Daniel Murray: Welcome to a new special series called The Bathroom Break, that extra 10 minutes, you either have to listen to marking tips or use the bathroom or both, but I don't recommend. But that's your choice.

Jay Schwedelson: This collab is gonna be super fun. We have Daniel Murray from the Marketing Millennials and me, Jay Schon from the Do This Not That podcast and subject line.com.

Jay Schwedelson: Each episode in this series, we are gonna go over quick tips about different marketing topics, and if you want to be in the bathroom, fine, just don't tell us about it. Thanks for checking it out.

Daniel Murray: We are back with another bathroom break and for those who can see the camera right now, Jay is literally in like this.

Daniel Murray: Puffer jacket and he has like a hot toddie in his hand with a beanie on and he is in some cold place, but he won't tell me where he is 'cause he is on the road doing some weird stuff. But like he's really, looks like he's at like a bundled up. I don't know what he is doing. It's so,

Jay Schwedelson: you might be the stupidest person alive first of all.

Jay Schwedelson: I'm on the road in Colorado and I'm not bundled up. I don't have a hot Todd, although I would have one if I knew what the hell it was. But I will tell you this, uh, it's two hour time change from where, you know, south Florida. It is crushing me at like 7:00 PM. I'm so tired and they scare the hell outta me.

Jay Schwedelson: I, I drink so much water. They're like, you're gonna, I've gotten altitude sickness before and Colorado's like high and I don't want to throw up. So I'm like drinking water and taking Advil. Like do you get any of that when you go to high altitudes?

Daniel Murray: Yeah, especially I've been to, I went to Salt Lake City once and I went like up to Park City and.

Daniel Murray: Just like quick ascent. I'm like, I needed to get that tea. There's like special tea that you're supposed to drink to help you with that. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah, I've got some bad headaches and altitude. I feel like we're weak being on C level. Yes.

Jay Schwedelson: Oh, I, I, I'm very weak. I, you know, it's funny, I was at a meeting in Utah and I didn't realize the altitude was like five or 6,000 feet in the middle of the meeting.

Jay Schwedelson: I had this crashing headache. I went to the restroom. I threw up in the middle of the meeting like I had, and then when I had to go back to the meeting, I didn't know what was going on. It was terrible.

Daniel Murray: Well, it was so funny. I was with my friend one time and we were walking in this place and it's like 10 years ago, and he's, he's walking and he's getting so tired and he goes, what's the altitude here?

Daniel Murray: And I'm, I'm like, turn around. And he's like, it's he, I'm like. It's sea level dude, he was just like sweating because he was just so tired. There's an ocean behind him and he's like, he thought he was an

Jay Schwedelson: idiot.

Daniel Murray: I was. I was dying. Uh,

Jay Schwedelson: that's amazing. Um, alright, so let's get into what, what we're talking about today.

Jay Schwedelson: So, attribution. There's not a marketer on the planet that doesn't focus on attribution, but, um, there are some tricks to actually getting attribution sort of right. But in general, attribution measurement is complete garbage. Daniel, are you on the, the garbage train?

Daniel Murray: Yeah, I, I think I've always said this and I've been in i marketing ops person before I decided to like go full content and social.

Daniel Murray: But, um. I always said attribution should be seen as like a compass where you directionally can find some answers, but don't use it as like A GPS, and a lot of people use it as a. I need to turn right, turn left, turn this way, turn that way to get to my destination. 'cause that's what attribution is telling me.

Daniel Murray: And I think that is the want wrong way to use directionally, it could tell you these channels might be doing better than this channel, but I don't think people who use it just as the, the roadmap is, is it's, it's the wrong thing to do.

Jay Schwedelson: Well, especially last touch attribution, right? I mean, are you on the train?

Jay Schwedelson: That last touch attribution is the worst. Before we get into ideas on what you should be doing.

Daniel Murray: Yeah, I mean, I mean the modern day buying cycle is most people have done the research before they get to your site. So, um, and, and the problem is that I've seen it most companies have been at is when they do that, they automatically put more money in Google search because that's usually like the last touch attribution.

Daniel Murray: 'cause someone's. Branded searching you or um, they're searching you online or they come in straight to your website, but someone, there had to be an action before they came to your website. And it, people don't wanna dig deeper into that. They just say, oh, here, executive team, look, we can put more money in Google because Google's doing so good for us.

Jay Schwedelson: Yeah. And I do believe with all the, uh, the LLMs and all the AI tools, and they all will eventually start taking ads. I don't care what Claude says, that there's gonna be more last touch attribution assigned to these AI tools, even though it's the same stupidity as assigning it to Google search. And so there's one, there's one tactic that we do a lot with our clients that I don't think enough marketers do, which is holdout groups.

Jay Schwedelson: So what a holdout group is, let's just use a round number and say you have a hundred thousand people in your database, right? And you have a whole campaign. You're pushing whatever it is that you're pushing, you know, to get new demos of your new SaaS product. Or you could be a consumer product, or you're trying to push some sort, a new offer, whatever, and you take, you could do this 5% if your big file is big enough or 10% and you take 10% of your database and you hold it out, you don't allow it to.

Jay Schwedelson: Get any of the emails, you don't allow it to be used for retargeting and remarketing. You do the best that you can to have those 10% to not be exposed to any of the, uh, media that you are aggressively pushing out there. And then what you do is after the campaign concludes and you take all of your net new customers that you've got, and you do it over a window of time to say, okay, I'm gonna take all the customers we got, you know, 30 days post the end of the campaign and all the customers we got during the campaign.

Jay Schwedelson: And then you match it back to your complete database, right? Um, and you say, okay, the people that we marketed to versus the holdout group. What was the actual lift that we got by doing the marketing or was there no lift? Did our marketing have absolutely no impact? 'cause the holdout group performed exactly the same.

Jay Schwedelson: And the delta between your holdout group and your and the people you've marketed to is your real performance. Now people, it's not an exact science. There's a lot of moving parts there. Whatever, but it does give you a much better view on how effective your marketing is. I don't think enough people do that.

Daniel Murray: Yeah, I think two things that I used to do is, one is geo base. So what I would do is, uh, pick a geo that, um, and just concentrate, let's say out of home there or radio there, or connected tv There. And just see like get a baseline of what it is now and for the last year and see if there was a lift in that area with, there's like doing that one tactic and there isn't a lift.

Daniel Murray: You will know, but usually you could tell there should be an incremental like branded search lift or some lift. Um, that's one, one thing I, I, I try, I I've done a lot when I've done is a geo-based, um, attribution testing. 'cause that will really tell you if something is lifting up in that, in that area. Um, it's more expensive though, so that's like the, the negative part of a geo testing.

Daniel Murray: But it's helpful to see like, does my tactics work in that area or not?

Jay Schwedelson: Yeah. And I think just in general, if internally you're assigning a lot of value to one channel. Uh, and you're doing multi-channel marketing or multi-platform marketing, that should be your red flag that, wait a minute, we think that, you know, we're driving all this on Instagram, but really simultaneously, we're running campaigns on Facebook, we're doing email, we're doing this all to the same people.

Jay Schwedelson: It's silly to just assign complete value to wherever it is that ultimately the person's converting in that last moment.

Daniel Murray: And, and a lot of people now are, are going to multi, multi like attribution models. Like they have like

Jay Schwedelson: Yeah,

Daniel Murray: multi-touch attribution. They have like, like media mix models. They have, um, incrementality testing.

Daniel Murray: They have like a bunch of things as like zero in. On what? That And that's actually a better way to do it, to have multiple, multiple things going at one time. Yeah. Because Facebook's a wall garden, Google's a wall of garden, um, they're gonna make it look better. 'cause that's how you spend more on those platforms.

Daniel Murray: So actually having multiple things going at a time and com compare and traffic. But the easiest thing that I like to, like the easiest thing to do is just add like, where did you hear about us on your form? A simple thing to just get someone to like, at least start getting directionally, and that's how a, a lot of people, we used to do that and we used to get, oh, we heard it in your YouTube channel.

Daniel Murray: We heard it in this, and then we, we could now invest more into those channels because they're actually telling us where they're hearing us from. It's not exact science, but it works sometimes. Um,

Jay Schwedelson: I'm curious about something since I'm in cold weather right now. Um, are you an Olympic guy? Are you like all in on the Winter Olympics?

Daniel Murray: I am because it's like, I, it's something I, I didn't grow up in cold, so it's so interesting to me how good people are on these things because I know how hard it's to ice skate. And I know how hard it's to ski, and when I see these people going 90 miles an hour, I just think how I would die if I, if I went one second off that I just thought about these drops are insane.

Daniel Murray: I read the funniest tweet the other day. It said, um. The Winter Olympics so, so crazy because there's people going around with knives on their feet and jumping off of um, hills, and then there's curling.

Jay Schwedelson: I feel bad for the curling people because they always get so much hate or whatever. Here's my problem with curling in all of it. I watch the curling people and I say, I don't believe those are the best. Uh, curlers in the world because it's not like, you know, Michael Jordan ever tried curling.

Daniel Murray: Right.

Jay Schwedelson: These are just the people that tried curling, so I know they're very good.

Jay Schwedelson: I'm sure they worked very hard, but they're not probably the best in the world at it. It's just they're the only ones who did it.

Daniel Murray: Smart. I mean, that's, that's the way to do capitalize on a market that is not being able to do.

Jay Schwedelson: Right.

Daniel Murray: Uh,

Jay Schwedelson: there you go.

Daniel Murray: I feel like you would be a good curler.

Jay Schwedelson: No, thank you. Thank you very much.

Jay Schwedelson: I really, I appreciate it. It's the nicest thing you've ever said to me. Uh, well with that, I hope everybody goes out there in curls, if that's what you say. I don't even know.

Daniel Murray: What is the, what is the, what is the, actually, I

Jay Schwedelson: don't

Daniel Murray: know.

Jay Schwedelson: The verb

Daniel Murray: curl.

Jay Schwedelson: I don't know. I think it's curls. Uh, let us know. Leave it in the, uh,

Daniel Murray: leave it a comment.

Daniel Murray: Uh, we'll see at the next one.

Jay Schwedelson: Daniel, come on man. I gotta get back to work. Get out of there. Alright, while he's still in there, this is Jay. Check out my podcast. Do this, not that for marketers. Each week we share really quick tips on stuff that can improve your marketing, and I hope you give it a try. Oh, here's Daniel. He's finally out.

Daniel Murray: Back from my bathroom break. This is Daniel. Go follow the Marking Millennials podcast, but also tune into this series. It's once a week, the bathroom break. We talk about marketing tips that we just spew out, and it could be anything from email subject line to any marketing tips in the world. We'll talk about it.

Daniel Murray: Just give us a, a shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear.

Jay Schwedelson: Peace out later.