digital marketing Archives – Dr. Joni Salminen

A collection of beginners’ mistakes on digital marketing (based on student answers)

Published by Joni on August 3, 2025

1. Google Ads is nowadays NOT much about selecting keywords >> Google Ads is no longer about keyword selection >> Google Ads is most typically selecting the keywords on your behalf, especially in Performance Max campaigns >> there can be some campaigns (e.g., brand) in which you’d still want to manually select keywords, but this practice is no longer the…

Design Ideas for MMM SaaS Platforms

Published by Joni on September 18, 2024

Some ideas on directions toward which Marketing Mix Modeling Software-as-a-Service Platforms should be developed: So, an MMM SaaS tool should not only observe but it should actively suggest and, if suggested policy is accepted by the human manager, implement it in the ad platforms! I think this step from observations to interventions is necessary to unleash the potential of MMM.

AACO – Transferrable skills in digital marketing

Published by Joni on October 11, 2023

This post is inspired by the brilliant CRAP or CARE model by Mikko Piippo (this acronym is much poorer but have to start somewhere :). Transferrable skills are beneficial across different digital marketing roles, regardless of the specialization. Analytics The skill needed in every area of digital marketing, whether advertising, PPC, SEO, email marketing, social media marketing, conversion optimization, and so on.…

Sales attribution in cross-channel retargeting

Published by Joni on October 21, 2022

Digital marketing thought of the day (with Tommi Salenius): There are two channel types for online ads: “first-channel”, meaning the channel that gets a customer’s attention first. And “second-channel”, where we run retargeting ads to activate the non-converted audience from the first-channel. There are also two types of consumers: “buy now”, meaning those that buy immediately without the need for…

“It eliminates all the fun.” Automation taking over marketing?

Published by Joni on September 16, 2022

Jon Loomer, a well-respected digital marketer, was interviewed by Andy Gray in Andy’s podcast. They discussed automation and the impacts it has on the future of digital marketing. Andy asked what happens when everything becomes standardized by the platform? That is, when the platform sets the click price, chooses the targeting, and even writes the ads. The logic of the…

Fake reviews dataset and generation

Published by Joni on September 21, 2021

We published a paper and resources, including a dataset, related to generation of fake online product reviews. Link to the fake reviews paper. Link to the fake reviews dataset. Link to the fake reviews code.

How to Audit International Facebook Advertising? A 37-Item Checklist

Published by Joni on October 14, 2018

This is a joint article written with Mr. Tommi Salenius who works as a digital marketing specialist at Parcero Marketing Partners. Introduction Facebook advertising is a powerful form of online marketing for many purposes ranging from direct response campaigns to brand visibility and awareness. However, the competition in the ad platform is increasing every year, as companies are increasing their…

Automatic Analytics: Considerations for Building User-Oriented Data Analytics Systems

Published by Joni on September 24, 2018

This is an unpublished exploratory study we wrote with Professor Jim Jansen for Machine Learning and Data Analytics Symposium (MLDAS2018), held in Doha, Qatar. Change of landscape: For a long time, automation has been invading the field of marketing. Examples of marketing automation include the various scripts, rules, and software solutions that optimize pay-per-click spending, machine learning techniques utilized in…

Google Analytics: 21 Questions to Get Started

Published by Joni on August 11, 2018

I was teaching a course called “Web & Mobile Analytics” at Aalto University back in 2015. As a part of that course, the students conducted an analytics audit for their chosen website. I’m sharing the list of questions I made for that audit, as it’s a useful list for getting to know Google Analytics. The questions Choose a period to…

Simple methods for anomaly detection in e-commerce

Published by Joni on August 11, 2018

Anomaly is a deviation from the expected value. The main challenges are: (a) how much the deviation should be to be classified as an anomaly, and (b) what time frame or subset of data should we examine. The simplest way to answer those questions is to use your marketer’s intuition. As an e-commerce manager, you have an idea of how…

Tag: digital marketing