1 min read
The AI That Told a Brand to Raise the Budget It Just Cut
I've been on Jason Smith's show, The Truth About Social Ads, three times now. Jason runs Spotlight Social Advertising...
Scott Desgrosseilliers
Recent posts by Scott Desgrosseilliers
2 min read
The Five Forces Framework for Marketing Attribution
The Five Forces of Marketing Attribution : Scott on Measure U
I joined Jeff on the Measure U podcast for a deep dive into something I care about a lot : how to actually use your marketing data to scale, instead of just collecting it.
Most marketers have no shortage of data. Dashboards, platform reports, spreadsheets. The problem is that having data and knowing how to act on it are two very different things, and the gap between them is where a lot of budget quietly gets wasted. That gap is exactly what the Five Forces framework is built to close.
In this episode I walk through the framework end to end. We get into how to define your North Star metrics, so your team is measuring the thing that actually reflects growth rather than a vanity number. We cover how to sort your campaigns into Scale, Chill, and Kill zones, which turns a wall of data into a clear budget decision. And we talk about diagnosing campaigns with precise attribution, so you can tell the difference between a campaign that is genuinely driving new customers and one that is just taking credit for demand you already had.
A big part of the conversation is about people, not just numbers. One of the hardest parts of measurement is getting a whole team aligned on the same scoreboard without drowning them in complexity. When the marketing team and the brand are not aligned on how success is measured, things go sideways fast, and I have seen that play out over and over. The framework is as much about creating that shared, trustable scoreboard as it is about the math behind it.
We also get into how to use AI to activate your analytics rather than just analyze it, which is where a lot of the future of this work is heading.
If you are a performance marketer, a CMO, or an analytics lead who has ever felt like you are data-rich but decision-poor, this conversation is for you. Watch the full episode below.
Topics: Wicked Reports Marketing Attribution North Star Metric Five Forces Methodology Wicked Reports Podcast
2 min read
Cutting Amazon Spend to Fix Stalled Growth : A Case Study
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5 Missed Forecasts. Then One Budget Shift. Then 4 Straight Hits.
I joined Ralph Burns and the Perpetual Traffic team to walk through one of the most instructive case studies Tier 11 has run, a story that starts with five straight missed forecasts and ends with four consecutive quarters of growth.
The setup will sound familiar to a lot of operators. Ad spend was scaling, the dashboards looked fine, but the results kept coming in under forecast and customer acquisition costs were creeping up. The usual instinct in that situation is to double down on the channels that report the best numbers. The episode makes the case that this instinct is often exactly backwards.
What the team and I dig into is how a platform's reported performance can hide what is really happening. The conversation covers Meta's recycling loop, where the algorithm quietly re-converts existing customers instead of finding new ones, and why a channel that looks efficient on its own dashboard can be misleading once you measure it against real orders and genuine new-customer acquisition. They get into how multi-touch attribution and incrementality testing were used to figure out which channels were actually driving new business and which were taking credit for demand that already existed.
The turning point in the case study is a bold reallocation: cutting the vast majority of Amazon spend and moving that budget to top-of-funnel channels. It is the kind of move that feels risky in the moment, because you are pulling budget out of a channel that looks like it is working. The episode is candid about that risk, and about how the decision was pressure-tested with attribution and incrementality data before it was made. What followed was four straight quarters of growth, lower acquisition costs, and a meaningful lift in overall marketing efficiency.
It is a genuinely detailed, practitioner-level breakdown, not a highlight reel. If you have ever suspected that your best-looking channels might be holding you back, this conversation is worth the full listen.
Watch the episode below, and if the case study resonates, the multi-touch attribution and new-customer measurement behind it are exactly what Wicked Reports is built to provide.
Topics: Wicked Reports Marketing Attribution Amazon Budget Optimization Wicked Reports Podcast
2 min read
The Attribution Truth Google Won't Show You
The Attribution Truth Google Won't Show You: Scott on Grow My Ads
Scott Desgrosseilliers sat down with Austin LeClear on Grow My Ads for a conversation every ecommerce advertiser should hear: the attribution truth Google won't show you.
Here is the uncomfortable premise. Every ad platform reports on its own performance, and every platform is incentivized to take credit. Google grades Google's homework. That means the numbers in your Google Ads dashboard are not a neutral scoreboard, they are a self-interested one, and they can look healthy while your actual business growth tells a very different story.
In the episode, Scott and Austin get into why that gap exists and what to do about it. The short version of Scott's argument, the one he makes across every channel, is that platform-reported ROAS tells you what the platform wants you to see, not what it actually cost to acquire a customer who was not coming anyway. A brand can post a strong blended number while its true new customer acquisition cost quietly climbs. The metric that matters is not how much revenue a platform claims. It is what it costs you to bring in a genuinely new customer, measured against your real orders rather than the platform's own math.
That is the shift the conversation is really about: moving from trusting a single platform's self-graded report to measuring the full customer journey with first-party data, so you can see which channels actually start and close new-customer revenue. It is a practitioner-level discussion, not a pitch, and it is worth your time if you run paid traffic and suspect your dashboards are flattering you.
Watch the full conversation below, and if it resonates, that gap between what Google reports and what actually grew your business is exactly what Wicked Reports was built to close.