Media Attribution : Matchbacks: The Next Generation

Here comes advanced media attribution, enabling you to allocate all media touchpoints to transactions

The point is to influence customer behavior, not just report it. Better understanding of cause and effect provides sophisticated marketers with much deeper insight that leads to dramatically more successful marketing and business strategies.

A Secret Formula?
In today’s marketplace, the path to purchase isn’t direct, and the consumer doesn’t necessarily leave footprints. With simultaneous campaigns across media channels on one side of the equation and multiple sales channels on the other, successful media attribution needs to include an intelligent assessment of which touchpoints have the strongest effect in generating the sale.

But do you attribute a transaction to the first touchpoint, the last or equally across all of them? Marketers are on a quest to find that magic formula for calculating the value of each media touchpoint. A catalog, for instance, has a long order curve. So if a customer who transacts with you received a catalog in the past 30 to 45 days, your catalog gets credit for playing a part in that transaction.

E-mail, on the other hand, has a short order curve, typically less than a couple weeks. If the order is placed within this time frame, your e-mail campaign gets a commendation as well. How compelling would it be to know, too, whether that customer is registered as a friend on your corporate Facebook page or follows you on Twitter? Very few retailers actually aggregate all that information at the customer or transactional level.

Investing Wisely
While marketers have become sophisticated at collecting data, connecting those dots is the new challenge. Marketers ultimately want to get more out of media attribution than static statistics. They want and need to understand the relationships between marketing channels and retail transactions to gain the insight to optimize contact strategies. Always knowing exactly which media played a part is an elusive goal.

Nevertheless, it’s important to at least understand the various touchpoints that occurred within an applicable time frame so you can better allocate your marketing dollars and maximize your investment in all selling channels. You’ll seldom have any type of transaction attributable to just one media. Whatever the exact equation is to calculate the value of each media touchpoint, having the insight is invaluable to marketers. Without it, you overinvest in one channel and underinvest in another.

You don’t want to overinvest in direct mail to a segment of customers who are very engaged online, for example. These customers might rely on blogs or Facebook or affiliate partnerships to transact with a retailer. Unless you have that insight, you can’t develop an appropriate marketing strategy; you can’t segment your customer file appropriately and drive a better return on every marketing dollar.

Media attribution is just another step toward understanding how customers want to engage with retailers, and what’s the optimal mix of media to generate that engagement at the most effective cost. There’s a lot of media to measure. But don’t just collect the data; integrate it. Even the latest technologies can’t attribute every transaction to all the relevant media touchpoints.

It’s about harvesting insights to create the business rules that lead to understanding the path to purchase. Yes, you need sophisticated technology to integrate all your data into one source and get a full view of the responsiveness of each customer across various media channels. But it’s you who’ll eventually leverage that data and make better marketing decisions. Sophisticated marketers understand that media attribution is a critical business strategy, not a technical detail. ROI

Michael Caccavale is co-founder and CEO of interactive marketing firm Pluris (mcaccavale@plurismarketing.com).