated way of treating lower funnel channels and that can help you identify ways to spend more into the channels that are effective. Go to getrecast.com and hit book a demo. Thank you very much.
