Michael Kaminsky argues that geographic lift tests are the cheapest way for any company to measure whether ads actually work. Unlike marketing-mix models, which need massive spend and complex statistics, lift tests use decades-old methods and simple tools. His company Recast offers a free six-month trial to make testing accessible.
Chapters
Lift tests are the simplest, most cost-effective way to get a precise causal estimate of the efficacy of a marketing channel out there. They are accessible to every single company and every single company that's putting a meaningful amount of marketing spend in the field should be doing them regularly. That's what we believe. That may be an odd thing for one of the co-founders of an MMM company to be saying, but every single company should be running a lift test. Here's why. Not every company should be running an MMM. You may not be spending enough money. You may not be spending into enough channels to really warrant the complexity and investment that an MMM takes. Unlike MMMs, where the statistical foundations for them and even the statistical inference possible to do real modern MMMs has only been around for about 10 years or so, the foundations for geographic-based lift tests, which are diff-in-diff designs, have been around for decades. They're well understood. There is tons of code, tons of literature about how to do them well. So they're really accessible to design and analyze them for everybody, for everybody out there running or managing a company and putting any meaningful amount of marketing spend out there. Unfortunately, even though they're accessible, that doesn't mean they're always easy. And when it's the 45th thing on your plate, it may be relatively hard to do. We wanted to make sure that every company had at least one effective way of measuring their marketing spend, and that's why we launched Recast Geolift. So Recast's MMM is compatible with any lift test platform out there, whether you roll your own and do it yourself in-house or you work with a third-party vendor. We designed Recast MMM to be compatible with external lift tests to provide additional calibration, but If you don't have a lift test platform that you're using, or if you're doing it internally and you want to use something a little bit more full-featured, that's why we launched Recast Geolift, and it's something you can use. And because we are militant about companies taking a hard look at their marketing spend and making sure that it's effective, we wanted Recast Geolift to be super cost-effective for you. That's why we launched with a 6-month free trial and a very affordable price point. Once that ends. So I hope you give it a try. I hope it works for you. And whether it does or it doesn't, make sure that you are running tests.
