Agile VC

JUNE 5, 2011

How They Do It: Build email list of consumers interested in local deals (mainly via paid search & social network ads), sell coupon programs to merchants via telesales. Keep in mind Yipit is an indirect competitor in the daily deals space (essentially a meta aggregator of deals sites), but the analysis is sound IMO.

North America 100

North America Chicago Boston Silicon Valley 100

Occam's Razor

SEPTEMBER 24, 2012

Increased investment in Facebook as an engagement/acquisition channel has translated into requests from CEOs, CMOs and other CxOs about the return on that investment. Compute ROI: (cost of Facebook campaigns + salary of people running campaigns + agency creative costs) vs. profit from incremental product sales. Too strong?

Metrics 165

Metrics Advertising Marketing Social Media 165

Cracking the Code

MARCH 12, 2010

The SaaS growth recovery does not seem to take a "V" shape 2) Sales productivity is ramping up: bottom was hit in the first half of 2009 However, the sales and productivity of the group, measured by the median "Customer Acquisition Cost ratio" or "CAC ratio", seems to be recovering more steeply. Small and medium businesses. (2).

Software Review 63

Software Review Technical Review Cloud Forecast 63

Occam's Razor

MAY 2, 2017

There are Search people and Content people and Landing Page Optimizers and Cart fixers and Attribution Specialists and more. tearsofpain One way of removing silos and focusing on the entire business is to leverage Acquisition, Behavior and Outcome metrics. Remember: All data in aggregate is crap, segment or suck.

Metrics 141

Metrics Acquisition eCommerce Analytics 141

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 21, 2010

By now we all know that the largest part of the online spend has been SEM (search engine marketing) where people buy CPC (cost per click) links to display alongside the “organic&# search results in the search engine. They are detail oriented, cost focused, quality obsessed and chasing a big market opportunity.

Advertising 284

Advertising Las Vegas Affiliate RSS 284

Austin Startup

APRIL 25, 2017

I won’t dive into cost structure in this blog post, but let’s think through how Snap could grow revenue 20x. Had Facebook not purchased Instagram, Facebook’s aggregate numbers likely would have dipped as millennials have largely abandoned Facebook for Instagram and Snapchat. 2 years ago my grandmother didn’t have Facebook.

Valuation 48

Valuation Technical Review Forecast Social Network 48

Occam's Razor

AUGUST 8, 2011

and partly because all they do is present data in the aggregate (a punishable criminal offence if there ever was one!). Search Engine Optimization is key. Few people search with a word or two. How are we doing for the super important long tail search phrases? But not just SEO or keywords or our brand name.

Customer 122

Customer Analytics Metrics SEO 122

Occam's Razor

OCTOBER 14, 2014

Any big changes in your marketing/customer acquisition strategy over the last time period (more money doing Search, less money in Email, elimination Facebook as it does not work, etc., and Organic Search Traffic (can't ever have enough of that!)… In my case I'm looking at Social Media (boss LOVES social!),

Analytics 133

Analytics Vertical Metrics Web 133

Hippoland

MARCH 14, 2013

We had submitted our idea: “ ShinyOrb : Kayak for Weddings” I’d envisioned a one-stop site that aggregated bridesmaid dresses, wedding gowns, shoes, jewelry, invitations… . How big could we become if our existing competitors could just outspend us on customer acquisition? We had a lot to think about.

Product 81

Product Aggregator Metrics Cofounder 81

Austin Startup

JULY 5, 2017

Once you can call a self-driving Uber/Lyft, the cost of transportation will fall ~75% (current driver take-rate), and probably 85–90% in the long run as cars are re-engineered to be designed as taxis first. This was the basis of Tesla’s recent acquisition of Grohmann Engineering. In other words, it’s building the factory.

Nevada 66

Nevada Global eCommerce Engineer 66

ConversionXL

AUGUST 19, 2020

It’s the same for search engine marketing. Search volume dried up overnight for generic queries like “summer concerts in Richmond, VA,” as well as branded events that had been canceled. Shortly thereafter, we discovered a corresponding increase in paid search queries for “things to do during quarantine in Richmond, VA.”

PPC 69

PPC SEO Channel Analytics 69

Hippoland

MARCH 14, 2013

We had submitted our idea: “ ShinyOrb : Kayak for Weddings” I’d envisioned a one-stop site that aggregated bridesmaid dresses, wedding gowns, shoes, jewelry, invitations… . How big could we become if our existing competitors could just outspend us on customer acquisition? We had a lot to think about.

Product 48

Product Aggregator Metrics Cofounder 48

www.forentrepreneurs.com

FEBRUARY 2, 2010

Working backwards means looking at the components that make up Profitability: Profits (EBITDA) = Revenue – Cost of Goods Sold – Expenses So to focus the management team on driving profitability, we should also track and measure Revenue, CoGS, and Expenses. Let’s take the first of these, Profitability, and work backwards. Obvious, isn’t it?

Metrics 55

Metrics Design Entrepreneur Startup 55

Hearpreneur

AUGUST 2, 2016

We believe that traditional media buying – display and banner ads, PR, social media, search keywords, etc. – Hence the problem why they are having a hard time generating leads on a cost-basis that makes sense for them. And for issuers, many have even less resources to dedicate to marketing and investor acquisition.

Accredited Investor 48

Accredited Investor Non-Compete Vertical Acquisition 48

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

They know how much it costs to bring in a customer and they know how much money they can expect to make on each one. First of all, it means that most aggregate measures of success, like total revenue, are not very useful. Our cost to acquire a customer on AdWords was only a few cents. involved before we go into production.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Agile VC

MARCH 8, 2012

And finally margins matter… a $50-100M software company can go public given it’s 80-90% gross margins, an e-commerce company with 20-30% gross margins and high customer acquisition costs needs to be much bigger (probably 5-10x at least). My partner @ LeeHower looks back: [link] 5 days ago Search. Author howerl.

IPO 100

IPO Silicon Valley Revenue Seed Stage 100

www.kalzumeus.com

AUGUST 13, 2012

Statistically speaking, you’re probably reading it either through a feedreader or on an aggregator like Hacker News. Folks scamming you for the incentive are a — cheap — cost of doing business.). And it costs businesses real money. And lets not forget the cost. How are you reading it right now?

Email 54

Email Software Review Software Campaign 54

Occam's Razor

AUGUST 12, 2013

MCA-ADC covers the challenge of attributing credit to all digital marketing channels (Social, Display, YouTube, Referral, Email, Search, others) that contributed to a particular conversion (or multiple conversions). And you are telling me that the Cost Per Acquisition for my display campaigns is not $201 but rather a lowly $155?

Channel 161

Channel Analytics Campaign Conversion 161

ConversionXL

JANUARY 8, 2020

After the acquisition, it started branching out into more areas of data science and analytics. Enter a keyword to search the datasets database. Recently, Kaggle started offering it for private projects at no cost and with the option to use private datasets. In a Kaggle competition, you can compete for jobs or money (or glory).

Analytics 94

Analytics Artificial Inteligence Software Review Technical Review 94

ConversionXL

JUNE 21, 2015

Use minimal viable (low-cost) campaigns to test assumptions. Cost of customer acquisition = cost of visitor acquisition * conversion rate, if it is profitable: Increase the volume for the same traffic. Stay away from aggregate metrics – combine, segment, visualize, predict. Data is not easy.

Email 48

Email SEO Campaign Agile 48

Occam's Razor

JULY 18, 2011

I dare say even more than Search (and without a shred of doubt, more than Social Media). For everything you do it is important to measure your effectiveness of all three phases of your effort: Acquisition. Optimal Acquisition Email Metrics. In my experience that is normally because it is hard to find data related to true costs.

Metrics 137

Metrics Campaign Email Marketing 137

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 26, 2020

If we can’t determine where the traffic comes from, we can neither attribute conversions to their original sources of traffic, nor can we find out the true cost per acquisition (CPA) or return on ad spend (ROAS) for each marketing activity. For what reason are they coming to our website? What keyword exactly?

Analytics 118

Analytics Campaign Email Channel 118

abovethecrowd.com

OCTOBER 1, 2013

Internet analytics can be roughly broken down into two simple activities – customer acquisition and customer optimization. Nearly every Internet company on the planet has invested in some form of the first activity, customer acquisition. Customer acquisition efforts are pervasive in our industry.

Metrics 93

Metrics Conversion Internet Acquisition 93

David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

Coalesce address the more general problem of searching through large data sets for best fits. Pacer is useful to search prior litigation, bankruptcies, etc. Capital has built a free online tool for founders to calculate their cost of capital. Lighter Capital, a Revenue Based Investing VC, offers a Cost of Capital Calculator.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

Occam's Razor

MAY 20, 2013

Digital advertising and marketing is a key part of ZQI's multi-channel acquisition portfolio. As is common in these types of educational companies, aggregators rule the roost. How should you decide which one of these acquisition sources you should invest in more? The answer is simple: Aggregators. They do everything.

Analytics 139

Analytics Aggregator Channel B2B 139

Occam's Razor

APRIL 21, 2014

Find campaigns where they are spending most money, lower the bounce rate and reduce acquisition cost. But they don't realize the cost. What would be the future of Adwords marketers with not provided searched query ? Earn more affection. strategies). I blame their entrenched thinking. You're welcome.

Analytics 131

Analytics Marketing Campaign Metrics 131

www.pakman.com

SEPTEMBER 27, 2012

To build the online media giants of tomorrow, companies need models where the costs of both content and distribution are near zero. These models allow scale to emerge at very low-cost. That is the fundamental conundrum of online media economics; by far, the most profitable models have zero cost of content and zero cost of distribution.

Social Media 47

Social Media Vertical Advertising Distribution 47

Occam's Razor

AUGUST 13, 2012

How can I e.g. determine the ROI of my mobile traffic acquisition, when people regularly convert on their laptops later… What would be the current best practice to move towards a proper cross-device attribution, while maintaining or improving on privacy standards at the same time?? That means: All of these metrics are off. Yes and no.

Analytics 124

Analytics Channel Metrics Web 124

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 11, 2020

Twitter has an advanced search feature, but it also supports a couple of simple search operators that can help you find relevant discussions: Question search. Smiley search. Twitter supports both “:)” and “:(” search, allowing you to find tweets containing either. Simply add a space and a “?”

Conversion 68

Conversion Social Media Search Campaign 68

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 17, 2011

Creativity in our business lives – The average tech startup these days spends time talking with colleagues & investors about a multitude of things: customer acquisition, viral adoption, raising capital, hiring / firing employees, product features, technology trends, marketing / branding, and on and on. So I thought I would.

Technical Review 356

Technical Review Framework Audience Media 356

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 18, 2020

For example, while the data aggregation process in Google Analytics seems like a “normal” feature, it might be a hurdle if your business needs to process data at the hit level instead of by sessions or campaigns. Use Google Ads actively and have more than 15,000 clicks on Google search. Ad cost attribution. Customization.

Analytics 90

Analytics SQL Metrics Campaign 90

Occam's Razor

MARCH 23, 2010

It is a bit silly to believe you can use one tool for purpose x (say search analysis) and another for purpose y (say everything else). Do a Google search for the Consultant. Never bother to search for their company and look at the paid and organic results (to find broken things). Oh and don't forget rule #1 above.

Analytics 118

Analytics Web Metrics Channel 118

Occam's Razor

MAY 18, 2010

I have said: All data in aggregate is "crap" Because it is. You can imagine then how absolutely heartbreaking it is for me to note that nearly all reporting that I see is data in aggregate. Tons of data "puking", all just aggregates. PS: Our business is in trouble because we are over-reliant on Search!

Analytics 123

Analytics Web Acquisition Metrics 123

ConversionXL

APRIL 1, 2020

Here’s another Google Analytics screenshot: Although 19% of the traffic comes from paid search, none of the ecommerce transactions are attributed to it. Aggregates lie. At this point, all order data is still aggregated. Customer acquisition cost (CAC)—the other half of the equation. Facebook, Bing, AdRoll, etc.).

eCommerce 74

eCommerce Analytics Aggregator Differentiation 74

Occam's Razor

JULY 15, 2014

These are your Directors, your owners of the Paid Search strategy, and other functional leaders. Or: While revenue is up by 48% profits have plunged by 80% because of our aggressive shift from to Cost Per Click as the God metric, this has brought increased sales of our loss leading products. Delivered to a CXO. trend and target).

Analytics 159

Analytics Metrics Web Ohio 159

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

In an ecosystem, each participant acts according to its own imperatives, but these selfish actions have an aggregate effect. If you haven’t figured out the ecosystem, growth is useless – whether it is a acquisition-only viral loop, like Tagged, or an advertising blitz like countless dot-bombs.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Occam's Razor

JANUARY 30, 2012

Pro Tip: Always, always, always let the Acquisition, Behavior and Outcomes framework be your guide. Create a customized dashboard for your Search team, one for your Display team, one for the folks doing onsite merchandizing, one for the nice lady that owns the ecommerce shopping cart and all the other key clusters of your audience.

Analytics 145

Analytics Metrics API Web 145