Rather than trust the myriad studies done by search engines and other third parties about the impact of online advertising to offline conversions, you need to implement a system that truly ties your online ad spend to your offline conversions. What most marketers don’t realize is that some simple techniques actually allow you to do this…

Continue reading on Search Engine Watch blog…

Columbus, OH (PRWEB) September 22, 2010

Following directly on the heels of the release of the Forrester Consulting study that showcased a 605% ROI for companies using ClearSaleing’s software, advertising analytics leader ClearSaleing announced this week the addition of two new team members, both experts in the technical and theoretical aspects of attribution management. ClearSaleing is expanding the company’s already growing attribution management practice by naming Alphonse Okossi as the company’s Technical Director of Media Mix Modeling and Data Analytics, and Thiyag Chinnappan as its Director, Media Mix Modeling and Data Analytics.

“Customers often come to us with attribution questions based on their own complex marketing spend,” said Adam Goldberg, co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer at ClearSaleing. “They want to know answers to questions like, ‘How much credit should I attribute to impressions in a Purchase Path vs. a click?’ and ‘How should I allocate my budget across the different marketing channels available to me?’ With the growth in ClearSaleing’s Media Mix Modeling and Data Analytics practice, we will be better able to provide customers with specific statistically-sound solutions and attribution models that will allow them to more accurately assign purchase credit, identify profitable Purchase Paths, and eliminate underperforming ads or ad types. The more accurate our customer’s attribution models are, the more accurate their decisions will be about what works and what does not, which leads to greater profitability.”

“We’re delighted to welcome Alphonse and Thiyag to the ClearSaleing team,” Goldberg continued, “and know that our customers will directly benefit from the insights and experience they bring.”

ALPHONSE OKOSSI
Alphonse Okossi, ClearSaleing’s new Technical Director of Media Mix Modeling and Data Analytics, will spearhead the company’s technical efforts in developing and implementing creative statistical methods to solve offline/online media mix and attribution-related issues. Okossi’s career path highlights more than 15 years of experience in marketing analytics, data mining, predictive modeling, risk management, forecasting and optimization. His most recent role prior to joining ClearSaleing was as Managing Partner of Planning Constructs, Inc., where he led development of the company’s marketing mix and price promotion modeling platform, including managing the programming team and designing demand forecasting and simulation web tool.

Prior to Planning Constructs, Okossi was the Analytical Product Development Manager for Information Resources, Inc., where he lead and conducted hands-on statistical modeling and related software application projects for price promotion, marketing mix, assortment, seasonality, incrementality and related forecasting/simulation web tools development. Prior to this position, Okossi held various high-level analytics consulting positions, providing web-enabled statistical analyses for clients, including Wells Fargo and JC Penney. Okossi, whose career started in the finance industry, holds a Ph.D. in Economics and an MA in International Finance and Trade from State University of New York at Albany.

THIYAG CHINNAPPAN
In his role as Director of Media Mix Modeling and Data Analytics, Thiyag Chinnappan will be responsible for leading the company’s practice and product strategy related to advanced data analytics. Chinnappan’s work experience is rich in analytics and media mix modeling. Prior to joining ClearSaleing, Chinnappan served as client manager in the analytics consulting division of The Nielsen Company where he developed and managed marketing and media mix activities for Kraft Canada, among other clients.

Before his work with Nielsen, Chinnappan was a project manager in marketplace analytics for HAVI Global Solutions, where he provided tactical data analysis and campaign launch insights for clients including McDonalds. Chinnappan, who holds an MBA from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, also holds a diploma in Project Management from Northwestern University.

CLEARSALEING ANNOUNCES NEW SERVICE OFFERINGS, TEI REPORT
With the addition of Okossi and Chinnappan, ClearSaleing plans to add a host of new offerings to its service roster, including improving existing attribution performance using profit weighting from Media Mix models, performing custom online/offline media mix analyses, simulating and predicting future sales using demand forecast functionality, and conducting custom analytics studies using advanced econometric techniques. Additionally, ClearSaleing will also develop custom Analytics Dashboards to allow clients immediate access to data and insights on specific online purchase behavior and target customers.

ClearSaleing also recently announced the release of a Forrester Consulting study detailing the value that ClearSaleing provides to its clients. The study, titled “The Total Economic Impact™ of ClearSaleing”, indicates a 605 percent adjusted return-on-investment for companies engaging in ClearSaleing’s attribution management offering, along with additional benefits of time savings, eliminating waste and more. Forrester conducted interviews with four ClearSaleing clients and found that, by using ClearSaleing, these companies experienced a net present value of more than $2.3 million, in addition to improving efficiencies in decision making and media buying and increasing productivity in automation and reporting. The full study is available for free on the ClearSaleing site.

ABOUT CLEARSALEING
ClearSaleing has been named “Technology Platform Search Marketers Can’t Live Without” at the SES (Search Engine Strategies) Awards. 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 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.

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.

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Attribution management begins with a tracking technology in place that allows you to track both clicks and view-throughs, and tracks beyond the last click. Here’s an example of the type of data available on a particular order if an attribution management technology is in place….

Continue reading article on Search Engine Watch Blog…

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.

Rosetta’s command of ClearSaleing’s attribution management technology has helped them improve client performance in many ways. Join us for this free webinar to discover more about:

- 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

Speakers during the webinar include Rosetta’s Analytics and Optimization Manager, Brean  Bark, along with Search, Online and Social Media Manager, Aaron Smith. The discussion is moderated by ClearSaleing’s co-founder and CIO, Adam Goldberg.

Register now for this free webinar.

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.

All reports are not created equally nor are they calculated the same way.  In an attribution world, there are two types of reports, ones that factor in attribution and ones that don’t.

The two types of reports have two different purposes:

• Operational Reports
• Performance Reports

Operational Reports

Operational reports don’t factor in attribution.  Operational reports are reports used to measure how your business is doing.  Operational reports are used to ensure there is nothing ‘broken.’  Operational reports include reports run from your ecommerce system, most traditional web analytics reports and reports that are compiled from several different sources.

Performance Reports

Attribution is crucial for performance reports.  Performance reports are used to judge how well your advertising is performing.  Performance reports also take into consideration latency and latent conversions described in my last post.

Both reports are extremely useful.  The problem arises when you try to compare an operational report to a performance report.  One common example of this  that I see is when a new ClearSaleing customer attempts to compare a report from their web database, an order report or a booking report, to the ‘All Sources’ screen of the Performance tab or any other report that factors in attribution.

These two reports will never ‘match,’ nor should they.  Operations reports give 100% of credit to the last click, 100% credit to the date and source of conversion (no attribution).  Performance reports divide up the credit and attributes it to each date and source that led up to the conversion (attribution).

So before you try to compare two reports, take a step back.  Think about the report that you are trying to compare to a performance (attribution) report.  Does the report factor in attribution?  If the report is coming from your ecommerce database or booking engine, or even your traditional web analytics, it probably does not use attribution.

On Wednesday, May 12 at 1pm EST, ClearSaleing will be presenting a webinar on the most common myths and misconceptions by attribution’s supporters and detractors. Here are the 12 most common misconceptions that will be addressed during this webinar:

1. I don’t have an attribution problem
2. The last click is the chosen one
3. There are no good methods for assigning attribution credit
4. There are no good tools for attribution
5. Attribution can be done with web analytics
6. Attribution can be done in a silo
7. Attribution is about buying the right mix of media
8. Attribution pulls dollars away from search
9. Path analysis is a waste of time
10. A/B testing is effective for attribution
11. Attribution Management takes too much time to be worth it
12. Attribution Management is a silver bullet

If you are interested in learning more about these topics, please join us for this free webcast to hear ClearSaleing’s point of view on these items.

There are many, many, many reasons why, when comparing two reports, even from the same system, the numbers will not match.

The reasons are (and each week, I will cover one reason in detail):

1. Attribution Reporting

Attribution reports’ calculations update daily and divide credit (orders, revenue and profit) over all of the contributing ads, impressions and clicks that led to a sale or other conversion.  Attribution is a newer concept for many marketers.   The fact that there is now the idea of a fraction of an order is definitely a different way of thinking.

2. Non-Attribution

Most marketers are very comfortable with non-attribution reporting.  Common examples of non-attribution reports are reports that are used for operational decisions, for example a Daily Order Report from a shopping cart.  Problems arise when trying to compare an attribution report to a non-attribution report (comparing apples to oranges).

3. Multiple Data Source – Over Counting/Over Crediting

If web analytics have not been configured to track all of the different sources of traffic to a conversion level, marketers are left to rely on reports provided by the source itself (e.g. Google AdWords Reports, Yahoo Search Marketing Reports, as well as other vendors like Display, Affiliates and Email).  Because none of these sources are ‘aware’ of the other sources, conversions and revenue can be over counted, and therefore, over credited.

4. Under Counting – Under Crediting

This is a by-product of the limitations of last click.  If you are using traditional web analytics, this is likely a problem.  Because the referrer only pays attention to the last place where a visitor came from, you wind up under crediting certain sources.

5. Accuracy – Data Quality of Web Reports

Here is the big elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.  It is possible that the data that you are relying to make important spending decisions is wrong.  The number one cause, in my experience, is a problem with the implementation.  Examples I have seen of implementation problems are code not being on every page, conversion code not being on the page or not being correct, and profiles or other settings that have not been configured properly.  It is definitely worth auditing your implementation, even if you are using a free solution.

6. Bonus:  One web vendor report to another

Even armed with the knowledge that both implementations are correct and complete, it is most often an exercise in futility comparing one vendor report to another.  The reason for this:  each company has a different idea of how metrics should be defined and calculated.  And each company has settings both internal and external that define how metrics are calculated (e.g if someone is on your site for 60 minutes are they one visit or two).

This week – Attribution

Attribution is a difficult concept.  Take pay-per-click as an example.  In order to fairly and accurately measure an ad, you have to think about latency.  On the day an ad runs, some of the conversions will take place.  But some people will come to your Web site from the ad and not be quite ready to purchase.  They may decide to return to your site a few days later and purchase.

To be ‘fair’ to your ads, you have to be able to count these conversions and credit them to the original ad (or multiple ads if several were seen along the way).

For example, say someone clicks on a Google ad on April 27^th.  They get to your site but are not convinced to purchase.  Instead they continue their research.  The next day, April 28^th, they go to Yahoo, click on an ad and purchase.

If you are attributing credit, here is what your reports look like:

April 28, 2010 – Yesterday’s Report

Here’s the tricky thing – the numbers change.  In order to give credit for latent conversions, the historic performance will then change.

April 29, 2010 – Custom Report Range 4/27/2010

There is no additional ad spend, but the .5 order is now credited to the correct day.

And this impacts all of the calculated metrics.

April 28, 2010 – Yesterday’s Report

Here’s the tricky thing – the numbers change.  In order to give credit for latent conversions, the historic performance will then change.

April 29, 2010 – Custom Report Range 4/27/2010

And even a step further, this impacts the ROI for each day.

The best thing about solutions that provide attribution reporting is that they supply this information already pre-calculated, so you don’t have to think about these types of calculations or even consider the fact that there are now fractions of orders.

Attribution management is shrouded in mystery to some online marketers. But it’s pretty straight forward, actually. In the simplest terms, just because somebody clicked on a paid ad and you made a sale, it doesn’t mean the PPC ad was responsible for it. How about if that same person had been engaging with your brand for some time via an email campaign, your organic listings, a social media site and then eventually decided to buy. There’s a whole lot of contact before the click and if you’re responsible for all of those touch points, you need to be able to appropriate your marketing dollars where they count most.

Join us for a free webinar when we discuss:

• How to analyze your current attribution management status (or lack of it);
• Are there any good tools available?
• Which ads and sources should get credit?
• Is path analysis a waste of time?
• Will attribution pull dollars away from search?
• And much more…

Register for the webinar which takes place Wednesday, May 12 at 1pm.