CEO: I hate how our ads are starting to look. I feel like we're starting to come across like used car salesmen.
VP Growth: I feel the same way, but they work.
CEO: What does “they work” actually mean?
VP Growth: They drive revenue. Isn’t that what we want?
CEO: Yes, but there might be a cost to our brand we’re not accounting for.
VP Growth: That sounds hand-wavy. I thought we prided ourselves on being data-driven.
CEO: We do. I’m realizing we haven’t been looking at the right data.
VP Growth: I thought we had all the performance marketing data we could get our hands on.
CEO: Have you been tracking our organic traffic from branded searches?
VP Growth: Sure, quarterly for board meeting prep.
CEO: Great. Is our branded search volume up or down vs last year? By how much? Is traffic from branded search up or down? Is the share of total traffic and total revenue from branded search up or down?
VP Growth: Umm...
CEO: And how often are you looking at ROAS from our ads?
VP Growth: Every 15 minutes during a 9-hour day and a few times after... so roughly 38 times a day.
CEO: So we look at paid media stats 3,420 times more frequently than our organic business driven by branded search?
VP Growth: When you put it that way... but there’s so much noise in that organic number. It goes up with more spend, discounts, new products, and in core season.
CEO: That’s why we strip out the noise and seasonally adjust to get to a resilient baseline representing our brand strength.
VP Growth: How do we get to that baseline? We can’t turn off ads, discounts, and new product launches for a while to see the base.
CEO: Unfortunately, you’re right. Let's use our best judgment and get to a rough, imperfect, directional calculation of the true base.
VP Growth: Nice. Then what?
CEO: Once we have the rough base of branded search volume and revenue, we’ll take 30, 60, 90, and 180-day rolling averages and compare each year over year. Again, it’s imperfect, but we’ll start to get a feel for which look-back period is most useful when evaluating if we're raising the base.
VP Growth: Seems reasonable.
CEO: We’ll pick one KPI to keep things simple. For now, let’s go with branded search volume and allocate 10% of our budgets and 25% of our time to driving that base, and we'll increase as we see signal
VP Growth: Love that. Here’s my realization: All marketing is growth marketing. It’s about generating the biggest totality of high-margin dollars over the mid and long term. We'll have to make the cost cuts now to support the evolution. The spike-stripped-seasonally-adjusted base of branded search volume is a reasonable leading indicator KPI. All our inputs (channels, tactics, creative, targeting, etc.) will be accountable to that output, and it's my job to find those inputs.
CEO: That was epic. You’ll have my job someday.
VP Growth: Thanks, but I’m thinking of getting into used car sales...
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