We at ClearSaleing have spent the last 4 years touting the importance of moving past last click when it comes to analyzing your online media. Back when we first started in 2006, it seemed like no one else had begun to use this concept, let alone discuss it. In 2007, I was invited to speak at Search Engine Strategies New York on the topic of attribution, as it pertained to B2B firms. From that point on, I was invited to speak at a lot of conferences, such as SMX, SES, Search Insider Summit, DMA, eTail, and more. Now it seems as if you cannot attend any marketing related conference without several sessions dedicated to measuring beyond the last click, i.e. Attribution Management.

At the same time attribution was picking up steam on the conference circuit, and being discussed by research firms like Forrester Research and Jupiter Research (now owned by Forrester), the search engines began to pay attention to this topic, starting with Yahoo. In the Yahoo advertising interface, they began to represent not only the conversions at the keyword level, but also what they called an assist. An assist is when a keyword is used in a purchase path, but was not the last keyword clicked prior to conversion. After that, Microsoft, through the Atlas institute, coined the term ‘Engagement Mapping’, which utilized the Atlas ad server to provide attribution data across search and display media. Then, in 2010, Google entered the foray into attribution with the Google Search Funnel product, which performs like Yahoo, but has a lot more analytics around the data to dive deeper into these paths.

One question that we often get is, “I don’t have enough money to invest in a product like ClearSaleing, so what else is out there?”  Or, “My company is still skeptical that attribution would benefit us.  Is there a way I can prove that our customers do navigate paths and attribution would be beneficial?”  One product worth taking a look at that is free is the Google Search Funnel product. Though this product is far from perfect, and leaves a lot open to interpretation, any product that shows beyond the last click can help you to improve the performance of your overall campaigns.

From there, we usually get several follow up questions:

- What would be the first thing you focus on when using the Google Search Funnel product?

When we look at Purchase Path reporting from ClearSaleing’s technology and focus solely on paths that involve AdWords ads, one thing jumps out at us across our entire client base: when there are 2 or more AdWords ads used in a Purchase Path, the last ad clicked is more often than not one of our clients branded terms. A branded term is a company’s name or misspelling/typo of it. When we look at the terms that precede the branded term, they are mainly general, product specific, need specific, or a model number.  Usually they are non-branded terms, as seen in the graphic below.

Therefore, under a last click world, branded terms end up stealing a lot of credit from the non-branded terms that preceded them. So, if I was going to look at one thing in the Search Funnels report, I would look at paths that end in brand terms to see how often non-brand terms come before them. Then I would look at how those non-brand terms are valued under last click and determine if they should be given more credit. We have found that when consumers use brand terms at the end of a Purchase Path, they are doing so to navigate back to the site they’ve already decided to buy from, therefore, it makes sense to credit the ads that were NOT used simply for navigation purposes.

- When I look at the path length report in Google, it shows me the number of conversions that took one click, two clicks, three clicks, four clicks and so on, it shows that most of my conversions occurred with just one click. Does this mean that attribution is not something I need to worry about?

There are a few things needed to keep in mind when looking at these reports:

- This data only pertains to Google AdWords, so if a client went from a Yahoo ad to a Google ad, it would be represented in Google as a one click path, when in reality, it was a 2 click path.

- On a similar note, paid search isn’t the only advertising source out there. So, if you’re using anything outside of paid search – display, affiliates, shopping engines, etc. – these are not being represented in the paths.

- At ClearSaleing, we use three simple categories to place ads in: Introducers – the first ad a person clicks or sees en route to conversion; Closers – the last ad a person clicks/sees prior to conversion; Influencers – the ads in between Introducers and Closers. When we acquire a new customer that has been using a last click attribution method prior to coming to us, they cannot justify spending money on Introducers and Influencers; they can only justify spending on Closers. You are likely in the same boat. Therefore, their data in the beginning looks as if attribution does not occur.  One thing that we get our customers to do that you should also test is to activate some of the more general terms in your account, and with the use of Google’s Search Funnels, see if these types of terms show their value by being an Introducer or Influencer in other paths. Over time, our clients generally discover their customers walk down more paths than when they started with us because they have the data to support investing on ads and ad sources that introduce and influence.

- Using Google Search Funnels, I found a collection of keywords that provide a lot of assists, but barely close. What should I bid for these terms?

Unfortunately, this is a really difficult question to answer. If you were a company that only sold one product, or every product you sold produced the same amount of profit, you could figure out what these assists are worth. If you sell many different products with many different margins, it’s impossible to know the value of these assists. The ideal method for evaluating these would be to know how much profit was earned on a conversion the keyword assisted, so you could assign it some profit credit and then you could come up with a bid to meet your business goals. Google will most likely never be able to produce profit figures because that would require companies to share margin data with Google, which is highly unlikely. Google could, however, take the revenue earned on that conversion (assuming you are an etailer) and attribute a portion of that to the assists, so that you could make a more accurate bid decision.

Though the Google Search Funnel product is not perfect, it does provide a lot of valuable reports that if one takes the time to use them and analyze the data, one can certainly improve the performance of their campaigns. If you have experience using the Search Funnel product, we welcome your comments, or if you have questions about attribution, as always, feel free to contact us.