Context · Growth motion
Marketing-led
Marketing owns the journey from awareness through to conversion.
What changes here
The same four questions, and what each one runs into in this context.
Attribution
The assumptions built into most attribution tools fit here better than anywhere else, which makes overconfidence easy.
Incrementality
The cleanest place to run holdouts, because marketing controls the intervention end to end.
Allocation
Channel mix is the main lever, so mix modelling and marginal return analysis earn their cost.
Decisioning
The optimisation event is a marketing choice, and it is usually set too shallow.
Written for this context
Attribution
-
Attribution Is Not Incrementality
Attribution assigns credit for conversions you observed. Incrementality estimates the ones that would not have happened otherwise. The gap between them is where budgets go wrong.
- Planned
Reading Platform Discrepancies Without Losing Your Mind
Two systems report different numbers for the same campaign. A method for finding which of the four usual causes is responsible.
Incrementality
- Planned
Triangulating When Your Evidence Disagrees
An experiment, an MMM, and attribution give three different answers. A structured way to reconcile them without averaging away the information.
- Worked example
Designing a Credible Geo Holdout
A paid social incrementality test carried end to end: market pairing, power, pre-trend diagnostics, a difference-in-differences estimate with its interval, incremental CAC, and what the design cannot settle.
Allocation
- Planned
Adstock, Saturation, and Honest Response Curves
Lagged effects and diminishing returns are where most mix models smuggle in their conclusions. How to tell a fitted curve from an identified one.
- Planned
Calibrating an MMM to Experiments
The practical bridge between slow causal evidence and fast allocation models: using experimental estimates as priors and as validation.
- Planned
Marginal Return, Not Average Return
The channel with the best historical ROI is frequently the one closest to saturation. Why budget decisions need the slope, not the level.
- Planned
Paid Search and SEO Are Not Independent
Branded paid search often captures demand that organic would have captured anyway. Designing the test that measures total branded conversions rather than paid ones.
- Planned
What a Marketing Mix Model Can and Cannot Do
MMM is a good allocation tool and a weak causal one. What it needs to be trustworthy, and why Bayesian priors do not create identification.
- Worked example Planned
An Experiment-Calibrated Marketing Mix Model
Baseline, adstock, saturation, and controls, validated against holdout estimates and used to produce a constrained budget allocation with stated uncertainty.