Developing UA Skills Over a Career

for those that don't know me i am john lau i am the director of growth at we we're a online and mobile only e-grosser um and like josh said today we're gonna talk about frameworks for ua skills for building a career so give me one second and go ahead and share my screen all right um so i think in the last couple years there have been a lot of questions about like okay we're going to be moving more and more towards automation um and you know facebook has uh came out with value optimization value op and and then you have uac coming out with t row as and more and more you have a lot of people leveraging the uh kind of big data algorithms to do our campaign optimization what does that mean to for a ua manager and i think there's still so much uh that

uh a user acquisition person or a marketer or growth marketer can do to develop skill sets that will in my eyes at least future-proof your career for at least the next 15 years um i could be wrong but this is what i personally believe so we're only going to go about like my definition of what is ua we're going to talk a little bit about the frameworks for success and then we're also going to talk about some other attributes that i personally look for in candidates that i hire and hopefully those are the attributes that could carry them to success and then lastly we'll end with questions so what is ua to me right from my point of view user acquisition is a discipline in which a marketer applies the art of storytelling to proper media channels for targeted audiences in order to achieve a predetermined result one thing i really really want to emphasize here is the art of storytelling and i'm going to talk a

little bit more about that in the um frameworks but for me this is what ua represents there are four frameworks that i think of and i think there's this have been kind of uh uh other leaders in the industry have talked about various forms of this but to me these are the four frameworks that i focus on first one is um omnichannel orientation meaning um you're not thinking about one channel um you're really thinking about how over all different channels com complement each other and work together in order to build a balanced media mix for you to sustain growth second is storytelling um you have to know how to tell the story of your value proposition of your product whatever it may be to the right user and depending on who your user is you might tell a different

story product and understanding you have to understand what is the value proposition of your product all right and uh i i think i saw a question earlier that i was asking hey should uh fall on the product we'll talk a little bit about that i think that's a very interesting question but this very very intimate relationship with product is necessary for you to understand how to best market whatever it is that you're trying to market the last one is you have to be data centric you have to be able to do robust experimentation create some at least basic modeling um and do it logically right understand what it means when you're creating an incrementality methodology or if you're trying to create a plt a very very basic pltv model you have to apply like some very like common sense to your approach in order for you to be somewhat accurate

um i changed the wording multi-channel orientation you have to develop a deeper understanding on how to create a balanced media x media mix for sustainable growth now if you're anything like me when i first entered the world of ua my first job was to manage rewarded video ad networks right so my my world view was very very very narrow over time i got my feet wet with facebook and then over time i started working on programmatic and working with dsps and then now in my current job i also have to manage social right so organic social and some brand elements so as i mature in my career my world view of marketing is continuously growing and with that growth i'm starting to understand that yes while you know for the longest time you know spending a lot of my paid acquisition dollars on facebook can bring tremendous success to whatever as i am trying to achieve i i'm starting to develop my understanding okay when i show an

ad on facebook now what happens is most people don't click on it right away because they go on google and they search a specific keyword and so i need to run paid search campaigns to ensure that i capture those people that are searching us um or you know running shopping uh ads on google uh through their merchant center um so you have to expand your knowledge towards multiple channels right understanding how channels complement each other i've spoken to people who was like hey my my bread and butter is facebook and and i think facebook can carry the date i'm like hey that's great but you know what about how how when you ask when i meet candice often times what i ask is like how do you think um your company's uac campaigns impact your facebook campaigns you know and it's there's no right answer really what i want to see is like how they think about uh how different channels interact with each other and how it

becomes incrementally beneficial for the company um and so it's very important with that mindset of when you're a ua person you have to think multi-channel you have to think about the overall big picture of the marketing effort rather than a singular channel and last piece i think is important and it's a little tough depending on the size of your company but being able to customize the success metrics by different channels should let's say your programmatic display have the same success kpis as your uac campaigns maybe maybe not a lot of that is understanding that interrelationship and how they complement each other and then you could actually set the proper kpi for measurement for each channel so that's something that i want to point out the second piece is storytelling for the longest time marketing is really storytelling what's changed with the evidence of mobile is that

our the amount of time we have as a marketer to tell that story has reduced significantly what's important here is that depending on type of channel you might have two seconds to tell a story or you could have 60 seconds to tell a story so it's important for you to understand depending on the type of channel that you're on that you're leveraging and the audience that you're you're targeting that you're telling the right story to the right user using the right channels and most importantly when you're trying to tell a story you have to develop a very very empathetic sense of putting yourself in the shoes of your target audience what do i mean by that the right story for the right user can mean very very different things depending on who you're targeting so i'm going to use an example for my current company where we're in e-grosser first example is let's say my target audience using my let's say chinese language campaigns on facebook it's typically a

first generation chinese american english is their second language their immigrants and so the story that i want to tell this person is that hey we can provide you with a taste of home we carry products from where you come from that you won't get at trader joe's or ralph's or at costco right you can only get that from us we will deliver a taste of home directly to your door second example second generation mexican american in this particular case it's probably primarily english user the person probably shops at ralph's at safeway at trader joe's in this particular example i'm going to tell them a story about their love of food these are the people who want to discover or celebrate food from different cultures so that they can actually come here and yes they can buy uh stuff that they grew up eating uh

from the mexican heritage but they can also discover other things uh from other cultures by using our product right this is where if i'm targeting the foodies that's the story that i want to tell right live to eat type of attitude and the third one is like let's say if i'm targeting a second-generation japanese-american stay-home mom now of course go over time everyone stay home right but in this particular example if you're talking about a parent who's like constantly trying to deliver oh sorry i'll run between work and working with uh kids you know doing distance learning while being able to jump on zoom calls then the story i want to tell them is the cost low cost and convenience right in this particular one i really want to like talk about like product understanding i think being a very very strong marketer you have to develop a very strong sense of product understanding now does that mean you should be a pm

not necessarily but i think you have to work very very very closely with your growth pm or or your broader kind of product team to be able to understand what are the strengths and weaknesses and what are some of the areas of opportunities of increasing down funnel conversion right because a lot of people like to say hey ua is top of funnel we we we do this handoff to product well the handoff never really happens right if you're bringing those users in you're kind of responsible for the entire user journey in many ways right because retention is a very very important key so um here's an example where uh at my current company where we were i was working with our growth pm to analyze okay i'm bringing these user in through these channels these are their respective registration rates but what are some of the kind of low hanging fruits that we can focus on in order to develop better top funnel conversions so we started looking at our onboarding experience

and through the about two months we we we started to redesign the flow and uh about a month and a half ago we did we launched uh the the newly redesigned onboarding experience and as you can see here um you don't see the y-axis but they literally doubled our registration rate now and just massive and of course you could say hey your your initial onboarding phone must really really suck uh for it to see that jump i was like okay that's that's a fair statement but that's perfectly okay because you don't know if something is sucking unless you actually experiment and try something different and i think this is where like building that really tight relationship having the willingness to build this tight relationship with product is very very important because i've known a lot of ua people that has this like you know kind of blackjack dealer approach where they you know clap their hands like hey here's your user piece you know and i really really really think that is not the way

to go so if you really want to develop a long career in in growth in marketing and user acquisition you have to be willing to develop a relationship and understanding of your product next one is about being data centric now in this particular case i'm not saying like hey you have to be a data analyst in order to be a strong ua person or you have to have some type of programming or or data or math or statistics background in order to be a strong marketer no but you have to have the mindset of being able to want to actively experiment and model in a very very logical manner right you have to be able to develop tests where you could logically test various models use experience creatives and channels you have to have the ability to build up basic growth models like pltv recoup and incremental measurement and more importantly develop an ability to look at all metrics right we can't be only look at hey

you know my registration rate is this uh as long as i improve that i'm golden well you have to also look at your purchase rate what are some things that you can do to increase your purchase rate for being data centric i think it's very important for a ua person to think of how can i validate my theories with data but being open-minded enough to know that if the data doesn't validate my theory that's okay i move on to the next thing you see a lot of people who are trying to force the data to fit their mindset or their way of thinking and i think that's not the best way right and of course everyone agrees with that one thing that i want to showcase is you know uh when i first joined our company we didn't have any data support and what we had to do was find a way to develop uh incremental growth

and it was easy for me in this particular case because i was their first growth higher we've never done paid marketing before everything up to this point is organic so i had that luxury of saying everything that happened before now is a baseline but one of the the tricky uh trickiness of doing something like this is understanding okay your baseline is not the static thing and and and logically thinking about this your baseline will change week over week so as i develop the baseline i have to apply a week over week growth weight uh growth rate depending on the markets that i am uh buying it right so for example san francisco bay area where we're more saturated the growth rate is going to be very different than let's say new york where new york is a very very new market for us so logically thinking about these things to impact different um the definition of my baseline different markets now one thing that i know i i input into uh my model uh in december

was shelter in place right so in in december at the end of november early december many different states announced new shelter and place protocols due to the covet rise across the nation so i understood that because of this my organic rate will increase and therefore i have to discount my paid growth at with at that same rate so that i'm not over counting my paid marketing efforts so part of this exercise is being able to look at the market look at the events that's impacting the market and be able to logically think about okay these are things that are impacting my paid marketing efforts and these are some of the things that i need to do to account for those things so being data centric being able to take in data and making good judgment calls is very very important for any growth marketer even if you're not the mathematician what one thing that i'm going to say

where i'm going to pat myself on the back uh is we eventually did have a data scientist to support us and they that person independently did a regression model uh in in in terms of measuring our incremental growth over the course of q4 and we did a comparison with my like kind of rudimentary baseline model my my model was accurate within two percent of what they did now it's just like you know raise the roof i feel really good about myself even though i'm not a math major some other important attributes i think like a a ua person should have in order to really succeed uh in the long term are these four attributes curiosity you have to constantly want to learn our market i mean like mobile is what 10 years old now and and we've seen most of us here have

seen how the market has changed dramatically um and and and in about two months we're going to see the market change dramatically again supposedly um but you have to want to constantly learn more because this is one of the reasons why i'm so excited about you know my job is because every day i learn something new and that's very important second attribute is adaptability right we've gone through you know so many different changes that has impacted the way we looked at the market over the last 10 years so be having the ability to change the market understanding that the channels that are the kings today one may not be kings tomorrow and so being able to roll with the market change is important empathy i think it's very important for marketer to be empathetic and this goes back to what i was saying earlier about storytelling you can't tell a great story if you don't understand your audience in order to understand your audience you have to

be empathetic and be able to put yourself in the shoes of your user but this empathy also extends beyond the user to your own team right a lot of times in the past i've seen you know marketers will point the product and say hey they're not doing this or part two point to engineering say hey they're not doing this we have to be empathetic about the different constraints and resources on different teams and being empathetic enough to understand that whatever we do is a group effort and so i think this is one of the most important attributes that any marketer can have um next one is being fearless willingness to challenge the status quo i think it's cool you know i think two years ago most companies including myself most teams were super reliant on you know a handful of channels to drive their growth engine and and now we're all figuring out that wow outside of these kind of like a handful channels there's a world full of opportunity a world full

of possibilities in terms of how we could actually grow and one of the things that i looking looking at you know this whole idea of uh looming att and idea for deprecation is you're seeing actually a lot more innovation into the market whether it's on tech whether it's on the buy side where we're thinking about different channels differently i think being fearless is going to be an important attribute for a growth marketer and that's it this is really just my ideas of frameworks or and frameworks that i believe a ui person should have in order to be successful in the long term um love to hear your thoughts and questions awesome thanks so much john we have a few questions here uh some are sort of general around your topic and some are actually i think specific so let's see uh hi john given your definition of ua what what would be for you the definition of brand marketing

any thoughts around that i think for a very very long time you've had ua people myself included that like say hey i'm not brand i'm better you know uh i'm performance right um the longer i feel like i've been in this world the more i feel like those lines are getting more and more blurred um i think we there are many uh similarities in in terms of how we approach uh user profiling a lot of similarities in terms of how we like to tell stories about our product um we simply do it with somewhat different mediums and like uh in different manners which is why earlier i was saying how like uh the storytelling aspect like you tell a different story depending on who your user is and depending on what channel you're trying to tell it to on on so i think um i don't really see a huge difference between the two anymore um yeah

okay cool uh so another one that's pretty tactical uh related to some of your content how can you use data and modeling with a multi-channel approach when you can't track across channels for example how do you gauge the value of search campaigns capturing someone who saw your ad then searched it later is it just an estimate or can you really measure this i think you touched sort of high level about some stuff you've done but any thoughts there around multi-channel yeah i i think there's um at least personally i haven't seen anyone be able to do this uh really really deterministically um so yes a lot of it for me at least is very um estimate based uh it's inferred by our customer journey so for example through my mmp currently i can still get data in terms of okay this person saw my ad on facebook and this person then goes on on on paid search uh to search for uh my brand keyword for example um and so

what i look at is the percentages of people moving from one channel to another and understanding okay what is the actual ad journey for that user before the actual conversion on our website and based on that i am able to estimate different kpis for different channels a different cpa for example metrics for different channels so that i can continue to see overall growth because one thing that i've seen in the past or i've been guilty of this in the past is like hey you know why am i spending any money on programmatic display or right because you know if i measured with the same yardstick as the one i'm using for my uac or facebook campaigns it it's horrible it isn't working right but fundamentally it shouldn't it serves a different purpose right it showcases your brand out there and and be able to

tell people that this is what my brand does very very quickly and then when they see our facebook ad it helps to understand oh yeah i remember seeing this and this gives this facebook actually gives me a deeper understanding um so you're actually looking at your channels in terms of different funnel metric conversions and and i think that's a better way to approach it but like i said earlier i haven't seen any company that's actually been able to deterministically be able to measure this so a lot of the methods that i'm currently using is still a lot of estimating got it let's see all right last uh last call for questions for john he uh i'm sure you can people questions about hiring you can probably talk about that too as well he's pretty experienced there give it here 30 seconds or so and then otherwise we can jump into the next uh next session so the one thing that um one comment about the hiring piece um when when you are like um

talking to different candidates um is asking them how they look at measuring performance and in my in my history what i've seen is that a lot of people like oh i look at you know seven day roast or i look at you know d14 roast or d60 roads or something like that but one thing that i personally look for and then typically i challenge them it's like okay you know going back to my social casino days right we have really really high cpi's and people i use vo and i capture a very very high paying user and my you know day seven day 14 roads might look incredible and i think okay good i did my job i'm done you know but then you come to realize okay that person is in what you call a honeymoon phase right they they're very infatuated with your game maybe for the first 10 maybe at stretch 14 days and then you see that recoup curve flatten out incredibly quickly so

when you ask a candidate about that seeing if they have a really good answer are they really thinking about beyond just that initial kind of like um top of the funnel uh roast metric and being able to eloquently explain their mindset and talk about okay these are some of the considerations i take in uh the longer term uh retention this is how we account for that in our plt modeling i think these are some of the things that i would look for in terms of hiring a good marketer and it's okay if they don't have the exact answer it's really understanding how they're thinking about it [Music] [Music] me [Music]