Cofounder of SparkToro & Snackbar Studio. Author of Lost & Founder. Feminist. I love underdogs, cooking, & helping people do better marketing
This is one of my favorite #marketing and #advertising stories: The Parable of the Pizzeria. If you haven't heard it before, takes just 90 seconds. Helped crystalize for me why so many marketing dollars are wasted on channels that claim credit > channels that deliver incremental lift.
Rand Fishkin thank you for the parable. But how do you know the difference? How do you know if you were already going to get the sale or if the ad/promo/etc helped? (Maybe I'm walking into a product pitch lol).
So what happens if Joe Pizza (your local competitor) round the corner is standing outside handing green flyers and that young scamp has been defending the Pizzeria patch? Is there a blind spot here re share of voice? Curious because I’m looking into this right now. 🧐
Now the discussion is open again if you should bid on the brand terms on search or not :)
Beautifully said. Demand creation vs. demand capture are brutally misunderstood in today's marketing world. The sad thing is that many will hear this message, note it down, and make no behaviour change whatsoever. If there was just one thing that every business can do to avoid this mistake and get way more clarity on their marketing, it's asking their customers a simple question: how did you hear about us? The pizzeria owner would have saved a bundle by finding this out earlier and assessing the coupons accordingly.
100%. Google is getting credit for all branded ppc sales. What a joke,. We stopped bidding on branded text ads after updating our SEM policy with our distributors so that no one can bid on our brand in text ads. Now we focus ppc on shopping ads. Branded ppc traffic moved to SEO and now I am spending more funds in the upper funnel, driving incremental sales. For display, I did a test and found out that retargeting to visitors that looked at a PDP for 2 months is enough, but display ads are not effective with recent buyers until it has been at least 6 months since their purchase. This of course will vary based on industry and AOV.
Very relevant story Rand Fishkin! In a similar way, I’ve often said to law firm clients that with live chat or chatbot functionality on their site, those people enquiring may well have completed their more traditional online enquiry form anyway. Not to say there aren’t benefits to such functionality (indeed for some of our clients it’s been transformational) but you have to look at the bigger picture.
I read an article called the bubble of digital marketing that discussed this. Ebay was spending $1 million / month on their brand campaign in Google Ads, they turned it off and didn't see a drop in revenue. Facebook's algorithm finds the easiest people to sell to, which are people who were already going to buy. Incremental testing was the fix: https://www.measured.com/faq/what-is-incrementality-testing/
I had went back and forth about dropping my pop-up discount (specifically that model) for their email/phone. This pushed me to at least test this strategy. I can then see if we see higher profits/ less discounts, effect on conversion rates, and finally the effect on signups. They are already at the site, we have the best pricing and our customer service rocks, do we really need to give them that discount 🧐
Do you have a parable about burritos though?