Jordan is Gupta Media's Director of Strategy & Analytics. As a founding member of our S&A team, he plays an integral role in ensuring that our clients and media teams have access to the tools and insights that they need to succeed. We sat down with him to see what is on his mind as we move into a new year.
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Throughout the pandemic, CPMs were considered by many to be the gold standard when it came to tracking the health of the digital media eco-system. Looking ahead, is there any key metric that will be important to stay on top to track how digital media is adapting to a post-COVID world?
Jordan: There is never a single metric that you can use across clients, but the set of metrics that stand out for clients with campaigns focused on generating revenue/purchases would be those that compare your total marketing spend to your top-line metrics. These take a lot of different shapes and I’ve seen different marketers, brands and agencies use different names for them. At the highest level you’ve got the ratio of Total Marketing spend to total Revenue, this is more where you’re estimating your overall investment in marketing for your industry/size. When you zoom into digital advertising, you have total revenue over total paid digital spend, this would be like a tROAS (“Total ROAS”) or MER ((Revenue / marketing spend) x 100). Depending on the type of service you’re offering (for example, subscription services), that may not be enough because the revenue generated by the initial sale is only a fraction of the total LTV. In that case, you want to look at your CAC:LTV which is the cost of acquiring a customer compared to the estimated lifetime value of that customer.
Transparency is more important to clients than ever, and due to a number of changes to the privacy landscape (GDPR, Apple’s ATT), attribution and conversion reporting are more delayed than ever. How can agencies maintain a level of trust with their clients in the face of these changes, is it simply about setting clear expectations?
Jordan: Yes, setting clear expectations is an important part of the process, but the delay in reporting is not as disruptive as the attributions that simply no longer exist. With iOS 14.5 conversions (especially view-throughs) being lost, it becomes much more important to study how your spends impact your top-line revenues while using platform-level attribution as a directional indicator of success rather than the singular figure that defines it. The delay in reporting can often be modeled in by looking at how previously lagged attribution grows over time, once you have a sense for how your conversion totals grow from days 0 to day 3, you can use the data that you have currently to adjust your bids in real-time. By understanding the holes and delays in attribution, media buyers are still able to make directional optimizations in real-time using partial data to guide performance towards top-line growth figures.
There are a lot of duplicate tools in MarTech (marketing technology) these days. Which piece of your tech stack do you see as indispensable?
Jordan: Every piece of our tech stack on the Strategy & Analytics team performs a different function, some of it is more “tech” than “MarTech”. BigQuery helps us store data and process it using SQL. Rivery helps us get data from any marketing platform / API easily to set up a data pipeline, we can also run SQL/Python to transform data before storing it in BigQuery. Supermetrics is like a simplified version of Rivery that most marketers/clients might know of, it doesn’t handle the size and specificity of something like Rivery but it’s quick and easy to pipe data into a Google Sheet. An interesting part of our role is that we actually end up having to learn the Martech stacks used by our clients. Standout tools we’ve seen have been Segment (a customer data platform) that helps you orchestrate how event tracking and customer data are processed across platforms, Klaviyo (another CDP) and then mobile measurement partners like Adjust and AppsFlyer (although that’s been an especially tricky space in H2 of 2021!).