Make Attribution Actionable Qubit Whitepaper

Best practice guide:Ten ways to make attribution actionable

September 2013

2Ten ways to make attribution actionable

Contents

What is attribution? 4

Why do we need attribution? 5

How sophisticated is attribution? 6

What are the difficulties associated with attribution? 8

Ten best practices for making attribution actionable 10

About Qubit 16


What is attribution?

Attribution means assigning value to each of your acquisition channels according to how much you believe they contribute to each sale. Thats like working out who the most valuable player on your team is, and the best formation for them to play in!

The majority of your traffic might be driven by Google, but perhaps it doesnt drive the value you think it does or the value Google assigns! This can potentially erode your profit margin and diminish your return on investment. And who doesnt need to deliver positive ROI? Yet despite this, 83% of businesses have been engaged in attribution for less than three years.1

1 Google, 2013


Why do we need attribution?

Imagine if every year when your birthday came around, a whole group of people banded together to buy you a present. Would you thank them all equally, thank the person who gave it to you, or try and work out who actually put the effort in to try and make you happy? Now friendship groups dont work on the same principles as businesses do; sometimes the people who contribute the least might mean the most to you. But when it comes to profit margins, it is of paramount importance to figure out who is actually driving the value to your business.

Consider this journey: a consumer googles your brand and lands on your site through an affiliate link or an industry blog. A couple of days later, theyre on their phone and click through to your website. Later that evening, theyre on their laptop, they see your adwords ad and click on it. Once theyve made a purchase from your site, which channel do you reward between these three? Businesses need attribution so they can figure out how to allocate their marketing spend.


2 FIKSU Cost per Loyal Customer Index, 2013

3 Google, 2012

4 Forrester, 2013

How sophisticated is attribution?

Tough competition means its more difficult to get people to buy from you than ever. Between March 2011 and 2013, the amount of money brands had to spend to get one person to buy from them increased by 45%!2 Its no wonder attribution has suddenly become a priority for marketers: with profit margins being eroded swiftly, justifying your digital marketing spend has never been more important.

The attention of marketers has meant attribution has come a long way. In 2011 over 80% of companies were using a first or last click model.3 But now, things are heating up. Tina Moffett of Forrester Research observes that Marketers today are not settling for narrowly focused metrics of success defined by last-touch attribution.4 The previous industry standard has been overtaken by new, superior models.

So what are the other options? Attribution generally falls into three broad categories.


5 HiPPO: HIghest Paid Persons Opinion. This means following the gut feeling of an executive rather than the data

Name What? Advantage Disadvantage Who for?

First or last click model

Attributes all the value of a sale to a single touchpoint.

Easy to implement.

Stops giving you the full picture as soon as customers visit more than once.

Companies whose purchasing process usually only involves one touchpoint.

Rules based model

Value is distributed between the different channels using rules based on the observation of visitor behaviour.

Can make the most of internal expertise, meaning you can develop your own model.

Relying on internal expertise can often fall foul of the HIPPO syndrome.5

Highly sophisticated companies who have an in-house analyst to slice and dice the data to determine the best model.

Algorithmic model

A constantly self-updating, learning algorithm that assigns value to each channel according to the behaviours associated with it.

Behavioural learning evolves with the business. As the priorities of customers change, so too does your pricing structure.

Can seem like a black box that presents you with a host of convenient numbers, which can be difficult to trust.

Suited to most ecommerce businesses where purchases typically involve more than one session.


6 Google, 2012

What are the difficulties associated with attribution?

Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I dont know which half. This complaint has been reiterated time and time again by CMOs struggling with tight budgets. Its a clich because its true. It is difficult to know which ad activity is effective for two reasons: consumers usually dont tell you exactly why they bought something, and even if they do, theyre not necessarily right about it.

Although there are sophisticated products available on the market, the adoption of these attribution models has been slow. Sometimes, even when sophisticated models are employed, they remain difficult to apply cross-channel which can lead to inaccuracies in the data. So what are the barriers stopping marketers?

1. Arbitrary models In 2012, over 80% of client-side marketers were using a linear, arbitrarily decided attribution model in order to assign value to channels.6 Using a last-click or first-click model ignores the rest of the route to purchase, and a linear, weighted model will always end up with inaccuracies.


7 Google, 2012

Figure 1. Example of how propensity to purchase can increase as a visitor encounters your site from different traffic sources

2. Difficult to act upon Despite the call for a new, better way to do attribution, over 30% of tools live in spreadsheets so trying to integrate them with other platforms can be tough.7 This makes the findings from the data difficult to act upon, as opposed to a custom technology built for the purpose.

3. Data accuracy Attempting to perform attribution across channels can be tough, with disparate data sets speaking different languages. Without a carefully organised data set, many attributions become unreliable, and no better than using a last click model. If dynamic, cross-channel solutions arent going to outperform basic last click solutions, why bother, right? Well, last-click can only ever perform so well, but dynamic solutions learn as they go along. The quality of their output improves as time passes!

Number of visits


Ten best practices for making attribution actionable

We at Qubit have been dealing with attribution for a while now. To this end, heres ten best practices around marketing attribution you can implement in order to ensure you make the most of your marketing budget.

1. Integrate attribution into bid management

Some of the most important touch points in a customers journey are undervalued by many of the less sophisticated attribution models out there. If you want to maximise your return on investment in display networks and pay-per-click, you need to integrate an advanced attribution model into your bid management system to prioritise the appropriate channels.

Next move?Work with a bid management vendor to find out what signals you can add into their model. You can then plug in via their API or daily downloads of data.

2. Stop overpaying your affiliates

Paying your affiliates twice for a single conversion can drastically reduce the return of investment of a potentially lucrative traffic source. You need to analyse your CPA traffic sources to ensure you are not overpaying for conversions, notify the relevant parties, then set up rules for CPA de-duplication. Everyones paid for an item twice before due to faulty card machines. You might be doing this with every transaction!

Next move?Identify the rules that you want to implement and notify affiliates that this is now happening.

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Ten ways to make attribution actionable

3. Identify and optimise for high-performing keywords

Instead of seeing SEO as a single channel, view each of your potential keywords as individual routes a consumer can travel to reach your website. Dynamically evolving content that edits itself to align with a business goals may be difficult to implement for now, but serving visitors who follow particularly high-performing keywords with targeted landing pages can lead to a significant boost in conversions.

Next move?Set up a workshop and put together a content strategy. Give your SEO agency, or in-house SEO team access to attribution reports so they can see what impact they are having and update their strategy accordingly.

4. Track all of your emails separately

Understanding which emails are driving the most value in terms of clicks and conversions on a longer term basis than last click enables you to factor in these additional touch points into your attribution model and refine your payment structure.

Next move?Come up with a tagging logic that your email team can follow for different email types and use tools such as Qubits free URL builder (bit.ly/URLtool) to implement it.

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5. Structure your data in a future proofed fashion

Using a robust data model allows you to collect visitor data with an unprecedented level of granularity. It also enables you to understand exactly what site behaviour is driving conversion and then attribute this back to the corresponding marketing channel. A data model is a JSON object that translates the variables you call on your website into another form, meaning they can be understood by other sources. In simple terms, this means getting different technologies to work together takes hours rather than weeks!

Next move?Use a W3C standard compliant data model (bit.ly/qubitw3c) to ensure you are future proofing your data. Qubits Universal Variable model is a free, open source data model, but there are others that fit the bill.

6. Split social into Bought, Earned and Owned

In order to fully understand the value of social, split each of these channels up and assess them separately. Bought social appearances include things like sponsored stories in your Facebook feed. Earned include people tweeting about your product. Owned social media is the profile of the company, or the guest blogging position your CMO holds. Carefully split these out and build a finer understanding of your social media spend.

Next move?Get your social team to tag all social content up correctly so they can assess the comparative effectiveness of the different channels, and focus on areas of weakness.

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7. Conduct an A/B test on re-marketing activity

Obtaining an understanding of cross-channel interactions is key to maximising your conversions. Do they actually increase the number of visitors returning to site? Where does the most value in the purchase funnel lie? Is it in the awareness, consideration, or purchase stages? Does it affect average order value? Can you start to use your data layer to expose only high value users to retargeting and improve performance?

Next move?Work with an A/B testing vendor who can help run split traffic on your campaign. It is important to work with your re-marketing company who will be keen to assess the incremental revenue generated by their work.

8. Make sure everyones on side with the chosen solution

If you dont have everyone aligned on a common approach, there is a significant danger of internal squabbling over the marketing spend. If everyone knows exactly which approach is being taken and why, it will be easier down the line to operationalise, and justify changes in your marketing spend.

Next move?Run a workshop to take everyone through the methodology and then do monthly or quarterly check-ins to review the data and associated actions.

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9. Categorise your referrals as rigorously as possible

You need to complete a full categorisation of referrals right down to keyword level. For example, affiliate links are very different to visitors who come from Google who searched your brand. You can then optimise specific landing pages to create a more personalised experience. Its all too easy to forget how granular categorisation might need to be be as rigorous as possible and watch as your bounce rates plummet.

Next move?Get categorising by collecting more data where possible! For example, when visitors arrive through natural search, categorise them into brand search and non-brand search. Once youve finished this, set each category of referrals to link to specifically designed homepages.

10. Tailor your landing pages for each step of the customer journey

By showing people who come to your website from different channels a different landing page, you can improve the value of underperforming key terms. For example, you might not expect someone arriving at your site from Facebook to purchase, but you might increase their propensity to spend on subsequent visits by showing them how many of their friends have also purchased from your site.

Next move?If your CMS cannot easily create many variations of a landing page targeted to specific traffic sources or keyword groups, work with a personalisation platform that can help you do landing page optimisation and measure improvements in performance through AB testing.

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So what are you waiting for? Marketers have always struggled with the internal justification of their budgets, and embracing more sophisticated attribution models offers a solution.

Not only will your CMO no longer have to find additional budget, youll be able to calculate your own ROI in a robust fashion. Forget about struggling to justify your own existence to the C-suite. Embrace attribution, and watch the numbers do it for you.

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About Qubit

Drive conversions, fast.

Qubit helps drive conversions on ecommerce websites. We do this by putting marketing and ecommerce teams in control of their optimisation strategies so that they can create relevant and engaging experiences for their visitors.

Qubit consolidates tag management, visitor analytics, A/B testing and personalisation within a single integrated platform to unchain IT resources and create one seamless optimisation workflow. As these technologies work together, huge value is placed business agility and collecting data to understand every aspect of visitor behaviour.

This new approach to personalisation is known as Customer Experience Management, and enables businesses to create relationships with their visitors in real time and ensure that their expectations are met at each stage of the purchase lifecycle.

To date weve helped Staples, Topshop, All Saints, Superdry, Farfetch and John Lewis improve their conversion rates and become more nimble in their marketing and ecommerce operations.

www.qubitproducts.com


www.qubitproducts.com +44 (0)203 551 [email protected]

Make Attribution Actionable Qubit Whitepaper

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