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

January 27, 2025

In this bonus episode, Eric and John preview their upcoming conversation with Lew Dawson of Momentum Consulting.

Notes:

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.

Transcription:

Eric Dodds 00:13
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 RudderStack customer. Now you’re a RudderStack 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 talking with you about that. So welcome to the show and give us just a high level background of your journey in data.

Lew Dawson 01:04
Yeah, thanks, Eric, awesome. Be on the show. Thanks for letting me come on. In short, my background changed quickly. I started writing code back in the late 90s. So I got started really early. I loved it and have been doing it for 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 Mar tech, and implementing a lot of Mar tech technologies from scratch for companies, and did a little cyber security in there and back, really solving martech full time. And that’s that’s that’s the niche I found that businesses really need help with, and really can use my consulting services. How do you really implement a proper and great marketing Mark tech ecosystem? So that’s, that’s where we are today, and that’s how I got here. Awesome.

John Wessel 01:58
So, Lou, you were talking before the show about attribution, and we’re gonna dig deep. Today. We’re gonna be pulling out wires for you know, where did that go? It’s gonna be fun. Yeah. So what? What attribution topic are you most excited to jump in?

Lew Dawson 02:16
Oh, man. Attribution is a deep and wide topic, like this one that interests me immensely, because it’s a hard business problem and a hard data problem to solve. So it’s just it touches every facet of a business and every facet of data, from coordinating with leadership, product marketing, so yes, like, you have to deal with scary people, right? All the way to those really skin scary, like down in the basement engineers who 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 ad and retention ecosystem, and you keep getting better and better and better, and you continue to grow conversions by using that data. You know that attribution data, how

Eric Dodds 03:21
It is hard to get there. Make it sound so simple, we’re gonna break it down today. So let’s dig in.