Attribution is a new concept to many marketers. And a natural reaction to seeing new information, especially information (or data) that is different, is to question the accuracy of the reports (data). The way that seems most logical to confirm that the new numbers are correct is to compare one report to another. In my last post I introduced this series of blogs hoping to alleviate frustration that many marketers experience when they try to compare two reports and the numbers don’t match.
All reports are not created equally nor are they calculated the same way. In an attribution world, there are two types of reports, ones that factor in attribution and ones that don’t.
The two types of reports have two different purposes:
- Operational Reports
- Performance Reports
Operational Reports
Operational reports don’t factor in attribution. Operational reports are reports used to measure how your business is doing. Operational reports are used to ensure there is nothing ‘broken.’ Operational reports include reports run from your ecommerce system, most traditional web analytics reports and reports that are compiled from several different sources.
Performance Reports
Attribution is crucial for performance reports. Performance reports are used to judge how well your advertising is performing. Performance reports also take into consideration latency and latent conversions described in my last post.
Both reports are extremely useful. The problem arises when you try to compare an operational report to a performance report. One common example of this that I see is when a new ClearSaleing customer attempts to compare a report from their web database, an order report or a booking report, to the ‘All Sources’ screen of the Performance tab or any other report that factors in attribution.
These two reports will never ‘match,’ nor should they. Operations reports give 100% of credit to the last click, 100% credit to the date and source of conversion (no attribution). Performance reports divide up the credit and attributes it to each date and source that led up to the conversion (attribution).
So before you try to compare two reports, take a step back. Think about the report that you are trying to compare to a performance (attribution) report. Does the report factor in attribution? If the report is coming from your ecommerce database or booking engine, or even your traditional web analytics, it probably does not use attribution.