Multi-Channel Attribution - Where do Leads Come From?

AIM 2010
Where to Leads Come From
Multi-Channel Attribution
Gary Angel

What is Attribution
Attribution is a process for assigning/crediting a lead or a conversion to a specific set of marketing activities and touchpoints.

Easy or Hard?
Sometimes it’s easy:
Sometimes it’s not:
We got 1,500 calls.
Saw TV
Visited Web
Searched
Visited Web
Called

It’s Getting Harder
The number and diversity of marketing channels is growing making attribution even harder.

Why it Matters
Fights over attribution are sometimes perceived as being largely political:
My TV ads drove 5 million in business
My PPC campaign drove 2.5 million in business
How come we only had 6 million in sales?
My Display Campaign drove 1 million in business

Why it Matters
But you can’t optimize your overall Media Mix or your individual channel strategy unless you understand how each marketing channel works and how the overall program works together.

Why it Matters
For Instance:
If Natural Search attracts early-stage buyers, it may seem to perform worse than Paid Search even though it drives more new customers.
If Paid Search is heavily dependent on branded traffic, it may only perform well in conjunction with Mass Media buys.
If Display creates awareness but doesn’t drive direct traffic it may only work in conjunction with heavy search buys.

Common Methods of Attribution
Last (Most Recent): The last known campaign touchpoint gets the credit for a conversion.
First (Original): The earliest known campaign touchpoint gets the credit.
Equal: Credit is divided equally between all known touchpoints.
All: Full credit is given to every touchpoint.
Spoken: Credit is given to the touchpoint identified by the customer.

Last (Most Recent)
The more your lead/sales environment is multi-touch – the less well this method works.
In this example, 35% of the visitors who clicked on a paid brand term had already clicked on another paid term in the SAME session!

First (Original)
Especially problematic with longer sales-cycles.
For this logged-in site, 33% of the people who registered used a different cookie IN THE SAME MONTH. More than 50% used a different cookie within 3 months.

Equal (Shares Credit)
Doesn’t really help with Marketing Mix calculations.

All (Every Touchpoint full Credit)
Doesn’t really help with Marketing Mix calculations.
If you’ve siloed reporting, there’s a good chance this is your de facto strategy!

Spoken (Customer id’s Touchpoint)
Customer testimony is heavily influenced by collection point and method and, even at best, can be quite unreliable.
Only 64% of the most dissatisfied visitors in an online survey had actually used the tool they were rating.

Proper Attribution

Aggressive Collection

Web Analytics Techniques
Universal Campaign Coding
Code all URLs with Params
Don’t neglect URL Shorteners
Standardize campaign coding and enforce.

Separation of types of campaigns:
Internal
External
This method will allow separate attribution studies to be made of internal vs. external without one type screening off the others.

Campaign-Stacking
Use a cookie to store all campaign values recorded for a visitor
Pass to a variable in your web analytics solution
Omniture has a plug-in for this

Use multiple variables to track different attribution periods at least until confident of your sales-cycle.
We suggest the following attribution strategies:
Campaign = 45 days
Internal Campaign = visit
Redundant Campaign 1= Visit
Redundant Campaign 2= 7 Days

Capture of Visit Number
Use a cookie to track the visit number of each visitor to your web properties
Record the Visit Number in a web analytics variable
Omniture has a plug-in for this

Key Event Time-stamping
Time-stamp key events in custom variables
The timestamp should include at least the full date (YYYYMMDD form)
Key events to timestamp include external campaign arrival, lead and conversion
Timestamps are used in segmentation to study attribution and before/after key event behavior.

Transaction Ids
Record the Lead Id in your web analytics solution
Where possible (Omniture, Unica, Core), update this value with actual lead-status
This allows you to track actual lead effectiveness by campaign / behavior

Careful Analysis

Necessary Research

Recommended Conceptual Model

Recommended Attribution Model

It’s not just campaigns
This analysis looked at attribution based on previous visits without campaign sourcing.
For two campaigns to this site, almost 50% of their click-throughs had already used the site!

Showing Multi-Attribution
This Report shows how often each campaign interacts with others and what the total conversion rate is.

Showing Multi-Attribution
Here’s the same report with the biggest incremental lifts highlighted.

Dark-Period Testing
Testing media mix by going dark and tracking to baseline is a consistently useful method.
In this case, going dark showed that the client had to purchase 6 clicks from these terms to get a single incremental visit.

Correlation Analysis
Using correlation models, you can match marketing efforts to outcomes (if you have enough clean data):
For this home products company we correlated weekly TV, Radio and Print TRPs, Banner Impressions, Search plus econometric data on housing starts and prices by region with web site activity.
Media effects only correlated with a 1-2 month lag – TV was by far the most impactful.

Comprehensive Reporting
This client chose to compare campaigns by pipeline stage:

Comprehensive Reporting
Here’s an example using our 4 Stage terminology:
Comparison by Type
Best Companion
Best Overall & Trend

Key Take-Aways
Aggressively Code Sourcing
Multiple #800s and Campaign-Specific #800s
Multiple Asks
Reward Asks
Code Campaigns Everywhere

Key Take-Aways
Over-Time Tracking
Campaign Stacking
Universal Sourcing
Time Encoding
Global Rollups
Shared Cookies

Key Take-Aways
Analyze Carefully
Segment by Attribution and Life-stage type
Look at attribution beyond just marketing campaigns (existing customers/visitors)
Use Dark-Periods to Baseline and Tune Media Mix
Use Correlation Models to track marketing impacts vs. econometric variables

I’m Out!
Gary Angel
President, Semphonic
415 884-2511
gangel@semphonic.com
http://semphonic.blogs.com/semangel/
http://www.semphonic.com
@garyangel on Twitter

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Multi-Channel Attribution - Where do Leads Come From?

by Joshua Tree Internet Media, LLC on May 04, 2010

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Multi-Channel Attribution - Where do Leads Come From? — Presentation Transcript