By Adam Goldberg

What is Twitter?  You could ask 100 Tweeters that question and end up with 100 different answers.  Some might say it is micro blogging.  Others say it is a way to keep your ‘followers’ up to date on your comings and goings.  Another group might say it is a waste of time.

As an online marketer, I want to know if Twitter is a bona fide advertising source.  Sure I know I could tweet about events going on at my company or clients in hope that those Tweets drive my followers to take certain action.  But is it really an advertising source that deserves to receive credit for conversion if I can tie the conversion to the fact that the consumer read the tweet?

During the Attribution Management Forum 2.0 (AMF) on Jan 29^th, 2009, we posed that question to an audience of hundreds of senior online marketers by presenting the following two scenarios, and we asked them to vote on how they would attribute conversion credit if they knew a tweet was involved in that consumers buying process.

Scenario 1:

In Scenario 1, a consumer received a tweet that alerted them to the fact that they could save 20% on Nike Shox if they bought them from the Finish Line by 12am tomorrow night.  The consumer clicked on the link in the tweet, but did not buy the Nike Shox at that moment.  Later on they went to a search engine and searched for “Woman’s Nike Shox,” clicked on an ad for the Finish Line and bought a pair of Nike Shox before the 12am deadline and saved the 20% that was tweeted about on Twitter.

We asked the audience to select the best attribution rule out of the following options:

Over 67% in both groups we polled, according to their indicated level of experience with attribution management, believe option “A” is the best rule.  This vote shows that these senior online marketers do indeed believe that Twitter is a bona fide advertising source as they are willing to give half of the credit for this conversion to Twitter.

Less than 8% in any group we polled voted for option “C”, which totally excluded Twitter from receiving any credit for the conversion.  This is further proof that senior online marketers do value Twitter as an advertising source worthy of conversion credit.

Scenario 2:

In scenario 2, the tweet was exactly the same as the tweet in scenario 1.  In scenario 2, the consumer clicked on the link in the tweet, but did not convert at that moment.  Later on they used their address bar to navigate directly back to the Finish Line’s website, purchased a pair of Nike Shox and received the 20% discount because they bought before the deadline.

We asked the audience to select the best attribution rule out of the following options:

Over 66% in both groups we polled, according to their indicated level of experience with attribution management, believe option “B” is the best rule.  This vote shows once again that these senior online marketers do indeed believe that Twitter is a bona fide advertising source as they are willing to give 100% of the credit for this conversion to Twitter and 0% of the conversion credit to the address bar.

Less than 7% in any group we polled voted for option “C”, which totally excluded Twitter from receiving any credit for the conversion.  This is further proof that senior online marketers do value Twitter as an advertising source worthy of conversion credit.

These types of scenarios and rules are why we continue to strive to generate some consensus around Attribution Management.  If you would like to learn more about these scenarios or the scenarios from the previous Forum, please visit www.AttributionManagement.com.  Additionally, we love to hear from our audience, so please fill us in on what your thoughts about this scenario may be.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 9:53 am and is filed under All Blogs, Attribution Management, PPC, What's New?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.