Sharing marketing data industry secrets
Improve marketing efficiency today - an actionable guide to making better decisions with data.
You’re Overpaying for Users if You Aren’t Investing in Marketing Data. No exceptions.
This post outlines the highest-leverage actions. If you’re not doing them, you’re wasting budget while competitors acquire the same users for less
Step One (Today): Basic Tools To Enable Better Decisions
These are non-negotiable. If you don’t have them, you’re at the mercy of Meta and Google sales reps (who, by the way, are not your friends).
✅ Attribution – Still using GA last-click attribution for decision-making? If you are, congrats—you’re donating money to ad platforms and spending way too much time wondering why the sum of all ad-reported revenue is 5x higher than what you’ve actually achieved. This article is a good 101 for attribution, study it, invest in it.
✅ Aggregated Reporting across channels – Excel, Google Sheets, a BI tool—you choose. But if you can’t see what’s happening, you aren’t competitive. Here is your starting place for an aggregated view.
✅ Marginal CPA tool – Most companies blindly pour money into channels without knowing their true efficiency curve and marginal CPA. I’ve built a template you can use to quickly see where you’re burning budget vs leaving opportunity on the table. This saved a friend $500k last year. 🔗 Here’s your free tool
Step Two (next 90 days): Hire a Marketing Data Person—And Pay Them What They Deserve
Most companies underinvest in this hire. Huge mistake.
A truly great marketing data person is worth as much as a Head of Performance Marketing. (If that feels wrong to you, your current team is probably making decisions based on bad data)
Once you’ve hired them, here’s their day 1 priorities:
✅ MMM (Media Mix Modeling) – Hire someone who can build in-house with PyMC. If you can’t, use a third-party tool—but don’t take black-box vendor models as gospel. Don't know about MMM? Here's your starting place
✅ Incrementality Studies – Run Geo-lifts. Run conversion lifts. If you aren’t doing these, you don’t actually know what’s working. This will get you started
✅ Close the diagnostic analytics gap – Most businesses see analytics as descriptive (i.e., WHAT's happening). Few data teams have unlocked the true value of diagnostic analytics (i.e., WHY). Read this and start doing what few data teams have nailed
Step Three (next six months): Make Your Team Smarter
Channel managers need to be great at data or creative—preferably both. If they’re elite at both, fast-track them—they’re future CMOs.
📊 Train them on SQL – If your team can pull their own data, they’ll make better decisions. Free course to get them started.
🤖 Get them using LLMs – AI is not a gimmick. If they know how to use it for analysis and automation, they’ll work 10x faster. Start here.
🗣️ Level up their communication skills – They’re talking to Data, Creatives, and PMMs daily. If they can’t translate numbers into action, they’ll struggle to progress.
💡 The harsh truth: If you’re not investing in their data, creative and communication skills, they’ll be stuck in button-pusher land. And button-pushers get replaced by AI.
The Bottom Line
💰 Companies that treat marketing data as a cost center lose.
🚀 The best teams invest in measurement, hire real talent, and upskill their marketers.
❌ If you’re not doing this, you won’t win.
Know someone who needs this? Forward it to them — they’ll thank you when their ROAS jumps.
Next Week: How To Reach Top Percentile Marketing Measurement in 6 Months
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