This free webinar discussed:

• How different marketing tactics tend to come in at different points in the conversion funnel
• Why it is important to provide credit to the entire purchase path a user utilizes to convert
• How seeing Purchase Paths provides opportunities to see what channels are doing for themselves and others
• How understanding the complete picture for PPC upper funnel terms impacted accounts
• How attributed data has been a component in successfully driving down CPA
• How impression tracking proves the true value of display

View the webinar now. (Registration required)

Given the critical nature of attribution management to advertising analytics, we have created the Attribution Management Buyer’s Guide for marketers to use when selecting an advertising analytics and optimization platform.  The Guide is intended to highlight key attribution management features and functionality that should be available in any advertising analytics solution you select.

This is the second blog in a 10-part blog series for the Attribution Management Buyers Guide. This second section focuses on Products, where we focus specifically on the products or services that were sold as a result of a team of ads.

The most critical question to ask here is, ‘Does the solution show the actual products/services that were sold by order, or do you just report that an order occurred along with the revenue it produced?’

On our previous post, we focused on Attribution Variables, which are the key metrics by which you are valuing conversion credit across the participating team of ads. Of the three metrics we highlighted (conversions, revenue, and profit), profit was the optimal metric to use.

In order to get to profit, an attribution management system needs to be aware of the products you’ve sold so that it can calculate profit by subtracting sales price minus the price of cost of goods sold minus cost of advertising, and then apply tax and shipping rules. If the attribution management system cannot report on products sold, then it cannot produce true profit figures. At best, it will be able to take revenue and allow you to apply a flat margin across all of your sales.

An added benefit of a system that can report on products sold is that it can provide a wealth of information about trending of products you sell, which products get sold together often, and also provide an opportunity for up sell and cross sell in the future.

Attribution Management Buyers Guide Part 3: Ad Sources Tracked

For attribution management to be done correctly, it cannot be done in a silo. Many conversions are the result of multiple forms of advertising. For example, a banner impression leads someone click on a paid search ad, then an organic search, and then they convert. If the solution you’re using is only able to capture paid search, it would be oblivious to the fact that the banner impression is what introduced that person to your brand, and that the organic listing is what eventually closed the deal.

To ensure that you’re getting a system that performs attribution management across all sources (advertising and organic), make sure you ask the vendor the following questions:

• Which ad sources does your system track?
• Do you place tracking code on my website?
  • If the vendor doesn’t offer tracking code, they are solely reliant on information that comes through the APIs of ad sources. The only ad sources that offer APIs today are search engines; therefore, a system that does this is only capable of doing attribution across paid search.
• Do you get all of your data from the APIs of the ad sources?
  • Again, much the like question above, this is an indicator that they only track paid search.

• Do you track direct and organic visits to my site as well?
  • In order to have a full view of attribution, direct and organic visits must be included.

A foundational requirement for attribution management is the ability to track across all online ad sources, not just paid search. And the ability to do that requires your advertising analytics platform to use its own tracking code, instead of relying on the limited information provided through search engine APIs. While the search engine APIs do provide some valuable management information, the data is inadequate when it comes to tracking, classifying and accurately attributing value to the team of ads that led to the sale or conversion.

This clip from the AMF 2.0 discusses how to credit Offline Ads, SEO, and Social media efforts. Some of the other discussions included: time sensitive attribution, product sensitive attribution, and search/display interaction. Make sure to register for the 4^th Forum in the series: Attribution Management Buyer’s Guide: 10 Features of a Good Advertising Analytics Solution, which will take place on July 28, 2009 at 1pm EST.

To continue reading articles and see the videos from previous forums, visit the Scenario and Video sections of the Attribution Management Site.

There have been numerous reports published over the years by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft that attempt to prove how the use of display advertising, when combined with search, can increase your overall campaign performance.

A recent report published by iProspect, Search Engine Marketing and Online Display Integration Study was featured in an article for MediaPost titled Study Confirms Display Ads, Paid Search Work in Concert. Robert Murray, iProspect’s CEO is quoted in the article, saying “Internet users are more likely to engage and/or eventually make a purchase from brands with which they are already familiar.” Display ads help breed familiarity. The article also reports findings that suggest that of the people that react to display ads,  31% of those people click on display ads, and 27% go to search engines to do a search related to the ad (brand, offer, product).

At ClearSaleing, we have been tracking the relationship between display and search for over 2 years. We assemble advertising into what we call a purchase path, which is the chronological sequencing of display impressions, ad clicks, organic visits and direct visits that lead to conversions and/or non-conversions or abandoned paths. When we analyze the purchase paths of our clients that use display and search advertising, and specifically look at the types of searches they do after being exposed to display, we learn something very interesting.

Based on our observations, the combination of display advertising and paid search can indeed reduce your cost per acquisition (CPA). Our analysis shows that the most common type of search by a user after being exposed to a display ad is a branded search. We have found that with some of our clients, upwards of 50% of the searches that occur after being exposed to a display ad are brand searches.  A brand search is a search for your company name, a misspelling of your company name, or a typo of your company name that leads a consumer to click on your sponsored listing (your PPC ad).  Brand ads are almost always the cheapest PPC ads that you can buy. Many companies have trademark restrictions on other companies bidding on their branded terms, and for those that don’t have trademark protection, they are still likely to pay a very low CPC when compared to their non-branded PPC ads.

For example, if you were in the auto insurance business and are not running display ads, the most common search for your products is likely “auto insurance,” which is a keyword with a per-click cost between $15 and $30+ historically. Our research shows purchase paths that are all search-based typically start with a general term, and often include a second search for a non-branded term, and then close with a branded term. They also go from a general term to a branded term and then convert. The CPA, when considering the entire purchase path in this case, typically runs in excess of $30 to $60+.

If this advertiser ran display ads in addition to search ads, the search the consumer most often does after seeing that display ad is for a brand term. When we measure just the cost of the advertising in these converting paths, the cost for a banner impression is just fractions of a penny, and the cost of a click on a branded term is typically no more than $.25. Therefore, the cost of these converting paths can be as low as $.25 versus a cost of $30 to $60 for the previously stated search-only converting Paths.

By adding display to your campaigns today, you will create new paths for your consumers to navigate, which are much cheaper than search-only paths, and this can allow for your CPA to decrease and searches for your cheaper brand terms to increase.

This is the third video in the 2.0 series and covers Offline Ads, SEO, and Social Media. The different Purchase Paths explored in this video are : Direct mail with a branded search, Search with SEO, Twitter with a search, and Twitter with the address bar. Please visit ClearSaleingInc on YouTube for the latest Attribution videos and events.

This is the second video in the 2.0 series and covers Banner Impressions and Clicks. The different Purchase Paths explored in this video include: Search followed by banner impressions, and Search followed by banner clicks, . Please visit ClearSaleingInc on YouTube for the latest Attribution videos and events.

The Attribution Management Forum 2.0, which took place on January 29, 2009, was the second installment in the Forum series.

This is the first video in the 2.0 series and covers Paid Search and Lifetime Ad Value (LAV). The different Purchase Paths explored in this video include : search with a time element, product sold is unrelated to the ad, and lifetime ad value with related products. Please visit ClearSaleingInc on YouTube for the latest Attribution videos and events.