Is it time to say farewell to the old model of assigning all the value to the last click? Many marketers want the ability to measure customers' paths to purchase and understand the influences of each channel on a sale.
It would be a dream to accurately measure the impact of your TV ad on generating uplift in an outdoor campaign, driving interest in your press ad, which subsequently delivers a sale.
But can this now be achieved online?
I promised in my previous article, It's not all about the last click in search marketing, that I would share some insight into how I integrated my paid search, display, affiliate and email marketing channels to give clear visibility of customer journeys.
I have developed such an approach for a number of companies, including Warner Breaks.
I was fed up with treating each channel in isolation, measuring its individual impressions versus clicks, new versus repeat, spend versus return.
I knew that channels were positively impacting each other. I knew that my display banner advertising was delivering uplift on my paid search results. I knew my paid search was having a positive result on my affiliate networks. I knew my email marketing was driving visitors to brand keyword searches.
But I had no way of accurately measuring this effect.
I spoke to numerous companies to find a solution. Analytics companies can track the clicks, identify where users have come from (the referrer), but I wanted to also track customers off the site, including impressions (those who don’t even click). So I turned to an ad-serving company for the solution I needed.
The first step was to track all channels (impressions and clicks) through a single universal tracking tag. This meant regardless of the marketing channel, all user interactions were tracked to a single cookie.
By tracking the date and time of each impression or click, a report was produced to map out first interaction through to the final conversion on the website.
In its simplest form, a single customer path may look like this:
In addition to recording the date and time, it also captured the campaign name, the creative name, creative format, the website placement and even the keyword (for search marketing).
So what was the benefit of this report?
- Measure channel cross-over and collaboration
- Understand the online marketing mix
- Measure the impact of online branding
- Allocate budget more appropriately
- Reduce media wastage
- Improve online conversion.
I began by understanding the impact of the marketing mix. Was there evidence of display delivering uplift to search marketing?
I devised a simple pivot to look at how display banner advertising impacted the other channels. Top line results showed that of all customers that first interacted via a display banner, 25% ended up booking via paid search marketing and 12% via an affiliate network.
I also found that of all customers that first interacted with an affiliate network, 23% ended booking via paid search marketing - proving affiliates had value in raising awareness.
I also looked at the creative impact. Did display banners advertising the Spa drive customers to search on Google for Spa Breaks or Spa Hotels? Did our Rich Media creative deliver a stronger uplift than standard banners?
Next I tried to understand how to impact future customers. We looked for opportunities to replicate successful journeys, strengthen messaging or even adding special offers to improve conversion.
It also allowed us to optimise media plans, by identifying which website placements were delivering positive uplift versus those not delivering any influence.
The final setup was to calculate our attribution modelling, sharing the CPA (cost-per-acquisition) back with all the channels that influenced the sale – a far more intelligent model than last click.
I have spoken to numerous companies over the past few months who are now taking this approach to their online marketing. Be warned, the volume of data maybe a bit overwhelming at first, but crack it and you have an incredibly powerful report that will change your whole outlook on your online marketing.
So is it RIP for last click? Personally, I think the time has come to be a bit more realistic when measuring online marketing, and this report could be key to that change.
Matthew Finch - view blog
Posted 14 January 2008 10:03am by Matthew Finch with 5 comments
Tags: Search, Research, Rich Media, Shopping
Topics: Affiliate Marketing, Ecommerce, Email Marketing, Online Advertising, Search Marketing - Organic/Natural (SEO), Search Marketing - Paid (PPC), Web Analytics & Optimisation
Sectors: Travel & Leisure
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Graham Charlton
Online Advertising
Online Marketing Manager at Telefonica - O2 UK
14 January 2008 15:54PM
Great topic Matthew!
This is a very interesting approach and a logical step for most organisations. Optimising the mix is a priority for all marketing professionals. This is unachievable if companies continue to operate with silos of investment.
Over the last six months, we have certainly seen the dividends of applying this method of attributing value to marketing channels. We have been able to determine the true value of marketing channels helping us to develop plans and allocate budget accordingly.
Personally, I am surprised that more analytics companies have not exploited this opportunity and used advanced attribution methodology as a unique selling point. Attributing across impressions is also a valid point, although in our experience this has not resulted in any valid uplift. I would be interested to see what ratio you apply to impressions vs. clicks with regard to display advertising.
The biggest challenge is to convince agencies, CPA partners and affiliates to accept their new found role in the mix. As conversion metrics are increasingly adopted as a means of payment, expect this subject to be one of the key marketing topics of 2008.
20 January 2008 13:30PM
Excellent post and nice work Matthew (just saw it now).
James
CEO at Econsultancy
25 January 2008 09:40AM
Hi Matthew
This is great stuff - very interesting. Out of interest, when you talk about customers who "interacted via a display banner" or "interacted" via an affiliate, what do you actually mean by "interacted"? There is everything from just being exposed to an ad (but not seeing it), to being exposed and seeing it (hard to measure I guess), to interacting with it within the ad (e.g. rich media interaction), to actually clicking through to a destination page.
Did you do analysis on the so-callled 'view through' value (or lack of)? i.e. where a customer was exposed to an ad but didn't click on it and then went on to (search and) buy? And do you have any evidence for these 'view throughs' that the customer did actually *see and notice* the ad as opposed to just being exposed to it (I guess you'd have to ask people to find this out)?
Ashley Friedlein
CEO
E-consultancy.com
4 February 2008 23:19PM
Matthew,
this is probably the most intelligent thing I've seen about online marketing in a long time.
Like you, I had noticed a long time ago that paid online advertising was having a dramatic effect on my organic search engine rankings.
Google swore it should have no effect, but the difference was striking.
There were huge spikes in my organic traffic when I ran the ad campaign.
The results/clicks from the actual ad campaign were almost non existent.
Which obviously opens up the whole question of what exactly is the purpose of online advertising.
14 July 2008 15:56PM
Good post Matthew,
I have been working to get this system implemented for a while now. It certainly looks like the most sensible way forward.
One thing I am not clear on yet (and I guess once data starts coming in you can make a more informed decision), is how much weight you give to certain interactions.
For example, if someone sees a display banner that is used mainly for branding, then responds to an email relating to a new campaign and finally, clicks on a campaign display banner before converting, how do you split the sale? How valuable was the brand banner?
I'd love to see an article on how different people are splitting the value across the channels. This is where it starts to get complicated in my view.