Original analysis and the numbers behind the trends: sources shown, claims checked.
The paid media audit is sold on percentages, and chased to their sources most end at another agency blog. Here are six failures you can prove inside your own account in an afternoon, and the arithmetic that separates a finding from an assertion.
The number on your dashboard divides all the revenue by all the spend, which describes money you already committed. The decision in front of you is about the next increment, and that return is always lower than the average and falling. Here is how to find where your curve bends, and what to do at the point the two numbers disagree.
Last-click and even a mix model can flatter the spend that only harvested demand it never created. Incrementality testing is the causal tie-breaker: geo experiments and holdout lift tests that show which dollar actually caused a sale.
Privacy killed the click-level view, and marketing mix modeling (MMM) returned to fill the hole. But the brands getting it right don’t run MMM instead of attribution. They run three layers, each doing the one job it’s actually good at.
