2min chapter

Adspend with Ash Melwani and Rabah Rahil cover image

EP 26 - Is 'CRO' Actually HURTING Your Brand?

Adspend with Ash Melwani and Rabah Rahil

CHAPTER

Is It a Relation-Causation Issue?

Shane O'Brien is a senior vice president at CRO Shane's. He works with companies that are trying to get more revenue from their digital footprint. His company has been in the business for 20 years, but he says it hasn't always worked out as planned. "It wasn't lining up as much, and was harder," said O'Brien of his early days on the job.

00:00
Speaker 1
Like, you charge them, even if you charge them a couple grand a month, that's five months worth of work, to get that, like, all of a sudden, they just spent all that money profit-wise, and it's like, are you, like, you're not getting them a real ROI, like, when you actually break it down, so it was harder for me to, like, I wanted it to be like a home run, like, you're paying me, I don't want you to have to think about it, I want you to be like, yeah, this is, this is amazing, I'm making so much value, and so, just, it wasn't lining up as much, and was harder, and then I had other interests, that's kind of like the long path of, from start to kind of where I've gotten to with CRO stuff.
Speaker 2
So, totally tracking, a couple things there, so when, for example, if I do have a measurable lift in my ecosystem, is your issue that it wasn't the change that caused that lift, or, because that, like, for example, like, you can say, you know, like, you can objectively say, hey, this month we made 20% more after we hired you, Shane, and then you're saying that, even though the experiments did not, does that make sense, I'm saying, so is it like a relation-causation kind of issue, or? It's more, it's an attribution issue,
Speaker 1
it's the same thing as with like, marketing spend, it's like, how are you actually attributing what's working, and it's really hard, because it's like, think about it in like, the ad, you know, this show is called ad spend, think about with advertising, it's like you're spending money on Facebook, YouTube, like, yeah, it's digital, so you should be able to track it, but it's like, we all know that Facebook is counting conversions that came from Snapchat, or from YouTube, and like, sure, it's messy, and so when you start making changes on your site, like, okay, where did the lift in conversion come from? Was it because you finally removed the product that nobody likes off your site, so it kind of like, removed that distraction, or is it because you ran a 30% off deal? Like, oh, we also happened to this month while we're looking at the stats, like, we ran a free gift with purchase, and that crushed it, and like, so this test we were running, is that still valid?

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