We’re back with another deep dive into who is helping build the bank and this week we’ve got the man of many talents @vittorio.boccanera
Vittorio looks after all things Performance Marketing related and he’s more than willing to give a little more context to what that job entails.
Aside from being known for his resounding Italian humour, impeccable tiramisu skills and throwing heavy weights around, Vitto has worked in the finance and tech verticals all his professional careers.
Vitto joined Monzo at the start of the pandemic in the first remote onboarding group as a Senior Paid Social Manager. He’s now responsible for all things Performance Marketing related, helping spread Monzo’s mission of making money work for everyone in the UK, and hopefully overseas as well (!?)
Before that, he worked in Investment Banking at Citigroup, where he quickly realised he wanted to have a tangible impact on consumer’s lives. He joined Wise where he worked in Performance Marketing’s Paid Social team as Operation Lead, picking up on the technical foundations and moving into a pure Data Analyst role.
He’s always up for a discussion or private chat, drop him a note on LinkedIn with the subject line “Monzo AMA”
Vitto will be answering questions by this Friday 29th October
I’d probably go with a hamster out of my pocket every time I coughed. Hoping there’s no hidden meaning there, and if there is, woopsies!? Pardon my Italianness
With regards to Stats, numbers & data – there’s only so much I can share, but let’s see, what were you interested in specifically?
Nothing hidden! I just try and create a strange would you rather for these AMAs.
As for the data part, not really sure. I’m just a bit of a numbers nerd. Something that impressed you for engagement, something that went viral, any sort of graph that has a huge spike on it. Obviously sensitive data removed.
That’s a really good question, it’s not immediately obvious, and the name with some of our products can actually cause some confusion – it definitely fooled @Revels !!!
Paid Social is part of wider Performance Marketing, it’s a specific channel.
Broadly speaking, Performance Marketing is when you show ads online by paying for them – it’s basically like when you see a poster in the tube, but only this time you see it on the web. Usually, the mechanics means that you are bidding on a platform to have your ad shown to the relevant people in your target audience.
Performance Marketing consists of various “channels” or avenues you can advertise your company, and reach a different variety of people.
You have:
Paid Social
Paid Search
Affiliate Marketing
In some cases even PR can be considered Performance Marketing
Display
Audio and Podcasts
SEO (although this is really to drive organic growth, you could evaluate performance through the same lens as the channels above)
Paid Social specifically is when you are bidding to show ads on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Quora, Pinterest, Reddit, Twitter, Linkedin etc.
“Social” refers to social channels like the ones above, and “Paid” means you are paying for the ads to be shown.
There’s a lot of data analysis, optimisation tactics and strategy involved, it’s very interesting and it allows you to work with creative and data at the same time!
What kind of metrics do you use to say if a media campaign has been effective or not? Is it just sign ups or how much they use that account after signing up?
Fair! From a creative standpoint we saw that actually a lot of content that @cookywook worked on during the pandemic went totally viral. Things like chart showing how customers use their Pots to save up for when we came out of Lockdown – “Pubs” was definitely in many of those Pots titles! (sensitive data obviously removed and only aggregated data was shown)
Another really cool one which went viral was again something @cookywook had worked on when Whatsapp had the outage a few months back. We used the fact that you can send payments instantly to your friends as a hacky way to communicate during the outage by effectively sending 1p and putting the message in the reference section of the payment That was really smart and super reactive from the team there!
@Rat_au_van we use a whole series of different metrics. On Paid Social (but not limited to) we tend to look at pre-install metrics. This shows the efficacy of the delivery of the ad to the selected audience. Things like
CPM (cost per mille, or cost per 1000 impressions served)
CPC (cost per click)
CTR (click through rate which is #clicks / #impressions)
CVR Click > Install (conversion rate from clicks to install)
CPI (Cost per Install)
We’ll also look at the absolute number of those metrics being driven.
We’ll also look at post-install metrics, and these I’d say are the more important ones you want to be measuring as it’s what you measure to calculate your ROI (return on investment)
So things like:
How many people start an application process
How many people have the ability to make a payment with Monzo and the CPA (Cost per Acquisition) which is our north star KPI.
How many people open a Plus or Premium or Business Account
How valuable are those customers? (LTV - Lifetime Value)
Payback (CPA / LTV) i.e are we spending more or less than what we get back? Are we efficient or are we burning money?
We will also look at (where possible and with customers having given us their consent) - demographic data, post-attribution data, what campaigns are working based on the metrics above, what creative works etc.
We use several platforms:
Big Query to write raw SQL code and extract data
But predominantly we use Looker for data visualisation – it allows us to keep an up-to-date snapshot of how our marketing efforts are developing over time.
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I have literally no idea what you do.
If I was writing a Science Fiction story, and one of the characters was described as a Performance Marketing manager, what would the next paragraph say?
It usually entails me either referencing “Pizza Pasta Margherita” without context, or me just telling rubbish dad jokes which only Italians would understand (mainly because I translate them word-for-word). Oh well
I think joining such a fast growing, ambitious and under-the-spotlight company during the pandemic and being the sole executer in Performance Marketing was a big challenge. But with it has come so much opportunity to have a say of how we market to our audiences, and responsibility. And I’ve had a fantastic team to help me along the way. Goes without saying that joining a new company and not being able to meet the team in person for over 12 months was difficult. But the cohesion of the group was such that it was made very easy for me to integrate and feel a part of the company!
Definitely kick starting Performance Marketing in 2021! As a marketer you always want to be showing your work to people you think can benefit from it. And I’m happy to say that so far, it’s working and I’m very happy to be actively contributing to Monzo’s mission of making money work for everyone
As a non-Italian who loves tiramisu to the extent that if a pudding menu has tiramisu on I will disregard the rest, but who has experienced a wide variety in style and quality of tiramisu as a result, I have two separate but related questions:
What should one look out for to know if they’re eating an authentic style tiramisu, as opposed to a ‘tiramisu’ style dessert?
Can you tell us how to make the perfect tiramisu? (Hopefully it’s not your nonna’s secret recipe)
The main debate amongst italians right now is / and will always be what type of “biscuit” you should be using. Is it “Savoiardi” or “Pavesini”? They are similar but different in height, how they will absorb coffee etc. The original recipe uses Savoiardi, but I’ve been bought up with Pavesini, and both are exceptionally good (I’d lean towards the latter). So if someone has made tiramisu with those biscuits, you can be certain that the tiramisu is “authentic”. Obviously the zabaglione needs to be well amalgamated. The number of layers is also a giveaway - between 2-3 layers is the norm.
Hahahha my nonna’s secret recipe is definitely one of the ways to make a perfect tiramisu. But the real secret is in the zabaglione. You need to make sure that when you fold the whites and the yolk together (after they have been worked) it’s done from bottom to the surface in a slow manner. That’s what makes the tiramisu top notch
Pardon my Italianness 
and thank you 
)