By Joy Brazelle, Director, Product Marketing and Professional Services

Background

Back in the good old days of marketing, marketers made decisions solely based on their gut feelings. They’d create their marketing and media plans, and then print out a huge spreadsheet filled with marketing launches, ad buys, and creatives for the year.  The agency and the client would gather around the conference room table and debate one approach versus another until they came to an agreement on the marketing plan for the year.   The campaigns would be launched, budgets would be depleted and next year, it happened all over again.

But there were very few ways to accurately gauge the success of a particular campaign and to correlate it to increases in sales.  The marketers’ own experience and gut feelings were about the only criteria on which marketers based their decisions, as there was no effective way of gathering credible information on who actually saw their ads and campaigns and what they did as a result.  Basically, you spent the budget, and next year, if the company was still around, the budget was renewed or maybe even increased.  And then the planning process repeated itself.

Enter Web Analytics and the Last Click Mentality

Thankfully, things changed when web analytics entered the marketing picture early in the 21^st century.  Web analytics is great for helping marketers make decisions, especially those decisions related to improving the user experience once a visitor gets to your Web site.  One way that web analytics does this is by showing you the sites that are driving traffic to your Web site, also known as the referrers.

Web analytics also does a decent job of evaluating the success of your online marketing campaigns, but the information it is able to provide in this area does have its limitations.  Because most web analytics packages were built to monitor traffic once it arrives at your web site, they do not give you the full picture of everything that happened before a visitor got to your Web site—these packages can only show you the ‘last click’ referrer.

The reality is that only a small portion of your visitors do one thing–like visit one Web site, click on one ad, or do one search on one search engine–before they get to your site and convert.  The average visitor is likely to take several steps on the way to your website.  Unfortunately, web analytics is incapable of showing you the full path your visitors took before arriving on your site.

Attribution Management Widens the Funnel

By focusing only on the last click analytics that typical web analytics programs provide, savvy marketers may inadvertently be strangling the top of the funnel.  Consider a common trend of user behavior within a conversion process.  The graphic below shows hypothetical funnel statistics for a site with a well-designed checkout process:

Step 1 – Step 2                 Less than 10% conversion (add to cart)

Step 2 – Step 3                  Greater than 70% convert from this point (begin checkout)

Step 3 – on                         Greater than 90% convert from this point

Think about this:  If you could get even a slightly higher conversion rate from Step 1 to Step 2, you could exponentially increase overall conversion rates based on the conversion rate of the subsequent steps.

By counting on last click attribution that typical web analytics packages provide, most marketers cannot justify widening the top of the funnel with general keyword ads or banner buys.  This is because last click analytics focuses on the last thing that a visitor did before he/she converted.  Generally this is either clicking on a branded search result or coming back directly to the site by typing the URL into the browser or having the site bookmarked.

But smart marketers, armed with accurate attribution knowledge, can make the case for the more general keywords and the banner buys.  They know that many people need to do research before they make even a small purchase online, and they recognize that often, this research starts off with a very general search or an exposure to a banner.  Then, as the potential customer learns more about your brand and company and gets closer to making a purchase decision, they are more likely to get back to your site via a branded search when they are ready to purchase or convert.

Attribution Data Helps You Catch them Early

When the stakes are high and competition is fierce, marketers must seek out any advantage you can find.  Accurate attribution data presents one such advantage.  By having access to visitors in their early steps in the research, marketers who use attribution data are able to widen the top of the funnel AND market to potential customers earlier in the sales cycle.