It claimed that you should measure what you value, and nothing is more valuable than growth for entrepreneurs. Revenues, venture capital, prestige, and scale are all factors that contribute to a company’s success. Measuring growth, on the other hand, is complicated and difficult – and it is just becoming harder. Growth marketers have been pushed to reconsider how they design their growth analytics engines because of changes to attribution in iOS 14 and additional adjustments in iOS 15, as well as other privacy-preserving measures in the industry.
We gathered a distinguished panel of growth experts on the Extra Crunch stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021: Jenifer Ho, vice president of marketing at Elation Health; Shoji Ueki, head of marketing and analytics at Point; and Nik Sharma, owner of Sharma Brands, a well known DTC growth marketing consultancy and investment shop. We discussed the attribution dilemma and how startups should define their models, as well as how to gain the first consumers in a firm and when growth marketing should truly begin, and how businesses should choose the correct KPIs for their business.
Our discussion began with a deep dive into the subject of attribution, which is now a hot issue among growth marketers. Attribution is the process of linking marketing expenditure on platforms like Facebook and Google to real consumer purchasing activities. Attribution methods are meant to capture activities such as when a person sees an Instagram ad for shovels and then buys one two days later. For businesses and customers, purchasing decisions may be complicated, which is why determining attribution is critical to a startup’s success. When it comes to modeling it, Ueki highlighted the need for simplicity in all elements of attribution.
One of the most essential lessons I have learned from my previous experiences is that it is critical to start small and simple and work your way up. I have worked in organizations where we have made that mistake previously. When it comes to attribution, I prefer to use the analogy of an automobile. It is tempting to attempt to create the Ferrari of attribution systems, but when you are just getting started, all you really need is a skateboard, right? A straightforward solution gets the job done.
At SeatGeek, we tried to establish a media-mix model before we had anything much more basic in place a few years ago. We put a lot of time and work on it with our data science team, but it was never used or accepted. At the end of the day, attribution’s main purpose is to determine incrementality, or how additional income is earned because of your marketing activities, that is what a complicated media-mix model or multitouch attribution model is for, but getting it properly is difficult. We had constructed one that did not really serve the purpose of assessing your incrementality as much as feasible for us.
