Non-Line Blogging

We've come a long way with on-line analytics in a short period of time.  A couple of years ago we were all relatively happy with the "last click wins" referrer model and merrily shovelled money into Google's bank account.  Today we are more likely to obsess about attributing a fair percentage of a sale to the efforts of a number of digital activities;  as we always knew, somebody may have seen a banner and clicked on an affiliate link BEFORE using a search engine to find your site, so we'd better juggle our advertising spend accordingly.  But how far should we go down this attribution path, and if you give up too soon what effect will this have on how we judge success? 

Let's walk through the process.  Using a simple analytics funnel we can see what source generates a "successful outcome" - could be a sales lead for a BtoB organisation or a booking for a holiday company.  I've not included any time scales in these examples as the period from trigger to successful outcome will vary from one product to the next.

As I've already mentioned, we've probably come to terms with the over-simple view of the "last click wins" attribution model.  We may even be able to link together all our on-line advertising activity and identify dates of key events like "viewing one of our display ads on-line" or "clicking on an advert on a partner site".  We can then get a feel for the on-line customer journey (as we feel we have influenced it)

Most marketers seem to be at this point and we can get really excited about deciding what is a fair way to atribute the relative importance of all this channel activity.  However, let's not forget the importance of social media at this point - does somebody who goes to a LinkedIn discussion forum or plays with a Facebook widget mean we should give them some credit?  If we're not careful we overlook some of the digital experiences people may have, simply because we may not have tracked them in the past.

One that is relatively easy to track is the presence of email in the overall journey, but as this is often not included as part of the "advertising tools" we may under-represent the role email plays.  It does not usually sit with the "acquisition tool" family and is often overlooked when implementing multi-source tracking like DoubleClick's Floodlight or the newer offering from TagMan.   Matching an email file to a list of "successful outcome" email addresses may yield this multi-channel impact, but this is a manual, somewhat "clunky" production process. 

However, the big problem with our lovely "closed" view of our customers' mind is that it is frequently polluted by mucky, grubby off-line advertising.  Maybe it was a print ad that stimulated the click on a banner, or perhaps a direct mail pack thumping onto somebody's door mat that promped a branded search, as we can see below..

So the conclusion is a bit worrying.  No matter how much we obsess about our digital customer journey and no matter how clever we get with our attribution algorithm, we may have got the "demand generator" completely wrong.  As there is no way to isolate all off-line noise from our customers' minds, and whilst it is still rare (but not impossible!) to track off-to-on-line conversions we are happy to pretend that we have got a really accurate fix on how we get our sales.  Maybe we are not making as many strides in the world of attribution analytics as we think, and are happy to stumble on with our tracking tags.

And if you think I'm being a bit harsh, ask yourself this question:  

If one of your prospects is on the cusp of becoming a customer, will sending them a direct mail pack or making an out-bound phone call help to nudge them towards a branded search on Google?  

If your answer is, at worst, a reluctant "probably", maybe we need to re-think how much value single-channel attribution modeling really delivers and worry less about divvying up our on-line budget between a few suppliers.  Perhaps we should even be trying to invest more in reaching people off-line at the right stage of the digital process? So there.