The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: From Data Chaos to Marketing Truth: An Engineer's Guide to Attribution with Lew Dawson of Momentum Consulting

Episode Date: January 27, 2025

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack, the CDP for developers. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel. This is a short bonus episode where we preview the upcoming show. You'll get to meet our guest and hear about the topics we're going to cover. If they're interesting to you, you can catch the full-length show when it drops on Wednesday. Welcome back to the Data Stack Show. We have a special guest today, Lou Dawson, from Momentum Consulting. Lou, you have such an interesting background

and have done lots of different things. We met when you were a Rutter Stack customer, now you're a Rutter Stack partner. And so you and I have actually talked many times about one of our favorite subjects, which is attribution and all of the related data and reporting stuff. And so I am pumped to spend a whole hour about one of our favorite subjects, which is attribution and all of the related data and reporting stuff. And so I am pumped to spend a whole hour talking with you about that.

So welcome to the show and give us just a high level background of your journey and data. Yeah, thanks, Eric. Awesome to be on the show. Thanks for letting me come on. In short, my background real quickly, I started writing code back in the late 90s, websites. So I got started really early, loved it, and been doing it over 25 years now. Got started early in the data warehousing space, spent a long time doing that. Then moved over to the marketing space and doing early days of MarTech and implementing a lot of MarTech technologies from scratch for companies and did a little cybersecurity in there and back really solving MarTech full-time. And that's the niche I found that businesses really need help with

and really can use my consulting services is how do you really implement a proper and great marketing MarTech ecosystem?'s that's where we are today and that's how i got here awesome so lou you're talking before the show about attribution and we're gonna dig deep today we're gonna be pulling out wires where you know where did that go it's gonna be fun yeah Yeah. So what attribution topic are you most excited to jump in? Oh, man. Attribution is a deep and wide topic.

I think this one interests me immensely because it's a hard business every facet of data from coordinating with leadership, product, marketing. So, yes, like you have to deal with people. It's scary, right? All the way to those really scary, like down in the basement engineers. Then, you know, talking about the data side for a second, you have to figure out how do I model my data? How do I make sure my data is accurate? And how do I accurately represent it to the people who care about that data so you can make good marketing decisions. And it's just a cycle that continues over and over. And hopefully if done right, you optimize your your ad and retention ecosystem and you keep getting better and better and better

and you continue to grow conversions by using that data, that attribution data. How hard it is to get there. You made it sound so simple. We're going to break it down today. So let's dig in. Yeah, let's do it. All right.

That's a wrap for the prequel. The full length episode will drop Wednesday morning. Subscribe now so you don's do it. All right. That's a wrap for the prequel. The full length episode will drop Wednesday morning. Subscribe now so you don't miss it.