Video

Interview Series #2 episode 2:

Neil Campbell, Chief Growth Officer at Smol, share his thoughts on marketing measurement and the biggest attribution challenges faced by businesses.

 

#fospha #Smol #interview series2 #ecommerce #growth #dtcmarketing 

Fospha and Neil Campbell: Interview Series #1 episode 2

Fopsha asked Neil Campbell on his thoughts on marketing measurement and the biggest attribution challenges faced by attribution.

Isobel: One of the traditional complaints about marketing is that it isn't always aligned to business metrics and results. So performance marketing and e-commerce has obviously gone a long way to kind of address that. But the relationship with the CEO and the CFO is still a common difficult point. What measures do you implement to make sure that you have a great relationship with the CEO and the CFO?

Neil: Yeah, it's really interesting question. So I have a great relationship with our two Nick and our CFO Lee because they're very bought into kind of what we're doing and, you know, what the aims of kind of growth are. And the other thing is to add is that, you know, there is a sort of let me not quite dividing line, but there is especially in the kind of growth world, there is sort of performance marketing one side and then there's the kind of creative kind of brand side on the other.

And on what you sort of find is that especially in kind of start-ups and especially in the kind of performance marketing side, there's a lot of numbers and technically kind of operating off a kind of platform and things like that. But it still needs the kind of creative input because ultimately what makes kind of ads work is that if you don't have the creative, then it doesn't work.

Especially important in a kind of TikTok world when you've got sort of got to grab people's attention instantly and things. But generally what I find is that at the start of a start-up kind of life and kind of in the early stages, the cash is very tight and there are for every money you can spend, has to get an instant kind of return.

And therefore you gravitate towards channels like this because like I've spent you know, £1,000 in a day. How many customers do they get? I know my CPA by the end of the day, I know if it's working or not. And that's the kind of stuff that, you know, CFO and things can get behind. This is like, OK, we know exactly where we are, we know where we are versus the kind of goals and some of the things you have to kind of coach them through when you do that.

Is that the first version of an ad? It'll always get better because we can always optimise. So we, you know, we worked a rule of thumb on a new channel or something that we can probably cut the CPA by half or a third just for the creative testing and working out what works for that audience. So you've got to get them on side of that.

It's like - you find an instant answer but it's, it's a number that we can bring down. Then as you kind of scale up, you start to kind of run out of road on how far performance marketing can take you and some of the saturation that you get within a channel. And at that point you're starting to say, well, I'm going to start doing channels which maybe don't have the same instant payback.

So maybe I'm not going to find out if that's worked. You know, if we do partnership activity, the investment there is to hire someone to go and do deals. But then I don't find out if they've worked until three or four months down the line when it's got them all kind of set up. Similarly, when you kind of get into brand marketing activity and that's where you sort of obviously get a lot more into the creative side of things at that point, you really have to go, well, that's a lot of money to spend on.

The only way to do it is to spend a lot of money. So the question then becomes, well, how do we make sure that that's the right decision? It's more likely to work on? So we do that on kind of test and learn philosophy. How do we test out those either regionally or in kind of small places that can start to really kind of work right where the challenge is really to kind of go, I have to design a test, but I have to design a test that's actually going to give me an answer.

Am I supposed to spend too little money and not really know? 

 Isobel: Yeah, and I guess that's the hard part, is not getting people on board with the kind of tests that you're doing to make sure that they're agreeing. The kind of success metrics. That means that it's been a good decision at the end. And I guess kind of building on that.

FAQs

Can I try Fospha for free?

At Fospha, we're so confident in the value of our solution that we offer everyone the chance to try the platform at absolutely no risk. That means that if you're not happy for any reason in the first month of working together we'll give you a full refund - no questions asked.
 
How are we able to be so confident? It's simple: we know from years of working with the best eCommerce brands in the world that we offer the best & fastest onboarding in the industry. That means that the average customer gets live dashboards within just one week. We also know that our modelling is the best in the market, so we're confident that once you get into the platform and see how well Meta and TikTok are really working, you won't want to turn it off.

Aren't attribution tools difficult to set up?

Traditionally, yes! That's one of the reasons we built Fospha - so that brands without the time or budget to take on Enterprise-level data projects could still have access to gold standard measurement.
 
Fospha is quick and easy to go live, and in most cases doesn't even require input from your tech team!

Do I need technical support to go live with Fospha?

Fospha is designed to make set up and integration quick and easy.
 
Especially if you're using out of the box platforms like Shopify, Magento or WooCommerce, the only setup that is required is granting Fospha access to your systems so we can pull the data we need to run our models. For most people this takes 15 minutes of non-technical setup time.
 
Even if you're using a custom setup or headless eCommerce system, we make it quick and easy to get started - you will just need to schedule a daily report from your backend system to be delivered via S3.
 
All the rest of the magic happens on the back end - Fospha automatically cleans, reconciles and models your data to present a single, simple view of performance that you can trust.

How do I know your model is accurate?

Fospha's model incorporates a rigorous QA process every day, selecting a best-fit set of model parameters for each client and then precisely testing them until it produces an outcome which exceeds our high accuracy threshold.
 
We also have QA checks to make sure that the data we are being passed from your systems is flowing smoothly, and alert customers in case a change you've made has caused an issue with your Google Analytics or Ads Manager setup.
 
Lastly, there is a human layer to our QA - by surfacing multiple attribution models in the dashboards, we can make sure that the data our model produces passes an eye test.

Which channels does Fospha measure?

Put simply: if it's digital, we measure it.
 
We integrate visit and conversion data from all your sources as standard, and add it to our model. We think this is essential - if your attribution platform will only integrate some of your digital marketing data, it only has a partial view of performance.
 
That means we measure your click-based channels like Paid Search, Shopping, Pmax and Affiliate. It also means we measure channels that deliver their value through impressions, like Meta, TikTok, Pinterest and Youtube.

How long does it take to go live?

Fospha is super easy to get live - the average customer spends just 15 minutes setting the platform up. That time goes on getting Fospha the Account and API access we need to connect to your key systems to our platform.
 
Once that is done, the Fospha team get busy getting your data cleaned and integrated into the platform, and running our modelling. That process takes about a week on average, so it's not long from when you sign up to when you can first start using the platform.
 
Fospha remodel 12 months of historic data for our clients too, so you can immediately see how your spend has really been performing - no need to wait while the platform gathers data!

How long does it take to start getting value from Fospha?

The average Fospha customer is using live dashboards within a week of signing up.
 
When you get your dashboards, our team will highlight the things we think you should be doing differently this month using Fospha's modelling of your last 12 months' data. From here, all you need to do pick one thing to do differently that month - we know from experience that customers who do this every month find it easy to justify the investment in the platform.
 
Of course, in the first 6 months of working together most of our customers go far beyond this, using Fospha to power their strategy, internal reporting and all their tactical optimizations too. But that's just upside. For us, it comes back to deciding to do just one thing differently in your first month of using Fospha.

Is Fospha privacy safe?

Absolutely - Fospha is built privacy-first, and doesn't rely on invasive user-level tracking to feed our models. That's why our impressions measurement wasn't affected by iOS 14, and it's why brands using Fospha will always have the edge on those that rely on pixels to track their customers.

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