Last week, we had the pleasure of hosting a webinar where we went behind the scenes of our recent product launch of Rockerbox Experiments. We explained the importance of integrating attribution and experimentation to drive more effective marketing performance, as well as how Rockerbox makes achieving this possible.
In our first installment of our newest blog series, “Rockerboxer Roundup,” we’re asking Product Manager Eddie Chou what marketers at direct-to-consumer brands need to know to conduct effective ad experiments and enable a more data-driven organization.
I’m the Product Manager leading Experiments at Rockerbox. I also lead other parts of our product, primarily focused on platform integrations and reporting. Prior to that, I led our first fifty customers through onboarding on our platform.
Before Rockerbox, I spent 15 years in SaaS start-ups, and even earlier a brief two-year stint in manufacturing. I have a passion for technology and solving problems, and many times those two go hand-in-hand.
Outside of work, I enjoy exploring the Pacific Northwest with my partner and two dogs, cooking, gardening and training Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
One key learning we discovered while engaging with our customers and prospects is that they’re thirsty to test marketing! They test different creatives, messages, landing pages, geos, audiences, and so on. To set up these tests, they would run these in individual ad platforms and rely on those platforms’ reporting to analyze the results.
This created disparate sources of data assets as these same customers were already incorporating Rockerbox into their marketing analysis and decision-making, so they would look at Rockerbox for cross-channel performance and then individual platforms for test results. This wasn’t ideal, and we built Rockerbox Experiments to bring this all into one platform, which is the desired operating procedure for our customers.
Rockerbox Experiments therefore allow our customers to review the results of third-party platform tests within Rockerbox, alongside their existing marketing attribution.
Each measurement approach has its strengths and purposes:
With these approaches in mind, Rockerbox Experiments was built to fill the need for brands that run tests frequently and need to see those results alongside their multi-touch attribution results.
Experimentation is challenging because it requires several critical components:
We view Rockerbox as not only a measurement platform, but also core data infrastructure for a marketing organization. To that end, we’re primarily focused on analytics and don’t involve ourselves in media execution. Rather, we see ourselves as arming our marketers with a wealth of information to make better business decisions.
The great news is that if you’re already running those experiments in other ad platforms, then all you need to do is identify those campaigns within Rockerbox Experiments, and you’ll immediately see the lift and statistical significance of those results. Already started an experiment? Don’t worry: so long as you’ve completed standard Rockerbox tracking, then you’ll be able to review the analysis in Experiments. No wasted test budget!
Running multiple test campaigns that you want to compare against a single baseline? Now you can identify them all and view each result individually.
Rockerbox Experiments leverages all the existing products we built out to provide as much depth of marketing and conversion reporting as we have available. That means we will use clicks, impressions and other techniques, including creating synthetic events to measure performance. If we’re reporting on marketing performance in our attribution platform, then we will also report on that in Experiments.
A similar question we get asked is what attribution type are we using, meaning: is the performance based on last touch, first touch, or modeled? For Experiments, our motivation is to focus on the performance lift of each test, and for that, it made most sense to us to use a concept called “assisted conversions.”
An “assisted conversion” is any conversion where the marketing touchpoint was on the path to conversion, regardless of the sequence of events. We chose this because this metric most closely corresponds to what each ad platform will report on their own and will separate the noise of other campaigns from the Experiment.
Rockerbox is all about upholding our core values, one of which is continually improving to strive for better results. That’s why we’re dedicated to enabling marketers with the tools they need to achieve their business goals.
You can watch our webinar on Rockerbox Experiments on-demand in case you missed it, and if you’d like to learn more about experimentation with Rockerbox, reach out today to schedule a demo.