What if you could save your company over a million pounds just by asking the right question?
In this episode of E-Coffee with Experts, Austin Willman sits down with Peter Louca, a Head of Performance Marketing veteran with over two decades of experience spanning paid search, programmatic, social, SEO, and full-funnel strategy.
Peter breaks down how he approaches performance marketing from first principles, building clear hypotheses, running exposed versus control tests, and using attribution as a multi-lens tool rather than a single metric. He walks through two real-world experiments he ran at a major UK retailer: one that proved brand PPC spend was largely unnecessary and saved the business over 1.2 million pounds, and another that revealed an in-store announcement outperformed a targeted Facebook carousel campaign for driving footfall.
The conversation covers attribution models from last-touch to MMM and econometrics, the role of behavioral psychology and qualitative research in marketing strategy, what the rise of AI means for paid media and first-party data, and why curiosity and the 80/20 principle remain the most valuable tools in any marketer’s toolkit.
If you work in performance marketing, run paid media, or lead a team responsible for marketing ROI, this episode is packed with frameworks and real examples you can apply right away.
Takeaways:
- Start with the desired outcome and reverse-engineer your marketing plan
- Use exposed vs. control tests to isolate true channel impact
- Last-touch attribution alone massively over-credits bottom-funnel channels
- Use multiple attribution models simultaneously for a well-rounded view
- Brand PPC spend may be unnecessary if strong organic rankings exist
- Simple in-store messaging can outperform sophisticated digital campaigns
- Behavioral psychology and qualitative research are underused marketing assets
- The 80/20 rule applies — basics done right drive the majority of results