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Join ClearSaleing CIO and Co-Founder, Adam Goldberg, along with VP of Biz Development, Dustin Engel, as they discuss various approaches to Attribution Management. As the need for implementing an Attribution Management solution has continued to increase, it is important to understand the various offerings available to decide which solution is the best for you.

Join us for this free webcast to learn:

The various approaches to attribution, with pros and cons for each offering:

• Ad Servers
• Web Analytics
• Consulting Groups
• Technologies
• The difference between Operational (day to day) vs. Project-based (strategic, high-level) attribution
• On the back end, what do you do with the data?
• Which solution would be best for you given your current environment need

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Attribution management is a practice that is starting to get more attention from online marketers, fueled partly by the pressures they are under to make smart decisions on online ad spending.

Attribution is a method of determining which of your online ads lead a customer toward a purchase decision, and pinpointing the level of influence of each of these ads. Traditional web analytics has been helpful in determining which sites are “sticky,” and which sites draw qualified traffic, but attribution goes a step further…  continue reading on DM news site

Read the entire article on the Search Engine Land Blog…

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.

Reading the report will give you an understanding of how Forrester sees each vendor in the space and what each vendor’s strengths and weaknesses are. One key point in the analysis is there is not one specific way to do attribution—each vendor approaches attribution in a unique way. For this post, we’re going to focus on the two specific types of attribution: “operational” (or day-to-day) attribution and “project-based” (or strategic, high-level) attribution…

Read the entire article on the Search Engine Land Blog…

Attribution: What It Is And Why Its Important

Original Date- December 1, 2009

Length- 58 minutes

Fewer than one third of online marketers are happy with their ability to measure interactive media. The main reason is that the industry standard of crediting the last click or last interaction is flawed. Recently, several leading players in the industry have introduced the concept of attribution measurement, which assigns credit to multiple touchpoints in a consumer’s purchase path.

Forrester Research, Inc. Senior Analyst Emily Riley, a leading authority on the topic, will be our guest speaker and present an overview of her recently published Interactive Attribution Wave. Emily will review the shifting trends in the market, highlight key players, and show marketers how to gain valuable insights by adopting attribution measurement practices. This is the first time attribution vendors have been evaluated, yielding groundbreaking insights that are valuable for interactive marketers, vendors, and publishers alike.

Watch the Webcast- (registration required)

Original Date- October 1, 2009

Length- 36 minutes

Attribution management — the process of tracking, assembling and properly valuing an entire team of online ads as they lead to conversions — has become a critical component of advertising analytics.

ClearSaleing, Inc., a leader in advertising analytics and founder of the Attribution Management Forum, and Vetra Analytics, a leader in quantitative marketing, have recently announced The American Attribution Index (AAI).  The AAI is the first-ever attribution management index that measures the relative effectiveness of each online advertising source and influence factor on consumer purchases and conversions.

In this webcast, we’ll learn more about the AAI, and how advertisers can use this new index to improve the effectiveness of their media mix allocation.
There are three versions of the American Attribution Index: the Aggregate Index, representing average attribution indices across all participating companies and all of their respective industries; Vertical Industry Indices, which represent an industry-specific attribution index across all participating companies in that respective industry; and Company-Specific Indices, developed for a specific company.

The introduction of these indices will allow marketers to gain further insight into advertising ROI, and help marketers more profitably allocate advertising budgets across available online options.

Attend this webcast and learn:
•    How to discover the relative importance of online media sources in influencing purchase decisions.
•    How you can benchmark against your competitors using the vertical attribution indices.
•    How you can use an attribution index customized for your company to improve the allocation of your online advertising investments.

Watch the Webcast- Real Media Audio (16.2k)

Watch the Webcast- Windows Media Audio (16.2k)

Original Date- July 28, 2009

Length- 62 minutes

This webcast highlights key attribution management features and functionality to look for when selecting and advertising analytics solution.

Attribution management — the process of tracking, assembling and properly valuing an entire team of online ads as they lead to conversions — has become a critical component of advertising analytics. Identifying which ad deserves “credit” for the sale or conversion has never been easy. The once-popular “last-click” conversion model has given way to a more sophisticated approach that evaluates the ‘influence potential’ of each ad click, impression, or site visit. With proper attribution, marketers can accurately measure, improve, and optimize the profit and ROI generated from cross-media advertising investments. But to do so requires the right advertising analytics solution. How do you evaluate the various options? Which attribution management features and capabilities should marketers look for in advertising analytics packages?

This webcast highlights key attribution management features and functionality to look for when selecting and advertising analytics solution, including:
•    tracking capability
•    reporting functions
•    relevance of ads along Purchase Paths
•    basic and custom attribution modeling
•    data storage

Find out what you need to know – and what questions to ask – when considering an advertising analytics solution for attribution management.

Watch the Webcast- Real Media Audio (16.2k)

Watch the Webcast- Windows Media Audio (16.2k)

Watch the Webcast- Windows Media Audio (16k)

Original Date- May 5, 2009

Length- 55 minutes

This webcast will focus on showing how using advanced statistical models can allow one to build attribution models that can then be tested.
The webcast will be co-hosted by Adam Goldberg, ClearSaleing co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer, and Dr. Purush Papatla, President of Vetra Analytics, which is a high-end statistical consultancy group that is partnered with ClearSaleing.

Mr. Goldberg and Dr. Papatla will show how using high-end statistical models can allow one to build attribution models that specifically address how to account for:

•   Social media

•   Word of Mouth

•   The differences between short Purchase Paths and long Purchase Paths

Like the previous Forums, there will be some interactive elements.  In the first 2 Forums, we had the audience participate by voting on various attribution scenarios. In AMF 3.0, we are going to introduce methods that can be used to solve various attribution scenarios.

Watch the Forum- Real Media Audio (16k)

Watch the Webcast- Windows Media Audio (16k)