Advertising Analytics Council Roundtable - Data In, Data Out: The Hygiene Problem Behind Every Return on Ad Spend Number
Advertising Analytics Council Roundtable - Data In, Data Out: The Hygiene Problem Behind Every Return on Ad Spend Number
Every campaign report ends with a number. Return on ad spend, cost per acquisition, conversions — one figure that says whether the money worked.
Almost nobody asks what went into it.
Ad data arrives from a dozen platforms that each define a click differently, attribute a conversion differently, and report on a different clock. It gets pulled, joined, deduplicated, and mapped — and every one of those steps is a place where something quietly breaks. By the time it reaches a dashboard, it looks authoritative. It's a clean number sitting on top of a mess.
This came up at our last Council session. We had budgeted a few minutes for it and spent far longer, because everyone in the room had a version of the same story: a number that didn't hold up, a discrepancy nobody could explain, a client question that took three days to answer.
So we're giving it the full hour.
What we'll get into:
Where ad data actually breaks — naming conventions, platform definitions, attribution windows, and the joins nobody documented
How to know your reporting is wrong before a client tells you
What good hygiene looks like in practice, and what it costs to maintain
Who owns this work — analysts, engineers, the agency, the platform — and what happens when the answer is "nobody"
Where AI and automation help, and where they just produce bad answers faster
Format: No slides. No pitch. Sixty minutes of peer conversation among people who work with this data daily — analytics leaders, ad ops, agency teams, and platform folks.
Wednesday, September 2 · 2:00–3:00 PM ET · Zoom
I'm Scott Rothstein, founder of Data Meadows. I've spent my career in advertising analytics, and I host the Advertising Analytics Council to get practitioners talking about the problems that don't make it into conference panels.
Seats are limited to keep the conversation intimate. Request your spot below, and I'll follow up to confirm. https://calendly.com/scott-datameadows/intro-meeting-ftf?month=2026-07
Hosted by Scott Rothstein, Data Meadows and Michael Falato, GTM Full Throttle