Introduction Carryover effects in marketing are a tricky beast. On one hand, you don’t want to prematurely judge a campaign because the effect of advertising may be delayed. On the other hand, you don’t want bad campaigns to be defended with this same argument. Solutions What’s the solution then? They need to be quantified, or didn’t exist. Some ways to…
This is a follow-up post on my earlier post about “fake” conversions — the post is in Finnish but, briefly, it’s about the problem of irreversibility of conversions in the ad platforms’ reporting. In reality, some conversions are cancelled (e.g., product returns), but the current platforms don’t track that. So, my point was to include a ‘churn coefficient’ which would…
We had a great discussion with Mr. Lauri Pitkänen about unfair advantage in business – e.g., a gift card company’s business model relying on people not redeeming gift cards, investment banker’s relying on monopoly to take 7% of each new IPO, doctor’s controlling how many new doctor’s are educated, taxi driver’s keeping the supply low through licenses, governments inventing new…
I hate to see, from a customer’s perspective, investors coming into a growing Web startup. Because it only means rising prices. The logic is this: 1) the investors need a positive return, and 2) the startup is growing because it has created something valuable, in most cases significantly more valuable than what it is charging from the customer. Therefore, the…
Introduction By definition, a dilemma is a trade-off situation in which there are two choices, each leading to a negative outcome. General solution A general solution, then, is to weigh the outcomes and compare them against one another. For example: choice A: -1 choice B: -2 In this example, choice A has smaller negative effect, so we’d pick that one.…
Introduction The struggle against moral hazard in banking is constant and real. There’s no turn-key solution for eliminating it, but it must be kept in mind at all times by policy makers. Consider the following citation from Wikipedia: “The role of the lender of last resort, and the existence of deposit insurance, both create moral hazard, since they reduce banks’…
There is a big data fallacy My argument here is simple – even though it’s a common argument that “everything is tracked”, marketers face a big data fallacy when assessing their ability to predict consumer behavior. The reason is explicated here [1]: “On any given occasion, everything from personal factors such as how well a person has slept the night before,…
Introduction The issue with offline marketing is tracking. For many offline marketing efforts, such as exhibitions and networking events, it’s hard to track results. Participation in these events is often expensive, and the results are evaluated on a qualitative basis. Although qualitative evaluation is better than nothing, quantitative data is obviously better. And in many cases, we can do that –…
Introduction Here’s a list of analytics problems I’ve devised for a class I was teaching a digital analytics course (Web & Mobile Analytics, Information Technology Program) at Aalto University in Helsinki. Some solutions to them are also considered. The problems Last click fallacy = taking only the last interaction into account when analayzing channel or campaign performance (a common problem for standard Google…
