If your company has conversions that occur offline, either on the phone or at a brick and mortar store, you need to understand if those offline conversions are a result of your online advertising. If you don’t figure this out, you’re undervaluing your advertising, which leads to poor optimization decisions.
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…
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.
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.
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.
This webcast continues the discussion surrounding how to identify, define and ultimately recommend better ways to measure and value an ad.
We’ll present a series of interactive polling questions and share the results with the audience immediately, so you’ll get some real-time information as to how leading internet marketers value ads.
Any good Internet marketing professional knows that assigning all of the value to the last ad clicked on before the conversion is inherently flawed. However, most Internet advertisers lack:
• The tracking technology required to determine the actual team of ads and their sequence that lead to the conversion.
• The valuation methodology to properly assess each ad’s true contribution and value to the conversion.
While a few technologies are now able to effectively track and assemble the purchase path leading to conversion, there is no industry-accepted standard or method for assigning relative value to ads in the path. How do we effectively attribute which ad – or group of ads – ultimately led to the final conversion?
We’ll cover a variety of common issues and scenarios surrounding attribution, such as:
• How length of time between searches affect how ads are credited
• Lifetime ad value with use of additional search
• Best allocation of different advertising scenarios, such as online-offline
This webcast brings together the online marketing and advertising minds to work together as a community to help collectively identify, evaluate, vet and ultimately recommend the best attribution valuation practices and methodologies for online advertisers.
While a few technologies are now able to effectively track and assemble the purchase path leading to conversion, there is no industry-accepted standard or method for assigning relative value to ads in the path. How do we effectively attribute which ad – or group of ads – ultimately led to the final conversion?
This webcast will bring together the online marketing and advertising minds to work together as a community to help collectively identify, evaluate, vet and ultimately recommend the best attribution valuation practices and methodologies.
In this webcast we’ll discuss
• Various ad attribution classifications (e.g. Introducers/Influencers/Closers)
• Common issues and scenarios surrounding attribution
• Best allocation methods for different advertising scenarios
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 sixth blog in a 10-part blog series for the Attribution Management Buyers Guide. This sixth section focuses on Purchase Path Stages.
Purchase path stages represent specific consideration steps in the overall buying process that a consumer goes through en route to a purchase.
Now that you are valuing ads based on where they occur in the customer buying cycle, it will be important for you to be able to identify and differentiate which specific ads introduce your brand to the customer, which ads influence their buying decision, and which ads close the sale. This information helps you pinpoint how certain ads are having a positive influence on customers in the beginning or middle of the buying cycle versus those at the end that close deals.
One question to ask vendors is, ‘How does your system report on which ads do a great job of introducing people to my business, closing deals, or being an ad that sits in between the two and influences the buying behavior? ‘
An additional benefit of working with a vendor that determines the effectiveness of all relevant ads along the purchase path is that, like most companies starting out in attribution, you will find you have many ads that close deals, but very few that wields influence during the early part of the buying cycle. This type of information highlights opportunities to invest in ads that are effective influencers in the early or middle parts of the buying cycle.
Attribution Management Buyers Guide Part 7 – Time
Time is one of the most impactful variables when performing attribution. Therefore, it is important that the attribution technology utilized provides you a lot of flexibility to apply different time variables and provides a lot of insight about the time it takes consumers to purchase and to navigate through the Purchase Path.
Here are some questions that you should ask of attribution management vendors to ensure that you’ll have the flexibility needed to handle this important variable:
– How is time factored in your tool’s attribution models?
– What kind of flexibility do I have?
– Can you tell me the time from first ad to conversion? Last ad to conversion?
– Can you tell me the time between ad clicks, ad impressions, direct visits, and organic visits in the Purchase Path?
– How long do your cookies last?
– How do I know the appropriate window of time to give credit back to an ad?
The ideal attribution management solution should be flexible with leveraging time as one of the key attribution attributes. Specifically, the solution should allow you to tell the time from first and last click to conversion. It should also be able to measure intervals between all clicks in the Purchase Path. This data, coupled with the ability to set an appropriate time window to apply attribution, will allow you to more accurately attribute proper credit back to the ads that contributed to the sale. In addition, the cookie that the vendor provides should optionally be configurable to last for much greater than 30 days, and it should renew each time that person visits the website.
The ideal attribution management vendor should allow you to easily see the time from first ad to conversion, last ad to conversion, and the time between each ad. The cookie that the vendor provides should last for much greater than 30 days and should renew each time that person visits the website.
The Attribution Management Forum has been created to bring together the leading online advertising minds to help collectively identify, evaluate, vet & ultimately recommend the best attribution valuation practices and methodologies. There are 5 categories concerning Attribution Management. The following video is the fifth and last video in the series: How to Value an Offline Ad.
The Attribution Management Forum has been created to bring together the leading online advertising minds to help collectively identify, evaluate, vet & ultimately recommend the best attribution valuation practices and methodologies. There are 5 categories concerning Attribution Management. The following video is the fourth in the series: Banner Impressions and Clicks.
Forrester Consulting recently examined the total economic impact and potential ROI that enterprises may realize by deploying ClearSaleing's advanced advertising analytics and attribution management platform. Register for the webinar to see the full analysis and the benefits from implementing an attribution management solution.
Independent technology research firm Forrester Research, Inc.
selected vendors for a 44-criteria evaluation to determine the leaders in the attribution management field.
ClearSaleing Takes "Top Honors"
ClearSaleing received the highest scores in both the “Current Offering” and “Strategy” categories.
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About Attribution Management
In the world of online marketing, Attribution Management is the process of properly identifying and valuing the chain of marketing initiatives and advertisements that lead to a sale or conversion.
