In the winter of 1928-29 a Belgian painter living in Paris painted what looked like an advertisement for pipe tobacco. The painter, René Magritte, painted a caption below the large pipe stating “This is not a pipe” creating confusion for viewers and a bit of a stir in the Paris art scene at the time. […]
Ah, the smell of the end of the Fiscal Year! Budget Planning for Marketing is in the air and the smell of burning remaining budgets lingers, backed by the sound of inter-departmental standoffs. It doesn’t have to be like that. Annual Budgeting is a time-honored process, but I’d argue that in today’s world annual budgets […]
In 2003, Google was still a scrappy startup, digital marketing largely meant Search or un-tracked banner ads, and Working Planet co-founders Soren Ryherd and Vida Jakabhazy had an idea that paid digital advertising could be optimized to financial KPIs. We were a little early. While Working Planet began rapidly building and optimizing digital campaigns it […]
I recently wrote about the limitations of one of the most widely-held marketing KPIs: ROAS (Return on Ad Spend). The main limitations with ROAS are that it is a measure of efficiency and not magnitude and that the efficiency it measures is revenue generation, not profit generation. Yet creating revenues without profit, or efficiency without […]
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) is the industry standard for assessing and reporting the performance of paid digital campaigns, but it really sucks as a KPI. To be totally fair, ROAS has a few strengths. It is easy to calculate (even easier than ROI): Revenue / Ad Spend. It is a relatively clear measure of efficiency. […]
Even the most data-savvy of marketing teams can make mistakes in thinking about the use of data in optimizing campaigns for financial success. Let’s face it, marketing data is rife with issues and is never perfect, and it is easy to put on blinders based on the data you have available, the systems you use, […]
Advertising is all about targeting, right? And once you’ve found a targeted audience, you want to get your ads in front of all of that audience. This is the thought process behind Impression Share, that often elusive, seemingly golden metric that Google dangles before us in AdWords reporting. And why wouldn’t Impression Share be important? […]
Here are seven quick adjustments you can make to take your retargeting program from “Yuck!” to “Yay!” (Listen up all of you who just use default settings and one giant bucket of targeted visitors, and don’t skip the last point below.) 1) Frequency Caps Overexposure to ads can quickly annoy visitors and result in decreased […]
In January, Pinterest moved their paid advertising platform out of beta. As early adopters, we were able to run tests with Promoted Pins to see if targeting, cost, and engagement could provide a meaningful channel for our clients. It did. In fact, Pinterest Promoted Pins has been one of the fastest growing digital channels in our history, […]
“We want to take our marketing to the next level.” We hear that often. But with digital marketing becoming more complex by the minute, what does the “next level” even look like? 1. It’s Holistic With cross-device and cross-channel behavior becoming more the norm than the exception, marketing programs that are siloed by channel are going to […]