Hello, and happy Monday!
This is issue no. 12 of the Nebulab newsletter, your favorite bi-weekly reflection about retail, DTC, and eCommerce technology.
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Here's an unpopular take: our industry has some serious control issues. We were spoiled by decades of performance marketing and dead-simple attribution measurement. Life seemed simple when we could trust our dashboards and track our customers' touchpoints across a virtually infinite time window.
Unfortunately, we're now having to cope with two forces that are making those dashboards useless: targeting and attribution becoming more challenging because of privacy-focused technical changes and the surge in popularity of upper-funnel, harder-to-measure marketing channels (e.g., podcasts, influencers, OOH).
Now, to be clear: we're all in favor of using data to inform your marketing mix—we've published entire articles about how to do proper experimentation. However, it's time to wake up to the fact that our data obsession is causing collateral damage: brands are either reluctant to go into "hard-to-measure" marketing channels, even when they're potentially very effective, or they spend a disproportionate amount of time and money in measuring the unmeasurable.
So, here's our call to action: data is gold, but don't let the absence or uncertainty of data get in the way of your strategy. Devise proxy metrics, look for correlations, and learn to trust your instincts. The waters are getting muddier, but the fish are still there.
Below, you'll find our favorite reads about how the world of advertising is changing, and what brands can do to stay on top of the game.
Apple’s latest cookie restriction is ad tech whack-a-mole. Reader beware: technical read ahead. The long story short is that, after ATT, Apple is continuing their battle against third-party tracking, and the ad tech industry is continuing to find ways to circumvent the restrictions.
The next stages of Privacy Sandbox: General availability and supporting scaled testing. Google follows suit: in Q4 2021, they will start deprecating cookies for 1% of their users. Early research is encouraging, but it’s still unclear what impact the Privacy Sandbox will have on conversion measurement.
🔒 Startups are gearing up for Meta to prioritize traffic to Facebook and Instagram Shops. Facebook is directing more advertising traffic to Shops rather than a brand’s external site, most likely in an effort to amass more first-party data and improve the performance of their ad products. If this were to become mandatory—which is unclear at this point—it might just cause DTC storefronts to drown in a new sea of sameness.
How to measure “hard-to-measure” marketing channels. Sometimes the best way to fight chaos is to embrace it a little: “We’ve returned to the 20th-century’s marketing measurement systems: a model that demands less certainty, more creativity, and intuition > blind trust in analytics suites. Most businesses just don’t know it yet.”
New article
Supercharge Your DTC Performance with Product Management
If there's one thing we've learned about running a DTC brand, it's that collecting the right data is only half of the equation: if you don't know how to use that data systematically and intentionally, you're bound to drown in a sea of numbers and post-purchase survey responses.
Lucky for you, we've published an article precisely about this topic! Dive in to learn how you can borrow a few tricks from the world of product management to design a data-informed strategy that will allow you to tackle any challenges your brand is facing.
That's it for today!
If you have any questions, comments, or attribution models you're proud of, you know the drill.
See you in two weeks! 👋
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