Why Data Attribution Matters in Creative Analytics

Evan Lee: Perfect. And then the first thing I'm going to do is share my screen.

Evan Lee: Awesome, everybody. Great. So for those of you who are joining us, like I'll say again, welcome, welcome, welcome. We are so excited to have you here today. Uh, both Ryan and I are are jazzed up for this one. We launched a cool new integration that's working well for our clients and new people in our industry. Uh, and we're excited to be here today to talk about why data attribution matters in creative analytics specifically. But before we start talking your ears off with all of this good stuff, Ryan is someone I definitely respect at the end of the day. So I'm almost wondering, Ryan, can we make sure that we, uh, we talk a little bit about who you are and what you're about and kick us off there?

Ryan Kovach: For sure. Uh, my name's Ryan Kovach. I help lead out the customer team over at Northbeam. Uh, I've been there for a little over a year, uh, 14, 15 months or so. My background is is kind of extensively, uh, in paid media. Um, helped run an agency for a handful of years. I've done plenty of white listing. Uh, I've very much been in the weeds. I, uh, uh, and my relationship with Motion goes way back. I remember jamming with you guys when when you were just getting to market and, uh, uh, just itching to have a product like yours out there just because every Monday I was briefing creative teams on, you know, tens of thousands of dollars worth of new ads and it was this four-hour long process and it was still, you know, not the best reporting, right? So, um, I've probably been in the space for like 10, nine, 10 years now of of running ads, helping brands grow, hitting those monthly stretch goals and and doing my thing. So over at Northbeam, I I my role is specifically help folks make sense of the data, dig in, make sure their strategy makes sense, make sure they're comfortable making decisions. And, um, as we continue to move kind of further and further away from iOS 14, the importance on creative analysis and in any media buyer's role has just gotten more and more important. So, uh, I'm excited to to have this conversation.

Evan Lee: For sure. For sure. No, and and it's so funny. Like Ryan talks a little bit about his relationship with Motion, but it's so ingrained that when I was chatting with Ryan, like we needed to bring our CEO Reza into the conversation because Ryan actually had such a solid creative process when he was buying ads, working with creative teams that it inspired a lot of what we have at Motion. So those spreadsheets that you were using, Ryan, crushed it. And now, again, when you talk about us helping out, you were a big inspiration for what we have going on here.

Ryan Kovach: Well, I'm, uh, I'm I'm glad to help and like I said, I was stoked the second I could put that four hours of work every Monday to rest and just use Motion. So, uh, yeah, man, love to hear it.

Evan Lee: Love it. I love it. And everybody, I just on my end, I know there's some new and some familiar faces who are in the audience with us today. My name's Evan. I'm the head of content or creative strategy here at Motion. And essentially it's a fancy way of saying like partnerships, client stuff, and all of that good stuff. So basically, why I'm excited to chat is because similar to Ryan, I've been in the weeds coming from an agency background. Um, but both of I, both of us literally talk to to to our clients, to prospects every single day. So we have a pretty strong finger on the pulse of of what we're hearing from an attribution standpoint, from a creative strategy standpoint, and everything in between. So I'm hoping that the both of us can help shed some light on not only our integration, but more importantly, what's going on in the industry at this point. Cool. Um, but before we get into like really the meat and potatoes of what we have going on, the first thing that I wanted to do was just for those of you who are new in the audience and watching the recording, just talk a little bit about Motion and Northbeam. So I'll cover the Motion side. On the Motion side, uh, we are the hub for creative strategy.

Evan Lee: And essentially, like Ryan was saying, like all of creative analytics previously happened in spreadsheets. Can you imagine a creative person having to do that essentially? So on our end, what we try to do best is we want to make it easy for people to understand in a very visual way what's going on, translate that into action, and then ultimately share that off very, very easily with everyone else who's involved. And we like to think of ourselves as honestly the hub for creative strategist work. So that's on our end. And Ryan, on your end?

Ryan Kovach: Yeah, over at Northbeam, um, the way I like to say it is we're an accurate compass that you can trust, right?

Ryan Kovach: Like, uh, especially iOS 14 was a big, you know, uh, event in the space. Um, but at Northbeam, we're doing attribution and specifically multi-touch attribution with first-party data. And then we have a couple technical, uh, pieces, components in there that kind of add to the robustness. We're building a device graph for all of our users, uh, to stitch and cleanse all of their touch points together, right? And getting a little into the weeds, but if you're familiar, like Facebook's default attribution is a seven-day click, one-day view. Google's default attribution is a 30/30, uh, out the box. And I always like to say multi-touch attribution is is dealing with a finite pie. We don't care who who gets the revenue. We're just trying to give folks an accurate compass that they can use to make decisions. And it's one of those things where anybody who's been an ad buyer, they've they've maybe seen a Facebook campaign or a Tik Tok campaign that, uh, looks really good, right? They go to scale it up and then they check their their back-end Shopify and they see that, hey, cash didn't move. Uh, what's going on there, right? So we are hoping to squash that problem and that's a a big piece of the pie that folks come to us for. Um, and yeah, so big believers in first-party data, big believers in an indefinite attribution window so we can track if somebody had a touch point from Tik Tok 90 days ago, but then branded search converted them yesterday, we can actually see that journey, stitch that user together, and then spit out the performance data as well as some of those soft metrics, uh, for brands to make better and better decisions.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. And then, of course, you know we had to link up and make Motion and Northbeam ultimately come to life. I was going to say Northbeam and like mix it all together essentially.

Evan Lee: But basically, why I like to think of how this starts to happen is basically Northbeam's able to give you that compass of exactly what what Ryan was mentioning there. And what we also know to be true is that creative has become the most important element of all of your advertising efforts, right?

Evan Lee: But ultimately, what we've also noticed is that, hey, on one hand, like both Ryan and myself come from, the media buying end, we're very analytical. We can dive into that data. Whereas on the other side of things, we have our creative folks who are less data analysts, but more so creative and conceptual, right? So what we want to be able to do is we want to be able to marry all of the great data with some really strong visual representation of what's happening.

Evan Lee: And that's where we start to come to life. So very easy to see things like these videos with that data to make sense of what's actually going on. And like I mentioned earlier, we're leveraging Northbeam's amazing metrics. We're making it really easy to share, and everybody, not just our media buyers, but everybody in between is able to get what they need from these styles of reports. Cool.

Evan Lee: So, that's a little bit of like the introduction when I talk about we help zoom in, Northbeam helps zoom out.

Evan Lee: The one thing I wanted to cover before we really get into the the Q&A here is from a housekeeping standpoint. So for the folks who are in the room with us, the first thing that I'd like to add is like share any burning questions that come to mind in the chat. And we have a pretty good community and some smart people in the house. So if there is, uh, like a question in there that you might have an answer to, throw your answer in there as well. Like I'm excited to see what we have going on. The second thing that I wanted to note here is because it's the launch of this integration, um, there is a 50% offer for three months from both of our ends. So that means, uh, Northbeam clients who sign up for Motion, you get it. Motion clients who sign up for Northbeam, you get it, and you're good to go. And then the final thing I'll note here is ultimately the recording and deck will be made available after this presentation. So everybody, we've got you covered. Uh, and that's what we got going on today, folks.

Evan Lee: So the excited piece that we have, and I think, uh, where I wanted to start, and then Tash or Tosh, we'll get to your question in a second there. But Ryan, the question that I have is you started talking about attribution a little bit like at a high level. Like, let's talk more about it in depthly. Why do people need to care about attribution and why is this such a big topic right now? I know it can be a hot button one.

Ryan Kovach: Yeah, for sure. Um, I mean, I'm I'm I'm biased. I work at Northbeam, right? But like, uh, the biggest seal of approval, uh, I can give is like my time is over here, right? And I think it is so important because there's so many, as buyers and as, uh, uh, executives who run direct-to-consumer brands, we're always looking to make sure we're as profitable as we can be, right? And, uh, the reality is third-party data has gotten less and less reliable as we move on from iOS 14. Um, GA4 is coming, third-party cookies are going to continue to get deprecated. And it's one of those things where if you find yourself spending, maybe it's just for a week or maybe it's for two weeks, but leaning into a campaign ad set or ad that isn't actually driving incremental new folks into the business, it's going to be really hard to hit your monthly goals, right? So, uh, all the platforms, um, do a great job, but they have their own limitations, right? They can't collect first-party data, uh, on on behalf of the customers. Um, so if you want to make sure your your ship is always steering in the right direction, you want to have data that you can trust, right? And that goes for, you know, landing pages, conversion rates, it it very much goes for creative and creative analytics. Any lever you're in control of pulling as an ad buyer and an executive, uh, offers, right? You want to make sure the data that you're looking at and the data that you're using is as accurate as it can be, so you're you're not wasting any money, right? Um, and especially for the creative side of things, uh, I always view it as like 70% of the job now, right? An ad buyer, maybe when I first started jamming with you guys, maybe it was 50% or 60%. I think 70% may even be conservative, right? It's like a core lever and there's even more and more accounts that I see that, um, they're setting it broad, right? Maybe they're using Advantage Plus, maybe they're using some bid caps. They're they're doing less and less targeting, less and less lever pulling than they were before. And so they need to make sure, hey, the dollars we're spending, are they actually driving new folks into the door? And that's where I think we fit in, right? Is we're a measurement tool, uh, that anytime you you're briefing your creative team or you're working with a creative team on, and maybe you pay a thousand bucks for a video or maybe you make it in house or maybe you pay $10,000 for an influencer, right? And they send you the assets that they want. You want to be able to tell like, am I ROI positive here? Or are there any trends in the video types or ad types that we're doing that I should double down on, right? A good creative team is always working hand-in-hand with the ad buying team to make sure that they're not just making an asset once, but they launch it, they listen to the data, they get accurate insights, and then maybe they're making revisions. So, uh, none of that is really possible without accurate data attribution, uh, and and why I'm, uh, uh, working so hard and and so proud of the work we've done over at Northbeam is because I think there's a lot of folks who continue to to need this.

Evan Lee: Honestly love how you just take that to the bottom line at the end of the day. We make micro decisions every single day that ultimately flow down or flow up to the bottom line. So having that understanding there is so important. A follow-up question that that comes to mind for me is around the type of decisions that could be made. So you talk to so many different roles, so many different types of people. What are you typically advising those different roles and people on, hey, this is what Northbeam's telling me, these are some of the things that you can do.

Ryan Kovach: Yeah, for sure. Um, sticking with the executives for a second, uh, we give that granularity on first-time performance. So I'm always making sure is our cash position as efficient as we want it? Is our MER where we want it to be, that media efficiency ratio? And then is our cost per new customer where we want it to be? And sort of those core performance metrics are the ones where I always want to have a pulse of of how they're trending, right? But for the ad buyers, I there's a lot more analysis that you can do, right? And some some executives like to get in the weeds, right? They want to know every optimization you're doing, they want to know every insight you pull out. Uh, but for the most part, I'm going to say that's the ad buyer's job and and put my ad buyer hat back on. And for those folks, um, specifically as it relates to creative, you have your normal performance metrics, right? That that ROAS, that first-time ROAS that are very important and I think, um, should kind of be the the have the most weight when you're making decisions. But when you're making creative optimizations and when I would do these conversations of, okay, here's all of our top five ads over the last 14 days. Here's our bottom five ads over the last 14 days. And here are the insights on the ads that we just launched last week, right? When I'm having those conversations, I'm looking for different things. I want to see is this ad engaging? Are they stopping the scroll, thumb stop rate? Are they getting depth with the video, hold rate or through plays or or looking to see depending on your platform where the drop off is. If you're on, you know, YouTube analytics, I want to see that click-through rate. And then CPC matters to me, but CPC is going to be a function of your auction dynamics plus how engaging and how much depth your ad had. So I'm starting there, right? When I'm building my motion reports, I'm looking at my my engagements, those those shares and comments and all that good stuff. I'm looking at my thumb stop rate, I'm looking how much depth I'm going. And if I ever see an ad or a type ad, maybe we're doing UGC videos, right? And I see that their performance is maybe 20% lower than, um, maybe my average, my baseline, right? So 20% lower. If I was just looking at performance metrics, I may say, hey, I should turn that off, right? But for a lot of brands, maybe they just spent $5,000 to get all those videos made. They're putting a lot behind these. Um, I think just turning them off wouldn't be the right move. I think the most effective move right now is to analyze how engaging, how much depth, how much action did this asset create, and then optimize from there. So if we were to look at that UGC and say 20% below on our on our ROAS number, but then we saw the thumb stop ratio wasn't very strong, but then we saw for the folks who did watch it, the hold rate, so people who watch maybe 15 seconds of the video or in the middle third, we saw a ton of engagement right there. That would be a piece that my creative team would want to know. And if I ran into that scenario, I would say, we're close, the ads are a little bit below baseline, but when people watch it and click on it, it's really engaging. And those folks are taking some action, the conversion rate is strong. Let's optimize against the thumb stop rate. Can we take the same asset, just chop off the first five seconds, and then do three different variations where the first five seconds is a bit different? And if you make those changes, I would expect if the other soft metrics are supporting, that that ad may very well be a winner still, right? So it's I always view it's not as you're doing yourself a little bit of a disservice if you're just looking at the top-line performance numbers. I want to drill into, am I getting engagement? Am I getting depth? And are folks taking action? And if any one of those is really strong, or if any one of those is lacking, that's when I put my qualitative hat on and I'm like writing out the insights as to why I think why. The thumb stop rate is incredible on it. And maybe we had a puppy in the first three seconds. I may brief to the creative team like, hey, let's try more pets in those first three seconds. Like folks seem to love it, but let's just beef up our call to action at the end because even though folks are stopping the scroll and they're watching a lot of video, we don't specifically do a call to action and that's hurting our click-through rate. So I'm kind of measuring down the funnel of of those metrics. Um, but then always viewing at the lens of, am I driving first-time customers with this? And that's where like, uh, I love our partnership so much because like e-commerce rate conversion on a first-time basis can be a wildly different number from your conversion rate for returning customers. And if you ever see that, right? If maybe your ROAS looks decent, but it's all coming from returning folks, that's not a a winning scenario for me. I'm probably not scaling up in that scenario. I'm I'm going back to the lab, I'm doing some adjustments and and I'm relaunching.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. And then on my end, like the same way that that you get to talk to a lot of people, I'm so happy that I get exposure to so many creative and brand teams because like I was mentioning a little bit earlier about this natural disconnect that happens, it's like, hey, creative is now more important than ever. Creative teams and media buyers need to be at the hip in terms of how they're approaching what's happens, but their natural skill set creates that distance, right? So for the creative teams that I chat with and any creative folks that we might have in the house, some of the metrics that Ryan was speaking to earlier are what you have to care about most. That means you don't have to care about everything. So for example, what some of this information starts to look like, and of course, this forever evolves, but at the bottom line, we have all of the metrics that Ryan was chatting about in terms of new existing conversion rates and all that good stuff. But when we drive into the engagement side of things, what we're looking for is like, hey, CTR all versus outbound. How is our thumbnail performing and getting people to actually continue their scroll? Our hook rates and holds, how are those working together? And then our waterfalls, what are people doing? And why it's so beneficial to actually know these specific type of metrics is because it makes it actionable for you to do something with it. So what I mean by that is when we're thinking about briefing on the creative end, it's no longer, whoa, whoa, whoa, I have metrics all over the place. What do I do with it? It's like, hey, if we're talking about thumb stop ratios, let's make that our focus. We know or we've seen that there's a correlation between thumb stop and conversion rate, like Ryan has mentioned. So what that means as a creative person, knowing I want to increase my thumb stop, let's just do two new versions and make it nice and easy. So this is where we're able to take that engagement data and bottom line data and actually marry it with what next steps can look like. So that's that evolution, like Ryan starts to chat about there. Um, and then I know we only have four minutes left here and we're kind of breezing through what we have going on, but something that I wanted to chat about before we get to a quick Q&A of of a couple questions that we've seen roll in is just Ryan, both of us are lucky to get exposure to so much data. So I'm just wondering on the trend side of things, especially in Q1, is there anything that's worth sharing with the audience that we have today that would be good to know?

Ryan Kovach: Yes. Um, CPMs are climbing a little bit, especially as we round out, uh, Q1 here. And sometimes that's a function of, you know, uh, uh, corporate budgets coming in, uh, getting their allotted spend, uh, to close out the quarterly budget, right? But it's also one of those in-between seasons a little bit. So there's, I'm always very interested in going broad. I'm always very interested in in sourcing, uh, Google AdWords affinity audiences. They have this really good, I I feel like it's been out there for a while, a long time, but I still feel it's underutilized. Uh, pulling your interest from that channel and testing again. Um, I'm continuing to pay a lot of attention to, uh, both Tik Tok just because they're in the news right now and who knows how that plays out, as well as YouTube shorts, especially as, uh, and I think you guys have something exciting coming soon on this, but the on the YouTube side, um, I'm seeing a handful of folks that they have good organic content, there's a lot of wiggle room on the short side, especially organically to prop out 15 seconds of engaging content and run that piece as its own short. And I've actually seen that work both organically really well as as well as in some ads. So shorts, I think are are trending up right now. And if Tik Tok does happen to get the axe and and all those DAUs and active users have to migrate, I expect a lot to go to shorts and reels. So I'm paying attention over there. Um, Twitter ads a little bit, uh, is is kind of in the air. It's in the zeitgeist. Um, more and more folks testing over there. Uh, outside of that, I'm seeing Advantage Plus on Facebook, uh, work better than it was working previously. So a lot of folks shifting budget in that direction. Some amount of, uh, Facebook shop, Facebook shops are continuing to push that. But I still view it as cream rises to the crop, right? Anytime we're nearing the quarter and CPMs are rising a little bit, um, the more you can streamline your workflow around creative analytics, like I said, that's 70 to 80% of an ad buyer's job. And if your team is doing a really robust job of like, okay, why were these my top five ads, right? Why were these my bottom five videos, right? And analyzing that, cutting again, uh, making the most of your assets, squeezing the most out of it, um, that's going to go a long ways. So those things are always on my mind. Um, but but paying attention to Twitter, paying attention to YouTube shorts, continuing to go broad while while refreshing with some Google, uh, audience insights.

Evan Lee: Love it. I love it. And then the final minute I will use here is is Tash had a question in our chat. Can we use Northbeam with Webflow?

Ryan Kovach: Um, I think the answer is yes. Uh, so we have a server API where, um, I haven't specifically done a Webflow one in a little bit, um, but as long as we can add a conversion pixel where the purchase happens, as long as we can add a base pixel where the head tag happens, and as long as we are able to receive your order table data, um, it should function just fine. So we play great with Shopify. We have a plugin for WooCommerce and Magento. Every other system, whether it be Webflow or custom, we actually have an API where we work with you guys to receive the orders and then we'll sync that order table up with our device graph and start mapping that way. So the answer should be yes, but feel free to drop me an email, [email protected], and I'm happy to to, uh, make sure we're all squared away there.

Evan Lee: Perfect. We'll be sure to follow up with the contact information as well. And then Charlotte, to end this off, had a question related to non-videos. What metrics can we care about? I'll take the lead here, but Ryan, dive in because I know you'll know what's going on. So the most simple form, Charlotte, is actually comparing like our CTR outbound clicks to the conversion rate. And CTR outbound clicks is actually letting us know who goes to the website at the end of the day, and the conversion lets us know if they buy or not, right? So when I'm looking at data like this, when I'm thinking about how to optimize, what I'm ultimately looking for are instances where I might actually have a lower click-through rate in comparison to the rest of the account, but a higher conversion rate in comparison to the rest of the account. And that just tells me, hey, not too many people are clicking, but those who are, they're buying. So for this specific creative here, my goal becomes, can I increase the CTR so it's a little bit higher, but maintain a conversion rate that's healthy because the story works. So I might change this one up. So there's like, I don't know, dark to light, Tik Tok text overlay, something along those lines, but that's that's some of the stuff that I'll focus in on from an easy standpoint. Ryan, not sure if you have anything else to add on that one.

Ryan Kovach: Yeah, I think that's good. And like, uh, reality is there's less depth on on images than videos. So like, Charlotte, your point is spot on. There's a little bit less action there. Um, I'm still very much paying attention to my, uh, comments, shares, and and reactions, right? Uh, any of that good engagement feeds the algorithm. And some of, um, I haven't done too much thorough analysis on this, but I'm seeing it pop up more and more. But I'm seeing more brands like facilitate comments. Like they'll do an ad, they'll have one of their community managers chime in on the top comment of the ad and be like, boom, I just used this camping with me and my dog out. Uh, and if somebody replies, you reply back to them and go like, uh, uh, show me a picture of you with your dog. Whatever you can to to, uh, invoke comments, that feeds, if you're familiar, the bear score and algorithm, uh, on Facebook, uh, comments, likes, and shares, all the platforms love that action. You'll get a little bit extra juice in the system. So when I'm looking at just images, uh, I'm making sure to include those metrics in there. And I would say it's a little bit more soft because you could have a lot of comments on something where the ad is isn't even, there's no call to action, you're not even trying to get people over there. But I'd be looking at any insights of is this ad middling, but it got a ton of comments and engagement there. Should I change my path to purchase? Change the URL? Should I change up my headline? Because people are engaging, that's half the battle there. So, um, yeah, I'd go likes, comments, and shares as those additional soft metrics on on the, uh, image side of things.

Evan Lee: Amazing. No problem, Charlotte. You have options. You have options at that point. Amazing, everyone. So we kept this one nice and short just to introduce to the to the integration, some of the stuff that we think about and ultimately how we view the world. You'll get a follow-up email that's ultimately just letting you know, uh, with the recording and everything else that you'd like, but you can get that 50% off. Um, but I know that both Ryan and I really, like I'll say it again, appreciate everyone's time. So thank you, thank you so much for taking the time with us today, everybody.

Ryan Kovach: Pleasure.