How to Test & Validate the Right Channels

Quotes

• “I love seeing the progression of the martech landscape over the years and saw some software providers, and I thought this is pretty mind blowing. But when I was looking at it what I felt was missing was the understanding of the proportion of the different solutions. So they’re nicely segmented and you see the different logos, because some logos are very small. These are the revenue employee count or material impact that business has and some of them have a significant impact.” - Oren“So what I did was, I took that entire list then in collaboration with SimilarWeb and we looked at that and analyzed the traffic patterns across all those different software vendors over a three-year period. And I sat for about a month and a half with my data scientist, I would look for interesting patterns or stories that we can extract in order to understand what’s really happening in the marketing landscape from a traffic point of view.” - Oren“Traffic, in the most reductionist sense, if you know what your conversion rate is, and that’s relatively static, the more traffic you increase, you can start predicting your number of leads, your marketing qualified leads, hence your customers. And for me, I’m always interested in understanding how to build scalable and predictable growth engines for the different businesses that I support as a CMO.”  - Oren“So traffic, as a marketeer, is the first initial metric you think about on top of the funnel that impacts the rest of your dominoes that gets to your sales qualified leads which is kind of that golden nugget between sales and marketing and the most tense point that helps the B2B business scale.” - Oren“Traffic is also a very valuable metric because it’s a nice metric to use to compare different solutions in different websites and understand the growth rates or the shrink rates, then  you can also analyze that on a category level. Is the overall category growing? Or shrinking? And that is now telling you a tidal wave, like are you going to ride that wave? Or you actually just invested and bought a really expensive kit in a category that’s shrinking, like the DMPs (Data Management Platform). We’ve seen DMPs decreasing very rapidly, and therefore you don’t want to invest in a DMP now if you’re a CMO or a senior executive.” - Oren“There are 6 parent categories but then there are also 49 sub-categories. In the top 6, we’re doing advertising and promotion, commerce and sales, content and experience, data management, and social and relationship and I think what’s really interesting was, some of those categories that are growing and shrinking are quite intuitive.” - Oren“For example, I didn’t expect CRM to be growing and I didn’t expect social and relationship. Some of the sub-categories in there are shrinking so catastrophically. There’s a lot of variability in the data and the way you slice it, you get very different answers depending on what you’re trying to assess or gather.” - Oren“The data tells me that there is a ridiculous skew. The very few players command a disproportionate amount of traffic. That’s the first insight. The second insight is, it’s un-intuitive as to which categories are growing, some of them, you never heard of, and which ones are shrinking. The pattern is unpredictable and I also think it’s very fragmented and the fragmentation is very challenging.” - Oren“It’s very hard to delineate from the data set what’s B2B and what’s B2C. For example, is Google more B2B or B2C? We all know Google Ad drives huge volume of sales and leads for B2B but it’s predominantly used for B2C context. And the problem with classification in the martech landscape is the duality of business and there’s no way to discern it using the company’s website so I spend a lot of time answering that question.” - Oren“I think there’s an interesting conversation to be had about what traffic really means. Traffic means different things to different businesses.” - Ben