A Visual Blog

In previous posts, I’ve tried to explain the reasons behind the frustrating fact that some report data just won’t ever match. This week’s topic is a no-brainer. To best describe why reports created by pulling data from different data sources won’t match other reports, let’s see it visually.

So, why is this a problem? Say you haven’t configured your web analytics to track your PPC, or maybe an agency is managing your PPC, but you have not given them access to your web analytics, so you must rely on the data the search engines provide. Inevitably, someone in your organization is going to want a roll-up or an executive summary of all the engines. The result is then the creation of a report from disparate data sets.

The problem – each vendor report is not aware of the other vendors. So, in the example below, each vendor report will claim credit for the entire purchase and claim all of the revenue.

As you can see, this greatly overvalues the conversion and creates an unrealistic view of the performance.
If you do try to compare the compiled report to your web analytics, there will be a problem as to how web analytics will credit that sale, as you can see below.

The real need is to conceptually ‘divide up’ the order and revenue and give everything credit.

By thinking about dividing up credit, you more accurately value the contribution of each advertising source. With this accurate and comprehensive picture, you can really optimize your spending, ensuring that you focus your spend, time and attention on what truly is working. What you may then find clicks (and impressions) that occur at the very beginning of the ‘funnel’ are getting the credit they deserve, so you may be able to increase bids on your more general keywords or show true ROI on banner impressions.

New York (PRWEB) March 22, 2010 — ClearSaleing, a technology and thought leader in attribution management, announced today the launch of the ClearSaleing Attribution Management Professional (CAMP) Certification Program, designed to give digital marketers intensive training on advanced advertising analytics, attribution management and ClearSaleing’s award-winning attribution platform.

Successful CAMP Program attendees will become certified in the increasingly important discipline of attribution management, which focuses, at a granular level, on identifying and valuing each of the ads that contribute to an individual conversion, and at a macro level, on the relative ROI of each advertising source and campaign.

“By providing them with a comprehensive picture of how all marketing channels actually perform, digital marketers are beginning to see how attribution management helps them make better choices in their advertising portfolio allocation and campaign management,” said Adam Goldberg, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer, ClearSaleing. “Training and education are the first step marketers need to take to put attribution to work. As a thought leader in attribution, ClearSaleing is providing customers, agencies and individuals with a formal, thorough training program in attribution best practices.”

ClearSaleing’s CAMP Certification will be available through instructor-led webinars, as well as individualized sessions, according to Training Director Joy Brazelle, Director of Product Marketing & Professional Services, ClearSaleing. “We are offering a flexible program that fits the needs of our customers and agencies who want to enhance their skills to use advertising analytics and attribution in optimizing overall marketing performance,” Brazelle said.

Curriculum
ClearSaleing customers will be able to use their own data in the training program while trainees who are not ClearSaleing customers will have demo data provided by ClearSaleing. Some of the subjects to be covered during the training program include:

–   Introduction to attribution management
–   Understanding the Purchase Path and customer touchpoints
–   Calculating influence of ad channels along the Purchase Path
–   Dashboarding and custom performance reporting
–   Identifying and interpreting data trends
–   Creating action plans based on data

Certification
ClearSaleing attribution program students will receive certification after successfully completing a practical and written exam. They will be required to successfully complete tasks demonstrating advanced knowledge of attribution. Using ClearSaleing reports, they will also conduct multi-channel campaign management, making decisions on ad spend allocation to improve campaign performance. The last step is a written exam which will be administered online.

Eventually, Brazelle noted, ClearSaleing will add advanced certification tracks in social media, online marketing, PPC and SEO practices.

ClearSaleing’s attribution certification program announcement follows on the heels of the company being named an interactive attribution leader in Forrester Research Inc.’s report, The Forrester WaveTM: Interactive Attribution, Q4 2009.

About ClearSaleing
ClearSaleing has been named “Technology Platform Search Marketers Can’t Live Without” at the SES (Search Engine Strategies) Awards. The company also won the 2009 ‘Outstanding Product’ award from TechColumbus. ClearSaleing’s advertising portfolio management platform helps marketers and agencies identify ways to more effectively and profitably allocate ad spend across a complex mix of online advertising investments.

ClearSaleing is a thought leader in the growing scientific field of attribution management and publishes www.AttributionManagement.com that provides a rich repository of ClearSaleing and externally published articles, white papers and other material focused exclusively on attribution management.

The company was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. For more information, please visit www.ClearSaleing.com.

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ClearSaleing CIO, Adam Goldberg, during interview at SES NY

Independent technology research firm Forrester Research, Inc. selected vendors for a 44-criteria evaluation to determine the leaders in the attribution management field. The vendors were selected based on product fit, customer success and Forrester client demand. The evaluation process lasted several weeks as Forrester worked with each vendor to get a true understanding of the attribution offering, strategy and market presence.

ClearSaleing  received the highest scores in both the “Current Offering” and “Strategy” categories. It also garnered a 5.0 out of a possible 5.0 score for its strength of management team.

View the Full Report

This is the first blog in a 10-part blog series for the Attribution Management Buyers Guide. This first section focuses on Attribution Variables, which are the key metric(s) by which your advertising analytics solution values conversions and attributes credit across the participating team of ads.

Most advertising analytics packages that offer attribution will attribute credit according to one of the following three metrics: 1) profit; 2) revenue; and 3) conversions. Some packages can attribute all three metrics as well.

There are pros for each one of these variables, and cons for some:

• Profit:
  • -Pro - Businesses are in business to do one thing – generate profit. Therefore, anytime you can measure a business activity according to the profit it drives, the better you understand the value of that activity. The same is true for advertising – if you understand the profit a particular ad generates, then you definitively know if that ad is worth continuing to buy or not.
  • -Con - There are none, however, we realize that calculating profit can be difficult for some business entities.
• Revenue:
  • -Pro – If you cannot get to profit, this is the next best metric. Though revenue does not definitively tell you if you’re making profit on those ads, you could infer that considerable revenue is being made on that ad, so you could continue to invest in that ad.
  • -Con – Just because revenue appears to be trending in a positive direction does not mean you are also producing a profit. By not considering your margin and cost of goods sold, you could be misled into investing in ad that is not producing profit.
• Conversions:
  • -Pro – Allows you to see which ads were involved in the highest number of conversions. This may shed light on top of the funnel types of ads that generally do not receive conversion credit, and this can help expose the type of value they have to the success of other ads.
  • -Con – Since all conversions are not created equal, it’s difficult to understand what impact any ad is having according to conversions on the bottom line. It is nearly impossible to perform accurate attribution with only this metric at your disposal.

As a follow-up, ask the vendor how they calculate profit. In order to be truly accurate, they should be incorporating your cost of goods sold and cost of advertising into their calculation.

ClearSaleing Announces Industry’s First Means of Using Attribution in Automated Bid Management at Search Engine Strategies Conference

SAN JOSE, CA Search Engine Strategies Conference, (PRWEB) August 11, 2009 — ClearSaleing, a technology and thought leader in attribution management, today announced the availability of an automated bid management module that allows marketers to not only factor in profit measurement to keyword buying decisions, but also move past “last click” thinking to open up the funnel of keywords along a purchase path that previously would have been missed.

Built on top of ClearSaleing’s industry-leading attribution management platform, ClearSaleing’s automated bid management module lets marketers automatically control their keyword’s bids using profit metrics based on its attribution model. It also takes into account conversion latency – the period of time between the customer’s first visit and a conversion. ClearSaleing can track profit down to the SKU level, and profit rules set by the marketer can be as complex as needed.

“Most bid management solutions are optimizing bids based on imperfect or incorrect information,” explains Luke Tuttle, ClearSaleing’s Chief Information Officer. “What we have done is automate bid management using the most accurate data possible by taking into account profit, attribution, back end data feeds and conversion latency. Our bid management platform makes predictions about conversion latencies for each day of the year and factors those into the bid decisions to make the best bids possible with the information on hand,” he adds.

“We are giving marketers a way of capturing all those profit-potential keywords, including ones that do not have an immediate result but eventually lead to a purchase,” says Tuttle. “ClearSaleing captures all effective keywords in the funnel, not just the last click.”

All Clicks Count

ClearSaleing’s automated bid management is the only industry solution that fully incorporates attribution along the entire purchase path, not just the first or last click. These options allow marketers to expand keyword use to include those keywords at the ‘top of the funnel,’ to facilitate brand awareness as well as conversions. The solution employs ClearSaleing’s unique system of keywords, organized into three categories:

• Introducers (First Click) – The first search term that results in a visit to your site. These terms generally are more generic and almost never result in an immediate purchase. Because these terms are more general, they are usually more expensive terms.

• Influencers (All clicks in between the first and the last click) – Until ClearSaleing, these clicks were generally ‘invisible’ to bid management solutions. However they are extremely important since they are what continues to move a customer along a purchase path. These terms tend to be longer phrases, often including a combination of a version of the brand name teamed with a more general term

• Closers (Last Click) – These are the terms that historically bid management systems (and analytics) see as getting ‘all of the credit for a sale’, which is incorrect. These terms are often times simply the branded terms.

“After reviewing the results of many automated keyword rules, we found that many solutions were simply ignoring important keywords or eliminating them if they had long latencies between a customer’s first visit and their purchase. Our research showed that more often than not, even extremely complicated, seemingly powerful rules resulted in bid changes for less than 1% of all keywords,” Tuttle explains.

Automated Bid Decisions

ClearSaleing offers bidding decision capabilities that differentiates the system from typical industry bid management rules. In addition to ClearSaleing’s unique capability to optimize on profit and true ROI, ClearSaleing also offers the capability to optimize on CPA or CPL if required by the business. It is flexible enough to allow a marketer to use the most appropriate optimization method.

“By using the measures unique to ClearSaleing, marketers can create rules that are based on business goals, ROI and profit. ClearSaleing’s attribution-based rules take into consideration not just marketing budgets but the actual costs of doing business,” says Tuttle.

About ClearSaleing
ClearSaleing’s advertising portfolio management platform helps marketers identify ways to more effectively and profitably allocate ad spend across a complex mix of online advertising investments. ClearSaleing’s technology enables attribution management through its patent-pending Purchase Path technology. Purchase Path accurately attributes profit (ROI) across the multiple marketing touch points that contribute to and influence a sale.

ClearSaleing is a thought leader in the growing scientific field of attribution management and founder of the Attribution Management Forum, the profession’s e-community for interactive marketers. The Company also publishes www.AttributionManagement.com, a website that provides a rich repository of ClearSaleing and externally published articles, white papers and other material focused exclusively on attribution management.

ClearSaleing’s unique ability to give marketers telescopic insight into their online ad investment is attracting major brand customers such as American Greetings and Nationwide Insurance. The company was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. For more information, please visit www.ClearSaleing.com

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.

Boston, MA, Internet Retailer Conference (PRWEB) June 15, 2009 — Attribution management is becoming an increasingly important tool for etailers wishing to more precisely identify which online spend activities are leading to conversions. ClearSaleing, a technology and thought leader in attribution management, is taking it one step further: ClearSaleing’s new custom attribution settings enable advertisers to pinpoint the exact weight that they want to give to a particular ad, ad source, or organic referrer by assigning custom attribution credit to each element.

ClearSaleing, an advertising analytics software provider, announced its latest attribution management advancement at the Internet Retailer conference being held June 15-18 at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center. Company representatives will be providing demonstrations of Version 4.2 at the ClearSaleing booth, #313, throughout the conference.

“With this level of fine-tuning, ClearSaleing customers now have the unique ability to define their own attribution settings–which in turn gives them the opportunity to extract even more detailed information about customer behaviors. It also gives them keen insight into the ROI of their organic SEO activities, something they’ve been struggling to do for some time. With this knowledge, they will be able to further optimize their campaigns across the entire media spectrum,” says Luke Tuttle, ClearSaleing’s Chief Technology Officer.

ClearSaleing’s full menu of advertising analytics technology is helping major brand etailers better allocate marketing budget resources by tracking and optimizing profitability across a myriad of online and offline marketing channels in use. Etailers using ClearSaleing technology include American Greetings, Goodyear Tire Company, Allegro Medical, Stanley Steemer, Nationwide Insurance and many others.

ClearSaleing Purchase Path Technology
Attribution management is the center of ClearSaleing’s Purchase Path Technology which enables Internet retailers to accurately measure, compare and optimize profit (ROI) across their online advertising portfolio. In addition to the enhanced attribution management features, marketers can now configure ClearSaleing to assign a cost to organic traffic for each search engine, providing for the first time a legitimate basis of comparison to paid advertising alternatives.

ClearSaleing has also developed industry-focused versions of the software to address the specific needs of advertisers within the Financial Services, Insurance, Professional Services, Travel, Pharmaceutical, Automotive and Retail industries. The industry versions help marketers better track variables specific to their industry without the need for costly customization or tedious workarounds.

Why do we get stuck? We quickly realize that the argument could be made for many different attribution models. For example, consider the following Purchase Path: a user clicks on an ad for ‘running shoes’, then clicks on an ad for ‘Nike Shox’, followed by clicking on an ad for ‘Nike turbo 7′ and making a purchase. One way to attribute in this scenario would be to give equal credit to all three ads. Another could be to give 20% of the credit to first ad, 30% to the second ad and the final 50% to the final ad. Or a third model could be the reverse, where 50% goes to the first ad then 30% to the second and 20% to the final ad. The point is that we can go on for a while with many different models. So which model is correct?

Marketers can find attribution very frustrating when observing the models above because there doesn’t seem to be a clear cut mathematical solution to what the right answer is. At this point, most marketers then begin to question if attribution is all that it’s cracked up to be given that there doesn’t seem to be any accurate way to solve the correct attribution models.

Attribution Models take some very complicated mathematics to develop. Recently, we conducted a webcast titled ‘Measuring the Immeasurable’ that featured our partner, Vetra Analytics. Vetra is a statistical consultancy made up of PHDs in Statistics and Mathematics that can utilize advanced mathematical modeling to create attribution models.

When solving for attribution, one needs to determine the ‘influence potential’ of each ad click, impression and site visit. In order to determine this potential, one needs to consider many factors, including but not limited to the timing of the ad, decay rate of the ad, if a conversion was made what products were sold, the amount spent of a first time buyer or repeat buyer, etc. In order to determine the influence potential, a model or models need to be built which will help to predict the consumer decisions as accurately as possible.

The statistical models account for one of the most difficult things for marketers to grasp – uncertainty. Uncertainty is all of the factors that may go into a buying decision that are not capable of being measured by your advanced technology. For example, did a friend recommend this product to the consumer? Did they see a billboard or TV commercial? Or did a sales person in the store influence their decision?

By accounting for the uncertainty and building a model that incorporates these factors, we can test the model on a go-forward basis. If the attribution in the model matches the actual results over a sufficient sample size and period, we then know the model that was built is mathematically sound. If the reality does not match the model, we then know the model is not optimal and can be recalibrated.

There are solutions to attribution management that will change the ways in which you manage campaigns. If you are serious about solving attribution because you recognize that accurately attributing credit to your ads will allow you to make more effective media buys, which ultimately lead to greater profits for you and your clients, then you will need to utilize a tool set that implements advanced modeling.

Always remember that a technology is only as good as the people behind it. When implementing an attribution solution, make sure you have the staff that understands how to calibrate it or that the vendor you choose offers services to assist you in building sound models. Your success with attribution is solely dependent on your ability to employ accurate models. If you are serious about solving attribution because you recognize that accurately attributing credit to your ads will allow you to make more effective media buys, which lead to greater profits for you and your clients, then you will need to engage with professionals that have the necessary mathematical skill sets, such as Vetra Analytics.

As an online marketer, I want to know if Twitter is a bona fide advertising source. Sure I know I could tweet about events going on at my company or clients in hope that those Tweets drive my followers to take certain action. But is it really an advertising source that deserves to receive credit for conversion if I can tie the conversion to the fact that the consumer read the tweet?

During the Attribution Management Forum 2.0 (AMF) on Jan 29^th, 2009, we posed that question to an audience of hundreds of senior online marketers by presenting the following two scenarios, and we asked them to vote on how they would attribute conversion credit if they knew a tweet was involved in that consumers buying process.

Scenario 1:

In Scenario 1, a consumer received a tweet that alerted them to the fact that they could save 20% on Nike Shox if they bought them from the Finish Line by 12am tomorrow night. The consumer clicked on the link in the tweet, but did not buy the Nike Shox at that moment. Later on they went to a search engine and searched for “Woman’s Nike Shox,” clicked on an ad for the Finish Line and bought a pair of Nike Shox before the 12am deadline and saved the 20% that was tweeted about on Twitter.

We asked the audience to select the best attribution rule out of the following options:

Over 67% in both groups we polled, according to their indicated level of experience with attribution management, believe option “A” is the best rule. This vote shows that these senior online marketers do indeed believe that Twitter is a bona fide advertising source as they are willing to give half of the credit for this conversion to Twitter.

Less than 8% in any group we polled voted for option “C”, which totally excluded Twitter from receiving any credit for the conversion. This is further proof that senior online marketers do value Twitter as an advertising source worthy of conversion credit.

Scenario 2:

In scenario 2, the tweet was exactly the same as the tweet in scenario 1. In scenario 2, the consumer clicked on the link in the tweet, but did not convert at that moment. Later on they used their address bar to navigate directly back to the Finish Line’s website, purchased a pair of Nike Shox and received the 20% discount because they bought before the deadline.

We asked the audience to select the best attribution rule out of the following options:

Over 66% in both groups we polled, according to their indicated level of experience with attribution management, believe option “B” is the best rule. This vote shows once again that these senior online marketers do indeed believe that Twitter is a bona fide advertising source as they are willing to give 100% of the credit for this conversion to Twitter and 0% of the conversion credit to the address bar.

Less than 7% in any group we polled voted for option “C”, which totally excluded Twitter from receiving any credit for the conversion. This is further proof that senior online marketers do value Twitter as an advertising source worthy of conversion credit.

These types of scenarios and rules are why we continue to strive to generate some consensus around Attribution Management. If you would like to learn more about these scenarios or the scenarios from the previous Forum, please visit www.AttributionManagement.com. Additionally, we love to hear from our audience, so please fill us in on what your thoughts about this scenario may be.