#036: Attribution Revisited with Jim Novo

The following is a straight-up machine translation. It has not been human-reviewed or human-corrected. However, we did replace the original transcription, produced in 2017, with an updated one produced using OpenAI’s WhisperX in 2025, which, trust us, is much, much better than the original. Still, we apologize on behalf of the machines for any text that winds up being incorrect, nonsensical, or offensive. We have asked the machine to do better, but it simply responds with, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

00:00:04.00 [Announcer]: Welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. Three analytics pros and the occasional guest discussing digital analytics issues of the day. Find them on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash analytics hour. And now the Digital Analytics Power Hour.

00:00:21.95 [Michael Helbling]: Hello everyone, welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. This is episode 36. You know, after we did episode 28, attribution, we got letters. Lots and lots of letters. And by letters, I mean comments on our Facebook page and Twitter and the measure slack. To the effect of, hey, you need to go deeper on attribution. And don’t go looking for all of you. Just trust me, this is what people want. But what could we possibly add to the tour de force that was episode 28? Well, we did say that we wanted to get an adult in on this conversation. Unfortunately, we could not find an adult, but we did find someone whose attribution roots run deep. Our guess this episode is none other than Jim Novo. You might know him as the owner of a thriving marketing analytics consultancy, but prior to that he was the VP of marketing at Home Shopping Network leading the TV, catalog and online marketing efforts at a time when most people had never even heard of online. He’s the author of Drilling Down, Turning Customer Data into Profits with a Spreadsheet, and the Managing Director of Education for the Digital Analytics Association, serving as the lead instructor on development of the DAA’s four-course series, Teaching Students How to Create Knowledge, Drive Action Using Digital Data. He has a 25-year track record of helping marketers use data more effectively, and today he’s our guest. Welcome, Jim Novo.

00:02:02.07 [Jim Novo]: Wow, that was quite a canned speech. I didn’t know you was gonna just read it like that.

00:02:06.77 [Michael Helbling]: Well, I mean, I tried to put a little flair in it. Well, here, let’s, you know, I don’t get points for originality, but other two co-hosts certainly do. And they are none other than the force from the north, north, the Ottawa, the senator, the Maple Leaf. I thought he was Norwegian there for a minute. Jim Cain, well, Norway, Canada. What’s the death place?

00:02:33.91 [Jim Cain]: Senator and then Maple Leaf.

00:02:35.39 [Michael Helbling]: Oh, you can’t say that.

00:02:37.72 [Jim Cain]: We don’t do that.

00:02:38.80 [Michael Helbling]: That’s not done. Sorry. Otherwise, sorry. So sorry. And of course, our other host, he is the lightning bug, the blue jacket, the… Oh, my God.

00:02:53.13 [Tim Wilson]: Oh, it’s Tim Wilson. Oh, yes, the professional sports mecca that is Columbus, Ohio.

00:03:02.38 [Michael Helbling]: All right, let’s get into this topic. So Jim Novo, thank you so much for joining us. We’re excited to have you. We did an episode, an attribution, but we feel like we just scratched the surface. So we’re excited to go a little deeper on this episode and have you along for the ride. So let’s get into it, guys. Where did we leave off last episode? And Jim Novo, maybe you can weigh in on where do people go wrong with attribution the most or where should they start? Cause maybe that’s a good pickup from last time or start wherever you want to. I don’t care. You’re tired.

00:03:37.71 [Jim Novo]: You’re going to take a nap. I think I’d have to say what happens mostly is there isn’t really enough of a robust discussion around what people mean by attribution, you know, how is it important, what decisions are we going to make after we figure out attribution, you know, and there’s sort of like a soft way to do it, right, where you just kind of look in you know the tool interface and it says oh we’ve got you know this share and that share and these campaigns contribute and so forth and that’s fine right but that’s a pretty high level and you might be able to argue not so accurate view of what’s going on. So then do you want to dig deeper or you don’t want to dig deeper? I mean, you know, I just think generally there’s not enough upfront discussion. Sort of the way actually that I think, Tim, I think you did at E-metrics, you know, you were talking about getting people to come up with a hypothesis, right? And say, you know, okay, so if we get 10,000 visitors from this campaign, is this good? Oh yeah, that’s really good. You know, if we get 10 visitors from this campaign, it’s that bad. Oh, yeah, that’s really bad. Okay. And so, right? And so you kind of go back and forth with them and you try to figure out what the middle is. And I think, you know, often in attribution, it would be great to have the same conversation, you know. So you say to whoever is driving this thing, So let’s take a channel or a campaign and what do you think that that campaign contributes? And they come up with some number and you say to them, well, okay, if it was 10% of that number, would that be bad? If it was 90% of that number, would it be good? And you try to find some place where you’re actually getting some kind of traction where a person wants to make a decision. And then, you know, you talk about how are we going to get there.

00:05:35.72 [Tim Wilson]: I feel like with attribution, a lot of times people think, attribution, it’s one word. I understand what it means. Let’s go and do attribution. And it’s going to give us so many insights. It’s going to define our media mix. And it’s going to be awesome. But they haven’t really put the clarity around what sorts of changes might they actually

00:05:58.13 [Jim Novo]: That’s what I was driving towards, yeah. Okay. And so, you know, I don’t want to step up to, you know, I mean, it depends on what level you’re talking about this, right? Obviously. But, you know, if you’re not really going to make any decisions, you know, based on this, if you have essentially a marketing plan or way the company operates or you know, silos that don’t talk to each other, whatever it is, and nothing’s going to change based on the result of an attribution model, test, or just even what it says in the tool, then why are you talking about this? Shouldn’t you spend your time and money doing something else, right? I just come at it from sort of a business place, right? You know, everybody is really busy doing all this different stuff, and a lot of it has very high value, and you know it has very high value, right? You can prove it has very high value. So the question is, if we’re going to go through this attribution thing, are we just going to kind of look at the tool and go, well, that’s interesting, you know. there’s these touches and this sequence and so forth and that’s pretty interesting and that’s good to know and we should take that into account when we buy media and that’s kind of where it stops or are you actually going to go in and say what happens if we’re way overspending on pay per click and what are you going to do you know could we put that budget somewhere else what if we find out it’s only fifty percent as effective as we thought it was that’s probably not gonna happen in a lot of cases, but it would be nice to find out up front if people are gonna actually make decisions about this stuff when they find out what the attribution actually looks like.

00:07:42.86 [Jim Cain]: I agree with a lot of that, but I think that any organization that’s not doing even some entry level, not last touch attribution planning, and they understand what it is and they understand how it applies to other things, is doing themselves a disservice. When you start looking at the kinds of ad hoc questions or hypotheses that people are trying to answer in Google or Adobe or what have you, A lot of times, you’ve got that short list of things you go through. Was it a landing page? Was there something wrong with the content? Was there something wrong with the last touch? Was there something wrong with the performance of the website? And you inevitably, in almost any piece of analysis you do now, end up going, what was the traffic mix that led to the visit that didn’t do the thing that I wanted? And even a basic waiting model that gives you the ability to not think about things last touch gives you the ability to maybe find that aha moment. So I don’t necessarily think that you need to go into attribution full bore with a business improvement focus in mind. I think you can be in a position where you can get your toes far enough into the water that you can just evolve your overall, the quality of your overall measurement practice. I don’t think that’s the best way to do it, but I think anybody that’s still using last click for everything, you know, they’re doing themselves a disservice.

00:09:04.76 [Jim Novo]: Yeah, I don’t disagree with that. Maybe I came out too hard.

00:09:10.03 [Jim Cain]: I’m looking for a fight. That was the most Canadian fight of all time.

00:09:15.36 [Jim Novo]: That was the part where I was saying, look, if you just want to look at the tool and make those kind of decisions, I guess what I would call soft decisions, right? It’s really good information to have. And you allocate proportionally. But let me try to say it another way. So when someone looks at the tool, let’s say, and they see, you know, this contribution, that contribution, right? And they start to formulate these ideas. And then they come out and they represent that specifically in exactly what’s going on. So we should therefore do this. That to me begins to sort of push the edge of it, right? Because you’re kind of making a call that says, you believe without any kind of really critical, you know, walkthrough of it, that that’s exactly what’s happening.

00:10:09.96 [Tim Wilson]: But is there, is there value if you start there and say, let’s just accept, let’s just agree that we’re, for right now, we’re going to say that’s the way the world works. And then as an analyst or as a marketer, then saying, okay, let’s now figure out how we can test the things about that sort of absolute that we most think is a little squishy. I mean, yeah. Is that one way to come at it though? You know, say, let’s just lock in this is what it is. And now let’s be very, as opposed to saying, we’ve locked in, now let’s throw all the data at a very expensive tool that’s very expensive to implement and try to get all the answers. Is there an argument to say, let’s just, let’s agree what we think the world is. And we know there are parts of it that are wrong. And now let’s find the incremental ways in this we brought up on the last episode, episode what, 28. Your email example from looking, looking out 90 and 120 days and say, now let’s just do a little bit of a test and control in just one area. Let’s just see if we can make that one area better and make it really clear to everyone. Is that an acceptable strategy, I guess? Absolutely.

00:11:21.43 [Jim Novo]: I think what I’m trying to do is encourage people to start going in that direction. Right? You know, if attribution is going to make a difference to the practice that they’re engaged in and they really want to spend a lot of, I mean, back to the whole resources thing, are you really going to spend a lot of time and money and make a lot of decisions on this stuff or are you just going to kind of go with what everybody thinks is the appropriate mix and that’s fine, right? So yeah, so it would be great to say let’s cordon off this one little place. You know, whatever the company’s, you know, businesses and the mix and all of that will determine what that might be. Let’s cordon off this little place and let’s do a test, right? Let’s either increase the spend or decrease the spend in a particular campaign or channel and see if it changes, right? And do it long enough so that you can actually see those changes. So that’s one way to approach it, right? I would prefer, like in the example that you just cited, the idea of, well, let’s find out exactly what we mean by attributing value or attributing some kind of action to a campaign, right? So in the case of customer value, for example, The value of the attribution tends to change over time as you move out further and further. In some customers or some, you know, types of visitors, it will start to accelerate and really ramp up as they become a best customer, let’s say, right? Who’s visiting all the time or buying all the time or whatever it is that the desired outcome is. On others, it’ll just be a one-time occurrence And then nothing happens again. They don’t come back. They don’t buy again and so forth. So wouldn’t you want to actually sort of figure out the value side of it before you spend a whole bunch of time on trying to figure out the channel mix and campaign mix and all that kind of stuff, right? So that’s a different. a different way you can go at it. You know, and so that requires a discussion about something like, is this a short term, are we okay with short term decisions or long term decisions, right? Like if we have the ideal attribution and it’s completely focused on very short term values, is that what we want? Have you ever had that discussion type of thing? Or would we want to be more focused on generating longer term value? We want to create customers who come back and visit us or buy again and again and again. that’s really what we want to do and that’s probably a different attribution that’s a different medium mix in all likelihood so now you sort of have another level to talk about right that really should be talked about somewhere or you kind of just go off on a path, right?

00:14:15.43 [Tim Wilson]: Well, so does that, have you seen it happen? Like when describing it that way, I could see a discussion starting with, we’re going to do attribution. And as the whiteboarding is happening on that, What comes up is we really should be looking at customer value, customer lifetime value, or a longer horizon for customer, whether it’s a total value of a customer or whatever it is. And what comes out of this we’re going to do attribution is, holy crap, we need to get smarter about how we’re measuring the value of customers and conversions. And you wind up kind of kicking the attribution can down the road because you actually are in the managed to shift the organization, which I don’t think can happen overnight or inside of a month to have more of a customer value as opposed to a, you know, what conversions happen today. or those hand in hand that you actually wind up uncovering, hey, you’re trying to go after attribution, but you’re not really thinking about your business the right way. And we need to think about that and get our systems instrumented and get our data integrated to the point that we can actually really measure that. Is that a possible outcome? I haven’t personally seen that, but I could now see that playing out that way.

00:15:35.93 [Jim Novo]: Yeah, and that might be a good thing, right? Or if you look at what they’re doing with cohort analysis, right? A lot of the SAS guys. You know, they’re saying, okay, so the people who signed up in January, by the time we got to March, this percent dropped out and we’re kind of associating that with this promotional effort that we did. But then if I look at the cohort of people who joined in March, We had a different kind of promotional effort going on and we had much better conversion from freemium to paid or whatever it was. right in that model. So if I’m going to attribute, right, if I’m going to start making selections, it really makes a difference that these people, and they don’t have to be, you know, buying products or, you know, they could be just visiting over time or interacting and posting even, right? Just posting. When was the last time this person posted? How many times did they post and blah, blah, blah, right? That kind of stuff. So you kind of have to figure out what is it that you really want to measure in terms of value and then you go back and start to attribute because that attribution mix is going to be different if what you’re shooting for is long-term value versus short-term value.

00:17:04.56 [Michael Helbling]: So that’s interesting because I think last episode we focused only on digital attribution, so attribution of digital channels. But I heard you say a couple things that I think I want to explore a little more. One is, I think sometimes that’s the wrong way to go. if measuring the customer is the right way to measure value. And the other thing was attribution based on tactic as opposed to or campaign type. Maybe I’m not saying that right, but instead of channel. So in other words, Hey, I’m going to run this type of campaign, and I want to look at the attribution of that as opposed to looking at search versus email versus display. So I don’t know. I’m not saying I’ve got an answer there. I just heard two things I thought were interesting. I wanted to see us explore a little more.

00:17:55.71 [Tim Wilson]: You weren’t saying that you thought measuring customer value wasn’t the right way to go?

00:17:58.80 [Michael Helbling]: Well, I tend to think that. Because most of my experience with this was in an environment where that was how we proved out the value, it was by customers and like to Jim’s point. when those customers actually increased their sales velocity, that was how we knew we were doing better.

00:18:19.04 [Tim Wilson]: Okay, so just to clarify, you’re saying you think customer value is the right way to go and that’s where many… Well, no, in some contexts, I don’t know.

00:18:28.95 [Michael Helbling]: Like Jim, you said you could use visits if that was the way that you were, you know, Finding value that way and I just you know I I’m interested in that and I think probably a lot of listeners are I think when you focus only on digital you cut out the customer concept Because you aren’t tying it back to however the customers being measured Unless you’re doing a little bit more than what you get out of the analytics tools that would most of us have today

00:18:58.82 [Jim Novo]: Does anybody even, you know, maybe this is a question that’s like completely outside digital for now, right? That people just don’t look at valuation. They’re so focused on conversion that it doesn’t really matter. Do you get that sense? I mean, I certainly have worked with people that are basically in that camp. As long as I can get the visit, the one sale, whatever it is, it’s over for me. I’m not interested in tracking that anymore and it’s pretty much over. And so if that’s the case, then if that’s the way the company is structured and that’s the way people think, then you’ve got a certain kind of approach to attribution.

00:19:42.69 [Jim Cain]: So just to be clear, value to you means lifetime value of a particular customer, or does it mean applying appropriate valuation to all the key activities on your site? Like I would pay 10 bucks for an email address, or I would pay 50 bucks for someone to create a wish list, or is it somewhere in the middle?

00:20:04.49 [Jim Novo]: No, it’s, you know, whatever activity there is. There is downstream value from that though, right? Because if you’re willing to pay someone $10 to give you an email address, then isn’t there residual value somewhere in the background from that activity? Otherwise, you wouldn’t pay them $10 for an email address.

00:20:24.46 [Jim Cain]: Oh, totally. It’s just like you were kind of touching on earlier value as one of those nebulous terms in our industry, right? And a lot of the stakeholders that I work with that have big omni-channel, especially strong kind of print catalog brands, value specifically means lifetime value. So in two years, a new customer will be worth 380 bucks to us.

00:20:47.25 [Jim Novo]: Yeah, I hesitate to use the phrase lifetime value because I think that that really trips people up and gets them into just like what we were talking about a few minutes ago. Now you’ve sort of misdirected everybody into like, okay, now we got to figure out how to do a lifetime value equation. I mean, I don’t really think that’s necessarily, I like to talk, I mean, in certain businesses it would be completely appropriate, but I mean, for most people, I would love them to measure the value of some activity that they’re paying out marketing dollars for. longer than a week or two weeks, right? Can’t we kick this out to like 90 days or something like that, right? Where you’re just trying to Again, a good example is a lot of the stuff that people are doing with cohorts. If that’s the way that it should be thought of inside the tools and so forth, then I think that’s a great demonstration. If you look at some of the types of models and tracking and a lot of the blogging that’s going on from these guys, you see the exact same kinds of curves and the same sort of value definitions. Right I mean you can certainly define value however it fits into your business model right it doesn’t necessarily have to create revenue.

00:22:12.48 [Tim Wilson]: This is maybe a little bit of a tangent but when you’re looking at a 90 day horizon. There’s this constant tension between what data you. can’t look at even though you have it you know if you’re looking at 90 days and we’re in we’re in may right now so that means that the stuff that happened in march and april i have data because i have the people click through i have the people converted but when i’m doing my analysis if i’m doing a cohort analysis and i’m picking a 90-day window then i have to say i’m going to cut off my last action 90 days ago, I think, I mean, I struggle with this, uh, cohort analysis, I’m like super excited about it. And yet I have not managed to really dive in and make it work. And part of where I struggle, if you start talking customer lifetime value and you say, well, you’re discounting stuff, you don’t have to go out 10 years because, you know, a dollar from them, it’s a NPV calculation. But are you in this challenge if you say, we’ve got to say it’s considered purchase and we have a two month typical purchase life cycle. And then I want to put some more time on top of that to go a little farther than just the conversion. How do you manage that tension between, if you go out to 120 days, you’re like, holy crap, that’s like four months. So we’re cutting off the data in January and that other stuff we can’t look at yet. How do you kind of approach that or manage that? Or am I completely missing that that’s not a challenge?

00:23:48.05 [Jim Novo]: No, I mean, it is a challenge. And so you’re kind of back to the same question about how serious are we about attribution and how much are we willing to really care about this? I think a lot of people you know spend probably too much time and money on it because they’re not organizationally set up to actually go through the process right of what’s going to happen in the end when you find out. I mean are you really going to change the mix of the media? Or if you come out with some kind of result that’s contrary to what people believe in the company, are you going to change your behavior or not?

00:24:28.81 [Tim Wilson]: So does that mean there’s a starting point where you actually have to get realistic about what sort of time horizon is right to look at? If we’re serious, then we need to agree that it’s not a last click today conversion. It’s maybe not even a week. It’s maybe not in a month. Let me show you just some historical data. This isn’t attribution. Just let me show you that these things happen after initial activity and things don’t really taper off from a customer value perspective for 90 days or 100 days or 120 days. And then you have to say, and if we agree to that, then that means when we get serious about this attribution, that means the window we’re looking at is I’m not gonna have an answer for you for six months, because when we try something, we’re gonna have to try it, let it run long enough for enough data, and then sit and wait for that window, that kind of attribution window, Is that where things get tripped up and get messy, that the speed of digital is once a year?

00:25:34.73 [Jim Novo]: No, I understand. There’s a huge cultural issue inside, I think, attribution. I would just rather have it out on the table, and that’s what people want. then that’s what they want. And if they want to stick with the shorter term thing, then that’s fine too. Either way, it depends on what the business believes. But I do think that people should at least have this discussion and say, okay, this is kind of how it works. And so are we really going to get into attribution to the point where we’re actually going to start shifting spend based on the financial outcome of these things? Or are we just pretty much interested in just generating visits and we’re not that concerned about what happens downstream? And I wonder if a lot of people have even had that discussion. And if it doesn’t matter, to your boss or his boss or her boss and so forth, then it doesn’t matter. But then that really changes the importance of attribution as a topic and really a discussion because what you’re saying is that what we want is a lot of visits. So whatever you guys want to do, you know in terms of the spending allocation doesn’t really matter as long as you drive more visits. We’re not really interested in how it works. We’re not even measuring it. What we’re interested in is the outcome. So you guys figure that out and you know that’s it.

00:27:08.08 [Tim Wilson]: And one step beyond visits, it’s even if it’s the last touch conversion rate. I mean, I think that’s probably more, you know, ROAS from a last click perspective.

00:27:18.91 [Jim Novo]: I mean, how do you measure customer experience, for example, right? You hear everybody talking about customer experience and, you know, oh, we’ve got this experience, that experience. And how does that ever get measured and translated into money? This is one way to do that. by doing real attribution if you really want to know what the value was of the new interface you created or those kinds of things you can get there through doing some serious attribution work but mostly that doesn’t happen yet right mostly people will pop surveys and say do you like it or you know and those kind of things which aren’t necessarily stuff that translates into bottom line money for the company. It’s great to know, but it’s, you know, am I too focused on trying to generate money for the company? Is that the problem?

00:28:06.77 [Tim Wilson]: Cut that out.

00:28:07.73 [Jim Novo]: Because that is sort of a, you know, I don’t know. Sometimes that doesn’t matter and I understand that too. But again, let’s have that discussion, right?

00:28:15.90 [Michael Helbling]: Our creative team feels that they’re being inhibited by your desire to generate money for the company.

00:28:21.83 [Tim Wilson]: Don’t be knocking the creative team. The creative team wants to generate money as much as the next group.

00:28:27.94 [Michael Helbling]: They are wonderful, wonderful people and awesome at generating experiences that make money for the company.

00:28:35.76 [Jim Cain]: One of the things that we’ve gotten good at in getting customers to care about attribution is to, again, it’s just kind of fun with language, right? So the point I made earlier about what’s an email address worth, it’s worth 20 bucks. There are some metrics that have an offline equivalent that aren’t just, I bought something. And most of our examples, again, will be retail because we do a lot of retail. There’s that very clear, I have a cash machine on my website, I get this much cash in it every day and people have a tendency to not look at anything else. And that tends to make them more likely to not think about a more sophisticated way of looking at their marketing mix because I spent the nickel, I got a dollar, all the numbers are nice and clean. But if you can start to get people to say things like, We used to serve as a couple years ago where we were paying 20 bucks an email address. Therefore, if we generate our own, I guess it’s worth 20 bucks. And we know that when we have someone’s email address, we are likely to sell them something in the first year. most of the pieces tend to be there to bring together the narrative, to start to get them to think about attribution as an on-purpose, okay, that makes sense when you put it that way initiative. And another one that I found to be very effective is, like, we haven’t shit on display yet, and I’m looking forward to that part of the episode. Hey, I was working my way over here. I know. Get my stock full of tunies ready to hit display with, but

00:30:03.09 [Michael Helbling]: Jim, I call that the standard temperature and pressure assumption. If this, then that provided, you know, we maintain the system at the same standard temperature and pressure.

00:30:13.96 [Tim Wilson]: How does that work out with your marketing clients? The ideal, ideal gas law in your, that you’re saying, it’s all I remember from high school chemistry.

00:30:24.41 [Michael Helbling]: PV equals NRT. Just like that. I’m a data scientist. All right, so let’s do talk about awareness and in digital display. Because I do think that’s something that companies run aground on all the time because they try to do things like measure display, like direct response. They try to run display only or awareness only. So what have you guys seen out there? What really tickles your fancy on this topic? Or is display just completely worthless?

00:30:59.63 [Jim Cain]: The point I was just going to make a minute ago was that as far as display is concerned, then you got into like gas law or something.

00:31:06.54 [Michael Helbling]: Temperature pressure. Yeah. It’s my favorite. I don’t know how to tell you.

00:31:10.37 [Jim Cain]: Targeted display or programmatic display, I have found in the data to not be very good at generating a first sale with someone. But it’s very, very good at generating that second, third and fourth sale. It is a great driver of what you would call lifetime value. And if you start looking at the attribution mix or the campaign mix that generates a first-time buyer and you compare it to the marketing mix and the cost for generating a second-time buyer, you start to very clearly see that certain types of campaigns play much better for certain sales, new versus repeat.

00:31:46.21 [Tim Wilson]: Oh, that just brings, I’ve got a client where the media agency says basically ignore everything we’re doing to get people to the site initially. They have an insanely high bounce rate for their display, but we’re just building the retargeting pool. Yeah, yeah. and guess how the math works on the retargeting they’re only factoring in the what they paid for the retargeting click and unlike what you the math is pretty simple that if you spent a gazillion dollars just you could drop a fucking pixel and they bailed from the site and then you bombarded them with retargeting but that is trying to get to a first sale it’s interesting that if you I hadn’t really thought about that. Retargeting posts, putting a retargeting pixel on the order confirmation page is kind of an intriguing one. Don’t keep trying to sell me the same kayak or shoes or shorts that I already bought, but just start keeping me top of mind because you know I purchased. I actually haven’t seen clients do that because they’re trying to get the first sale. So that’s kind of an interesting, I might have just extrapolated erroneously, but that’s where I went.

00:32:53.37 [Jim Cain]: Things that tend to be high funnel for a first time purchase tend to be much more efficient at generating revenue for subsequent purchases. And that carries through to social media as well. Wait, say that again? So normally when you look at an attribution model, there are things that are kind of like top of funnel or very high influencer campaign types. So social media, display. And again, when I think about display, I try and focus on clicks and not impressions. There are things that are more likely to lead to sales later. And you need an attribution model to frankly validate why you pay for them in the first place. But if you were to isolate people that are buying not for the first time, second, third, fourth, fifth time, display tends to be closer to the purchase than at the top of the funnel. And certain types of social media tend to be more likely to close or help close than to influence 90 days in advance. They are very different mixes. At least I found. You know sometimes it’s like you got to make it plain as the nose on the face to get someone to go oh shit there is money in there it’s not fun with math you know go forth and do this and showing you know again it costs us five dollars and eighty cents to generate a first sale and here’s kind of the the waiting model for our campaigns. Here’s a totally different weighting model for campaigns, and by the way, it costs $3.85 for the second sale. Now we’re starting to build that kind of narrative that a CMO gives you a mandate against, you know? And we’re also starting to touch a little bit now, and I was just curious, because it was one of the things Michael said in the preamble, and Jim, it’s weird to say my own name, names dealer.

00:34:31.50 [Tim Wilson]: What Jim are you referring to? Are you asking yourself a question, or is he just taking over the show?

00:34:35.99 [Jim Cain]: I’m just looking into a mirror adoringly, but when you listen to the other attribution episode, we did talk a lot about impressions and best practices and initial get, did you face palm a bunch of times? Did you have any, did you have a few moments where you were like, ah, children.

00:34:51.70 [Jim Novo]: No, I mean, I think that that discussion happens a lot, you know, and so really the question I always have with display is, well, you know, if you think that it, I mean, if we’re talking about attribution, if you think that it is so valuable in terms of helping other types of campaigns, why don’t you just kill it for a week or two weeks and see what happens, right? And then add it back. And can’t you do that kind of testing because, you know, is it worth it to you to invest that money elsewhere? Or I mean, how serious are you about figuring out? the value of display. In some cases people just say we believe in awareness and so we need to be out there and just generally create awareness. From a marketing perspective After all, I am a marketing guy, supposedly. So I’ll say, yeah, well, that’s great. If that’s what you believe in and you don’t want any proof or you don’t need any proof or whatever it is, then that’s what you believe. I mean, maybe this would be sacrilege to say in an analytical context, but I do believe and I’ve seen enough times where gut feel was actually the right way to go. And that was based on that person’s very in-depth experience with that particular product or that particular kind of customer or that particular kind of meter or whatever. And they were right. And actually when we ran the test, The test came back. I’ll let you kill it, but I’m telling you, this media works for us, and I’m just telling you that. We’ve never done a controlled test. I know the whole line. We’ve never done it before. Let’s go ahead and do it. And he was absolutely right that when we killed the display, Everything else, the performance of everything else dropped, and we proved it in a controlled test. So, you know, it’s one way or the other. I’m just more in favor of people actually talking about it rather than just kind of going on autopilot, right? If we’re going to have a serious analytical discussion, let’s prove it, you know, one way or another.

00:37:11.66 [Jim Cain]: If we want to get right down to it though, my issue with display isn’t actually display. It’s display salespeople, honestly.

00:37:20.47 [Tim Wilson]: I thought display analysts. I thought media analysts. Do we get to throw them into? Who do they work for? Yeah, the salespeople.

00:37:30.00 [Michael Helbling]: See, at least I know that creative people don’t listen to this podcast, so I can like say bad things about them and get away with it probably.

00:37:38.95 [Tim Wilson]: I’m driving listeners away one at a time. We can attribute every minute of the episode. So I do think, awareness separate from display, just saying we’re going to drive awareness in general. I think there are, and maybe this is to the gut point, that if you are a small company or a small brand and you are trying to grow in a market that’s got established players, there are cases where you say, you know what, we’ve got to spend a year just getting our name out there. So people feel like it is a known entity, a known brand and they feel comfortable. And I think that gets back to this really long cycle that in those cases you could say we have got to build awareness. I think I use carbonite on the last example or there’s I think blue box or some sort of, I get a lot of the podcast examples or things that I’ve never heard of. And then I hear them repeated, repeated, repeated, repeated. And I may still not buy. I may never buy. I may not buy for a year. I’ve never actually done anything on Squarespace. That’s a good example. I’ve never created a website with Squarespace. But I could totally see. This is where we’re working in our first in promo. We’re kicking it old school TV. Secretly, Squarespace is paying a $0.07 product placement. but the fact is is that’s one that gets really squarespace is a good example that gets really tricky when random person is saying hey you’re in the internet can you help me build a website and i’m like fuck off go to squarespace i’m sending them there there is no way in hell that the umpteen times that I’ve heard Squarespace promote on podcasts is going to be directly attributable to me as an individual. But I could see somebody at Squarespace saying, we have got to kind of carpet bomb the right audience. And that will, we’re going to kind of get that put back into their lizard brain so that when the people come to them, you know, somebody drew out a a kind of causal model of saying, we need to go tell the people who are never going to use our service, but who are going to have people asking them to do the work for us. If we can get ourselves planted in there, then ultimately those people will buy. That’s an incredibly challenging attribution problem. And I’ve been hearing about Squarespace for three years, and I might not have recommended it to anybody until two months ago. And I guess you could still argue was that a good, good outlay of money. But that to me seems like the one of the really challenging attribution scenarios. Thoughts? Yes.

00:40:16.93 [Michael Helbling]: Well, the fact that you know Squarespace more than you know Wix or Weebly or Jim.

00:40:24.25 [Tim Wilson]: So Wix would have been next on that list. I have created a Wix site.

00:40:28.54 [Michael Helbling]: But that’s the thing is obviously that awareness building that they did put Squarespace as the first one that you think about.

00:40:36.19 [Tim Wilson]: But then I built a site with Wix, ironically, for a trip to the Bourbon Trail, which I’m going to tie this back when Bourbon comes into needing to… Bourbon’s one of those things that has to sit in a barrel for a number of years before you try it. So there are certain distilleries that are trying new things. And so it gets back to that whole time frame thing, is that when you’re making bourbon or when you’re taking a longer window for attribution, there does seem like a case to say you have to very deliberately, documented, very clearly say we’re going to try things out now and then we’re going to wait for them to age because we need to have cohorts to work with or we need a decent attribution window. And that, I just, I don’t run into that with companies at all today. Now, maybe I’m not, maybe I need to instead of using the, you know, gas based formulas, I can use bourbon analogies and say, let’s do this now, but we’re not going to get results for six months.

00:41:36.79 [Jim Novo]: We have to let it ripen.

00:41:38.10 [Michael Helbling]: I like that, you know, instead of being like standard temperature and pressure, we can just be like, you know, I’m your brewmaster, your campaign brewmaster, we’re going to concoct

00:41:50.52 [Tim Wilson]: of media mix that’s going to work for your company. Might get some Pappy Van Winkle, might get some Rotgut Furniture Queener.

00:42:00.41 [Michael Helbling]: Well, that fits our culture pretty well. Okay, well, as always, the time is flying by. We should probably start to wrap up, but let’s go around the horn here, and what did you hear that was interesting? Did anything prompt you to think about doing more research on a topic? And if you’re Jim Novo, you could just say something nice about people out there trying to do attribution or give them a good tip.

00:42:27.57 [Tim Wilson]: Or people named Jim. People named Jim. Kane, Stern. This is kind of getting me thinking I’ve got to go make another run at cohort analysis and play around with longer windows of just looking at results and the kind of pivoting back to the customer stuff that you know should be every analyst knows they should be doing anyway but nobody listens as far into the episode so hopefully I won’t be revealed as an utter fraud.

00:42:56.38 [Michael Helbling]: No, I’m right there with you Tim like I’ve tried to avoid this topic for as long as possible Moestly because I just didn’t want to get I didn’t want to end up focused on media analytics for the longest time of my career Probably because of media sales people

00:43:16.63 [Tim Wilson]: Well, I think that’s the other the having the have we really agreed to what changes we would make and how we’re defining value is everybody on the same page. We’re not having debates over that as a we want to do attribution. So hey, we just got to knock out these other couple of little things first, which are pretty meaty things that will deliver value in and of themselves.

00:43:39.68 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah and so like that’s kind of one of the things Jim Novo that I really like that you kind of started out with is like okay put aside the minutiae of how we’re gonna do this and just let’s talk for a minute in frank terms about what this really will mean for us and what hypotheses we’re gonna test and what we’re gonna do different if we find out that you know 90% of our revenue or value comes from this channel directly or that channel directly or if we cut that out it doesn’t do anything to us or it only limits us by 10%. So I think that is probably something that’s really worth doing too is just be the frank conversationalist. Mr. Kane, anything from you?

00:44:23.14 [Jim Cain]: Yeah. I mean, I could do attribution every week. That’s one of my more favorite topics. I mean, I get brought into it all the time, right? Seems to be the place where senior executives want to go. Very few people have a path. And then once you start down the path to trying to do attribution, they realize they need to rebuild the whole damn house. Like, it’s not one thing, right? So it ends up leading to data quality and campaign tracking. And what is a campaign? And how do we… So like, people don’t… Get to i want attribution to i have attribution relatively quickly but it’s again especially in e-commerce at their conversations were having all the time. And i was just thinking as we were talking about core reporting and again you know i tend to think more in google analytics personally but. There’s a section in the custom segmentation building functionality in GA that are called advanced sequences. Sequences give you the ability to build behavioral segments over multiple visits. If you’re thinking about trying to follow through on some of the best practices from Mr. Novo at all today, asking questions with advanced sequences would give you the ability to formulate some pretty cool hypotheses. It is a feature of GA that people do not use enough.

00:45:37.79 [Michael Helbling]: And Ben Gaines has paid me to tell you that you can also look at cohorts now in analysis work space. Just balancing it out there. Great stuff. Any closing thoughts, Jim Novo?

00:45:55.57 [Jim Novo]: Yeah, I think that This was great to sort of walk through this. Moere data is usually a really good idea. And I thought that when attribution first became easy and was accessible and so forth, it actually got people thinking in a new direction that hadn’t been taken before. And I always think that that is a good idea. I guess what I’m trying to evangelize a bit is, are we going to go to the next step? Because as you guys pointed out, it kind of uncovers a whole bunch of other things that maybe we should think about at the same time. And so I would rather see us start to really dig into some of the rest of all of this instead of just kind of passing it over and moving on to whatever the next thing is. Let’s dig into it some and let’s see where it goes because I think there’s a lot of value to be had in it. And so once those discussions happen, then maybe some changes and some other kinds of thinking happen, and maybe we’ll all evolve into a better group of people in terms of driving real business value at the bottom line.

00:47:18.81 [Michael Helbling]: Well, you’re a dreamer, Jim Novo. Yeah, I guess. Well, actually, no, I think that vision is awesome. And honestly, it’s what makes me love this industry. You know, as you’ve been listening out there to us, I’m sure other questions have probably popped into your head or other things have probably come up and we would love to hear from you. You can reach out to us on our Facebook, or Twitter, or on the Measure Slack. And if you liked what Jim Nova was laying down, there’s a couple of ways to interact with him some more, including next month at E-Metrics Chicago, he has a full day workshop called Applying Digital Analytics. And I think you can expect more of the same awesomeness at that. So I think it would be well worth your time to check that out. Well, we’re very delighted to have you. Thank you so much for taking the time. This is a topic that doesn’t get enough smart thinking, and we’re glad to have some of your smart thinking on our show. And of course, let’s take it out to the rest of the world. And for my other two co-hosts, Tim Wilson and Jim Cain, keep analyzing. Cheers.

00:48:34.44 [Announcer]: Thanks for listening and don’t forget to join the conversation on Facebook or Twitter. We welcome your comments and questions, facebook.com forward slash analytics hour or at analytics hour on Twitter.

00:49:02.50 [Michael Helbling]: Try saying something. I’m saying something. Oh, yes. That’s it. You got it. Okay. So this one could be attribution part two more.

00:49:20.93 [Jim Cain]: Making it personal since 2015.

00:49:25.88 [Michael Helbling]: No, not really.

00:49:31.78 [Jim Cain]: Is that still a thing? What? Recording?

00:49:34.97 [Tim Wilson]: Yes. It is definitely one that if you miss a beat, you’ve missed three jokes. The writing is very compact.

00:49:46.50 [Michael Helbling]: It’s delightful. Kind of like our podcast. Oh, yeah. Our audience likes Tim’s tone of voice, so. It’s all right.

00:49:57.01 [Tim Wilson]: Test well. It’s a statement made with no data to back it up whatsoever. It tests well with our web analyst demographic. Or we’ll just keep that part that invited all of attribution and delete everything else. It’ll be a very short episode. We’ll start with it, yeah.

00:50:14.64 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, yeah. It’s a nice guess. Jim Nobo.

00:50:18.40 [Jim Novo]: Jim. This says attribution sucks. Yeah, it was literally we were sitting in a bar and it’s like we really ought to come up with some kind of thing for the best student in the UBC classes. And so people were just talking about different ideas and then somebody said let’s call it the Jim Novo Award so we can talk about something else. They bring you in and you’re doing like $10,000 a minute, and then that drops down to $2,000 a minute, and they’re like, well, you know. It’s fine.

00:50:56.96 [Michael Helbling]: Somebody can do $10,000 a minute again. I’ll be glad if we could do $5 bucks a minute. What was the game game?

00:51:09.74 [Jim Cain]: Me? No. You just seem ready. That was what I’m just holding up my microphone. I look all poised and excited.

00:51:18.95 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, it’s probably like, when we have guests, they’re like, what the fuck? I am confused.

00:51:28.45 [Tim Wilson]: No, it’s a short story. As long as I don’t tell it. Rock, flag, and Novo.

00:51:36.39 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I think that’ll work.

Podcast: Download | Embed

Subscribe: RSS