Listen To Fairing On The eCommerce Fastlane Podcast

We recently dropped in on Steve Hutt’s long-running marketer podcast eCommerce Fastlane to break down all things attribution and gain a deeper perspective on the message of putting people over pixels in the DTC marketing space.

Just a few of the discussion points we tapped:

If you’re not already subscribed to the eCommerce Fastlane podcast, be sure to give this episode a listen here.

Key Takeaways

The foundational problem of growing your brand from misguided attribution insights

9:05

What we've noticed kind of looking at the trailing 12 months is that about a third of all orders lack … attribution data. So if you're looking in Shopify, trying to understand where that customer came from, whether that's looking at the UTM parameters, or just in your orders page, about a third of your orders are not going to have any data attached to them. Right. So that was kind of just fascinating to us, as these brands are trying to allocate their capital … [and] work super hard to find 5%, like even 1% improvements in their marketing effectiveness.

Yet there's this a third of their traffic that they really have no idea where it's coming from. I think a good analogy here that we always joke about is like imagine you're optimizing your car’s engine to be like 1% more efficient, while at the same time, you still can't see out of a 30-year windshield. It's like, how should you be focusing?

So that's kind of how we're looking at the problems, really start to identify where these people are coming from, and then you can really start to optimize everything thereafter.

Taking power back when the biggest ad platforms are grading their own homework

10:40

I'm assuming or hopefully, a lot of your listeners have heard about Facebook's over-reporting fiasco. Like I think most recently … they were over-reporting by over 900%. But unfortunately, since they're the ones as I said, before grading their own homework, there's not really much you can do on the merchant side. So I think we all need to accept that like this early phase, call it from 2010 to 2016, where brands could just rely on Facebook and Instagram, and just kind of scale from there like that honeymoon phase is over. And brands need to just really start building more diversity and accountability into their marketing plans as they scale. And right now from an attribution side of things like yeah, there's GA, and there is multi-touch attribution products, but there's really no advertising platform itself that is designed to help you kind of measure all of those sources, especially for the reason that they're all doing it themselves, like Facebook's grading its own conversion, Twitter, etc.

I think as far as these blind spots, and like grading your own homework … we like to just emphasize this concept of people over pixels, it's this idea of like, okay, you don't have to 100% rely on like this, these pixel conversion data, can really just start to engage with your customers and build a model around their input. And with that, like there's obviously no right attribution model, like one customer could be that recommended from a friend, or it could be that ad, that kind of that last click add, like, it's really difficult to tell. And all these attribution products are just aggregating an average in the weights of all these media touches when in reality, it's just impossible to tell. And then I guess the last point, there is word-of-mouth is still this elephant in the room. Like if you want to lower your CAC, and just drive your brand's growth like there's no bigger driver than word-of-mouth. And it's literally impossible to measure word-of-mouth, like you can potentially use a referral tool that incentivizes word-of-mouth, as far as knowing which customer came to you, because they heard from a friend is impossible to tell unless you just ask.

What brands can look forward to on the Fairing roadmap

23:51

We're actually rolling out response clarification. And you mentioned before, we're a one-question survey, and we're about to move into a two-question survey. And that is just clarification on a response. So we have all these customers who are advertising on podcasts or working with TikTok micro-influencers and yeah, the consumer can select “podcast”, but it's like which one.

And that's going to just allow people to drill down and we’ll obviously still capture that first response. So you'll have like a baseline and then you'll hopefully have a really valuable data set thereafter that allows you to understand a little bit deeper into these individual channels.

And then it's just focusing on improved reporting. Of course, it's kind of what everyone's asking for, and expanding our partner integrations. And yeah, we're working on a whole slew right now.