On August 5th 2009, the first meeting of the Shop.org Attribution Special Interest Group (SIG) kicked-off. The originator of the group is Anne Ashbey, who currently is an independent consultant and previously worked for Harry & David. Anne wanted to bring together people who work for eTailers, technology providers, advertising agencies, as well as online marketing insiders to establish “benchmarks” for companies to follow when doing attribution management. She was kind enough to extend an invitation to me to participate in the group based on ClearSaleing’s thought leadership in Attribution Management and attribution-based advertising analytics platform.
The first meeting included people from companies such as Range Online Media, Rosetta, Under Armour, JC Penny, Google, Rimm Kaufman Group, QVC and American Eagle. The goal of this first meeting was to establish a charter for this SIG. These are the three goals that emerged:
1) Review current multi-channel allocation methodologies for determining incremental sales, highlighting the pros and cons of various approaches;
2) Review available and emerging technologies for tracking and allocation;;
3) Recommend best practices for retailers to implement in their organizations to effectively measure the incremental impact of their marketing dollars.
In order to achieve our charter, we setup two groups during our second meeting: Group 1 is Case Studies, and Group 2 is Technology. Group 1 (Case Studies) is working with a few of the eTailers in the group that are currently performing attribution management to document the process they are using today, and the before and after affects that attribution management has had on their marketing decisions and their organization as a whole.
Group 2 (Technology) is evaluating current technology that exists in the attribution space, as well as identifying features that attribution management should contain in order to track effectively, measure accurately and produce actionable data to improve the bottom line.
Once the case studies are completed, we are going to bring in analytics experts to audit our findings and validate our processes and recommendations. These “analytics experts” will be some of the most recognizable names in the field.
The third meeting took place on September 22nd at the Shop.org Summit in Las Vegas. In this meeting we vetted some of the challenges with creating case studies about attribution, as well as some of the data points that need to be captured to make the case studies worthwhile. One challenge that arose when trying to produce before and after results is using two different time frames. For example, a company might have been using last click attribution in Q4 2008, then switched to multi-touch attribution in Q1 2009. If we compare profit, revenue, sales figures, etc., the increases or decreases we may find may have nothing to do with attribution, but more with the time of year that we are in.
We also identified some data points that we need to have in the case study. We recognized that the companies that take part most likely will not want to share any personally identifiable information, as they don’t want to give away any findings or secrets to their competition. Some of the data points that we agreed need to be captured are the marketing mix that attribution is being compared across, the ad spend, the type of attribution, and the industry the company is in, beyond just knowing they’re an eTailer.
A the end of the third meeting, we all agreed to have firmly established outlines for the retailer case study and technology review prepared for the next meeting, which will take place in later in October 2009. The ultimate goal is to publish the retail case study and technology review sometime in Q1 2010 after the 2009 holiday shopping season has commenced.
If you would like to keep up to date with the findings of this SIG, go to www.shop.org and search for ‘Attribution SIG’.
If you would like to read more about ClearSaleing’s findings in the world of attribution, please visit www.AttributionManagement.com or contact us directly.
