Are Your Observed KPIs Based On Causation Or Correlation?
If you want to understand your KPIs, you need to test — and test some more. But first, explains columnist Benny Blum, you need to know the difference between causation and correlation.
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Benny Blum's latest articles
How To Apply Statistical Significance In Business Marketing
In an academic setting, an analyst might only be happy with a 95% confidence interval. Columnist Benny Blum argues the situation in business is drastically different.
What’s Your Marketing Success Metric?
Are you working to achieve wins for the business, or for your team? Columnist Benny Blum notes that these two things are not always aligned.
Watch Out For False Positives — 3 Ways To Get Better At Testing
It's easier than ever for marketers to dive into A/B and multivariate testing, but columnist Benny Blum argues that they need to know how to design a proper test first.
How Audiences Have Changed Paid Search Auction Dynamics
Contributor Benny Blum explains why audience, rather than the keyword, is key to successful paid search campaigns. Learn how and save big.
So You Think You Need A Data Scientist
Contributor Benny Blum defines Big Data and Conventional Data, then helps you decide whether you need a data scientist or a highly-skilled analyst.
Lifting The Veil On Audience Modeling: It’s Not Just Retargeting
Over the past two years, I’ve been focused on applications of the remarketing toolset. Each time I have a conversation about my work, the response can be summarized by “Oh, you’re doing remarketing.” But I’m not remarketing. I’m building audiences. After the umpteenth conversation about how remarketing is a single form of audience-based advertising, I […]
4 Things To Get Right Before You Pay For Traffic
If you’re thinking about starting to pay for traffic or expanding an existing program, there are four core concepts to get right before you start burning cash. Determine: What’s a visit worth? Design for Conversion Get Your Message Right Establish an Organic Strategy Determine: What’s A Visit Worth? The most immediately actionable analysis for a […]
How To Do Attribution Modeling & Budget Allocation
In my last post, I covered customer lifetime value calculations and how to leverage CLV to identity high- and low-value audience segments. One of the most effective use cases for CLV is around budget allocation. Combining channel attribution modeling and CLV calculations, we can make highly calculated decisions around which channels are over- versus under-performing. […]
Audience Modeling & Customer Lifetime Value 101
Customer lifetime value (CLV) is at the core of all of our advertising efforts. Being able to distinguish between good customers and bad customers (and all the grey in between) is what enables marketers to build scalable programs without being limited to a direct response. A good CLV model highlights the good and the bad, […]
3 Ways To Connect With Your Customer Even When You Don’t Make The Sale
There are four ways to break into ecommerce: Better service (Zappos) Cheaper prices (flash sales) Proprietary products (Bonobos, BetaBrand, Warby Parker, Revolve Clothing, etc.) New experiences (ShoeDazzle, Rent the Runway) Unless your company embodies at least one of these attributes, it’s nearly impossible to succeed as a viable ecommerce company. Your potential customers are already […]
Static Assembly Lines Don’t Work In Interactive Marketing
Your company makes money by scaling what you do and limiting the costs associated with whatever you provide. With any product or service, scale depends on the systematic completion of a series of tasks — think of the efficiency brought about by the adoption of the assembly line. As a result, we use technologies to […]
Premarketing: The Evolution Of Targeting
Nothing has evolved more in online marketing than the way we identify and target users. Just a few years ago, segmentation of publishers into categories or channels was still cutting edge. The “cast-a-wide net and pare down” mantra of the display networks thankfully progressed into one of the first truly effective forms of targeting — […]
Strategizing Direct-To-Consumer E-Commerce: When Should Manufacturers Dive In?
Over the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to help a few prominent manufacturers strategize direct-to-consumer ecommerce experiences while balancing their relationships with their retail partners. Entering the engagements, my thought was that any brand should strive to capture their sales through direct channels in order to maximize margins. But politics are fascinating in […]
All I Want For Christmas…Is Bing Ads?
As of November, Google garners just under 67% of the market for search. One would expect the distribution of budgets within a PPC portfolio would be in line with market share. The reality is quite the contrary: more often than not, AdWords represents closer to 85-90% of the budget and gets 95% of the internal […]
How To Use Paid Search To Aid Your SEO
A lot has changed in the world of search marketing over the last year. From Enhanced Campaigns to Hummingbird and not provided, search marketers have had to rethink and re-calibrate their strategies significantly. Some changes caused more uproar than others; but, one thing has become increasingly clear: the art and science of both SEO and […]
Is Not Provided A Good Thing?
It’s been a few weeks since Google rocked our worlds and stripped keyword-level data from the referrer, so it’s time to examine the fallout and see what’s changed in the world of search marketing. Surprisingly, not much. Keywords were beacons of insight – fantastic beacons – but keywords were a double-edged sword leading us to […]
Remarketing For Search: Approaching The Promise Of Digital Marketing
Good fishermen know where the fish are… so why is it that good marketers don’t always know where the best consumers are? Despite massive advancements in targeting, tracking and user insights, John Wannamaker’s adage — “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half” — may still […]
Is Your Marketing Program Ready For Holiday?
Q4 is closing in and retailers are bracing for yet another record-breaking onslaught of promotions, traffic, sales and revenue that will make or break the business calendar. With the end of back-to-school comes the inevitable code freezes and holiday lockdowns. So while production teams audit for site stability, scalability and vulnerability, there’s no better time […]
Incentivizing The Omni-Channel Marketing Team To Work Together
Ecommerce consumer intent and purchase behavior is a difficult story to capture and even more difficult to understand with disparate data sources telling overlapping stories. Businesses leverage technologies including ad servers, analytics, third-party cookie aggregators, internal-tracking platforms and more… trying to understand what leads to sales. Despite these fancy technologies, more often than not, businesses […]
Latent Consequences Of Conversion Rate Optimization
I took a call the other day from a prospect struggling to meet their goal CPA in paid search. Their problem was logically simple: CPA is 3x over what it needs to be. After discussing account strategy, structure, and so on, the prospect said, “Well you could just triple my conversion rate and then we’ll […]