Ep 26 - Ruckus + Rockerbox: Solving For Attribution Challenges with Quinn Michael, Ashley Castellanos, Stang Gappa, and Sara Livingston

This week we teamed up with Rockerbox for a panel on how to solve attribution challenges by getting a single source of truth for their marketing activity.

Attribution, simply put, is answering the question of why we do things. Our attribution experts discuss what role it plays in the daily operations of a company, why perfection is the enemy of progress, the methodology for handling multi-touch and multi-channel attribution, and how to know when to turn off a channel. 

Here’s What We Discussed

• [01:05] Our panelists share their backgrounds and experience 
• [03:08] What role does attribution play and how it’s used in daily-monthly marketing operations 
• [11:40]  Ashley talks about the challenges of attribution data in offline channels 
• [17:57] How to tackle multi-touch and multi-channel attribution 
• [21:24] How to deal with getting buy-in from executives that need insight and understanding into your decisions 
• 26:44] Connecting your path to conversion insights with your LTV as an indicator for an LTV predictive model 
• [30:00] Deciding when to turn off or keep a channel – If you turn off a channel and you don’t lose customers, you know the value of it. 
• [36:59] What advice would you give to a D2C brand that’s starting to figure out attribution: Don’t aim for perfection, don’t overcomplicate it, challenge your assumptions
• [42:45] The panel shared their thoughts on Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) for modern companies: You need to have a huge budget to get a readable result on MMM 

About Our Speakers 

Quinn Michael, Director of Marketing Analytics at TomboyX – Quinn is the Director of Marketing Analytics at TomboyX. He’s an experienced Data-driven digital marketer and manager. Skilled in analytics, A/B testing, deciphering and presenting quantitative data in simple terms, and clear visuals that make sense of user behaviors and lead to increased user engagement. 

Ashley Castellanos, Head of Offline User Acquisition at Curology – Ashley is an experienced marketer with a demonstrated history of brand development, executing global, integrated marketing campaigns, and performance-driven acquisition campaigns in offline channels. Her specialties include TV, online video, out-of-home, digital, social, audio, and SEM/SEO channels. She is passionate about building breakthrough creative, driving innovative marketing strategy, and designing efficient implementation processes.

Stang Gappa, Growth Senior Manager at – Stang is a growth marketing leader and advisor with extensive experience in finance, DTC, and eCommerce. He is passionate about leading startups and early-stage businesses towards scalable and defensible growth through paid and organic acquisition and retention.

Sara Livingston, Head of Platform and Solutions at Rockerbox – Sara is an experienced marketer, product strategist, and operator.

She’s spent the last decade building data and analytics products and establishing the underlying strategies and supporting teams. This has spanned across the marketer side to drive growth marketing and customer insights efforts, on the publisher side for data monetization, and then in building enterprise SaaS technology to be used by these end companies.

In all instances, Sara helped establish new functions and divisions, introducing new operating frameworks and supporting technologies at organizations from startups to enterprises. Sara’s been fortunate to work with many of the leading Retail, CPG, DTC, and Subscription Services companies.

About Our Host 

Anish Shah is the CEO & Founder of executive search agency Bring Ruckus. Anish has worked in-house in Growth roles at Snapfish and Getable. He started Bring Ruckus as a Growth consultancy 11 years ago working with 40+ clients, then re-focused his firm on executive recruiting for Growth leaders.

 

Quotes

“We use attribution at every step of the planning and optimization cycle in performance marketing. So daily, we're looking to understand how we can optimize the in-channel performance.” – Ashley Castellanos

 

“Our approach to attribution is that perfect is the enemy of good. I don't think there's a silver bullet in attribution, I don't think anyone will ever find that. But just strive to get to a point where it's as good as it can be, understanding its limitations. Working towards that consistently to try and improve every day yields better results, long term.” – Stang Gappa

 

“Attribution is one of those things that grasp the question of why we do things. It's not that simple and easy, but if you get your multi-touch down to a point where you feel very strongly about it then you can make a lot of big decisions with really simple numbers.” – Quinn Michael

 

“I think the most important piece, and this is where the multi-touch attribution solution comes in, is being able to map that pathway to conversion.” – Ashley Castellanos

 

“One of the issues we've fallen into in the past is not starting with a really good testing plan. That’s the first step.” – Stang Gappa

 

“You're never gonna get every single solitary conversion attributable to marketing, and you will go insane trying to do that. But instead, aim for what are all the different tactics we can have to make that incrementally better every day and make sure we're getting to a place where we have significant data – That actionable goal to optimize off.” –   Sara Livingston

ABOUT RUCKUS

We are growth leaders who recruit your game changers. Visit https://bringruckus.com and connect on LinkedIn. Subscribe and listen to more episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify Google Podcasts, Audible, or wherever you get your podcasts!  

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