How to Know if Your Marketing is Working (And Why Deduplication is Your Friend)

At the root of all marketing measurement is one simple question: Is our strategy working? All the optimizations and adjustments to campaigns and marketing mix have the same goal of driving more conversions, more customers, more revenue, and more efficiency.

But such a simple question can be obscured by the complexities of marketing measurement. Without the reliable data behind your marketing analysis, you can’t fully trust the results you come up with. That’s why at Rockerbox we believe that you have to have a firm marketing data foundation in place before you can ask the questions that get at the heart of what’s really making an impact.

How Can You Prove Marketing Impact?

In the modern marketing discourse, there’s some disagreement on the best way to measure the impact of your marketing, with strong arguments for methods like MTA, MMM, and experiments. At Rockerbox, our opinion is that all of these methods have their place and you can leverage each one for their strengths.

MMM

MMM is a statistical analysis that looks at the correlation between historical spend and revenue data to uncover trends and forecast future performance based on spend. While it’s not the right methodology for answering the most granular, channel-specific types of questions, it can be a useful tool for setting overall marketing budgets—and it doesn’t require user-level data.

Experiments

Another approach to uncover marketing effectiveness is to use experiments. A/B testing is one of the most simple forms of experiment—essentially creating two versions of a marketing deliverable or element, analyzing which one performs better, then acting off of those results. For example, this could be two CTAs, creatives or audiences within a campaign in Meta. Experiments can also include geo holdout testing and incrementality testing, which both look to analyze the impact of advertising by measuring the results of groups that were exposed to advertising vs. those that weren’t.

While useful in many contexts, one downside of experiments is that they do not provide an always-on measurement of marketing performance, instead requiring distinct tests to be run over a given period of time per channel or testing hypothesis.

MTA

MTA (Multi-Touch Attribution) is an approach to marketing measurement that looks at all the various touchpoints customers had before they made a purchase and gives fractional credit to each touchpoint for driving the sale. Through this analysis, businesses can make more informed decisions about where to direct budget and how to optimize their campaigns based on what’s making the biggest difference for the bottom line.

There are multiple types of multi-touch attribution that use different approaches to distribute credit. These include:

• Linear or even-weight multi-touch attribution models
• Time decay multi-touch attribution models
• Position-based MTA models (aka U-Shape)
• Data-driven or machine learning MTA models

The Importance of Establishing Baseline Performance

The larger your strategy gets, the more information you need to fold into your marketing reporting. The more channels you add, you might start to see contradictory information that makes you doubt the results you’re seeing. For example, platforms may report different conversion numbers than Google analytics, which might in turn be different than other third-party analytics platforms.

This inconsistency in conversion reporting can make it difficult to know which source to trust and make it near impossible to answer key marketing questions with confidence. The solution to it is deduplication—something that's impossible to do with individual ad platforms and that can only successfully be done with third-party analytics providers.

Deduplication: What It Is and Why It’s Important

With Rockerbox, you’re able to track all of your customer touchpoints across multiple platforms and credit each for driving a conversion based on your attribution model—on the contrary, when you measure your marketing through individual ad platforms, those platforms have no visibility into the other channels you use, meaning they may inflate the number of conversions they take credit for. This is where deduplication comes in.

When we build out the path to conversion, we’re reconciling all marketing touchpoints back to a known sale - on a per-user basis. This ensures that Rockerbox is aligned to your internal source of truth for sales. 

With this reliable view of conversions, you’re empowered to ask and answer questions about your marketing effectiveness that you couldn’t confidently do if you were working off of unreliable sources, including:

• What changes should I make to our spend both within and across channels?
• What is the true performance of each channel?
• How should I set my budgets?
• How much should we be spending by channel?

Get Answers to the Marketing Questions that Matter

With Rockerbox’s suite of products, you can centralize the data you need, create a reliable source of marketing truth, and leverage the analyses you need to make sense of all the information. Learn more in a 1-1 conversation with our sales team.