For years now, marketers have been able to buying display advertising, either by cost per impression (CPM), cost-per-click (CPC), or cost per action (CPA). More companies are opting for the CPA route, which on the surface seems like a much safer bet.

True to its word, CPA advertising means you only pay when you get an action or conversion, which can vary depending on the advertiser’s business model. Some common actions include a lead, an order, a download, a white paper view, or a demo.

The benefit is that the advertiser doesn’t pay for a non-action generating activity. Most marketers are savvy enough to negotiate the price they pay for actions from display networks. However, they don’t negotiate the terms as to what constitutes an action.

When buying display in a CPA model, there is typically a window of time in which a display provider can claim credit for an action. That window of time is defined as a look-back window — typically 30 days — from the time of conversion. So, in essence, any customer of yours that saw or clicked a display ad, as well as those that coincidentally was on a page with a display ad that they didn’t even see, in that window of time and converted is then claimed by the display network as an action that they deserve to be paid for.

Some display networks claim to have a reach in excess of 90 percent. By virtue then, more than 90 percent of your orders will be claimed by a display ad network. Does any marketer truly believe a display network deserves to be credited for more than 90 percent of their orders?

Unfortunately, marketers without the ability to see view through or post-impression data are forced to accept these terms at face value. Other marketers that have the ability to track an entire purchase path and truly see the impact of view-throughs and clicks on display ads, have the ability to define what truly constitutes an action worthy enough to pay a display network.

Let’s look at three examples of purchase paths that involve display, and how a marketer can use this data to negotiate a better definition of an action:

• Purchase Path 1: Display ad view through promoting diamond earrings -> Paid Search ad for diamond earrings -> Paid search brand term advertised in display ad -> Conversion

• Purchase Path 2: Paid search ad for diamond earrings -> Display retargeting diamond earrings -> Conversion

• Purchase Path 3: Display ad view through promoting diamond earrings -> (29 days pass) Paid search ad for diamond earrings -> Conversion

In Purchase Path 1, it seems clear that the use of display promoting diamond earrings was the impetus for the paid search that followed and the ultimate conversion. All marketers would agree the display was integral for making this action occur.

In Purchase Path 2, the person already had interest in looking for diamond earrings, they didn’t buy immediately, then were somewhere on the Internet when retargeting kicked in, and then they converted at a later point in time. In this scenario, it’s debatable if that display ad was necessary in getting that consumer to convert. The consumer might’ve already decided to buy but was just taking their time, when a retargeting ad was shown. In that case, the display ad was unnecessary. Or, the consumer could’ve been on the fence about buying diamond earrings, and the retargeted ad pushed them over and led to the action.

In Purchase Path 3, the sequence is similar to Purchase Path 1, except in this case 29 days elapsed between the display impression and the paid search ad. Most marketers, and a lot of advertising research, would agree that an impression’s rate of decay on a consumers mind is less than 29 days. Therefore, it’s unlikely that this impression had a bearing on the paid search that ultimately led to the sale.

A display ad network would’ve received compensation for the three actions in the three purchase paths because an impression was served within that 30-day window. But marketers can clearly see that the value of those impressions in the three examples is different. Shouldn’t we be paying display ad networks on some sort of scale for actions versus treating all actions that were exposed to display as being equal value?

Some of our clients have the purchase path data described above and have successfully negotiated the definition of an action to a display network. In some cases, even though an impression was served (Purchase Path 3), they aren’t paying one cent for that action.

In other cases, they’re paying partial credit (Purchase Path 2). Finally, when it’s 100 percent clear that the display impression was 100 percent integral to the action, they’re paying the full CPA.

Attribution is about giving credit where credit is due. Attribution is also about paying for credit when credit is due. With the ability to track the entire purchase path, marketers now have the ability to negotiate and define what “A” is in CPA when it comes to display.

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.

(Click to enlarge)

• 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.

All social monitoring technologies pull data from popular social sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, MySpace, etc. Since they all pull data from the same sites, they more or less show the same data. One area of differentiation some companies have is the ability to also pull data from unstructured data sets. For example, a company like Social Seen could also pull in information from your corporate systems, like your CRM, Call Center, website and suggestion boxes.

These Social Media monitoring tools classify each “conversation” in a positive, neutral, or negative fashion using standard language protocols. If the word “good” is used, they assume it’s positive, and if the word “bad” is used, they assume it’s negative. If it doesn’t contain a positive or negative lean, they classify it as neutral. This challenge of accurately classifying conversations is a common problem in the social monitoring space. Recently, I learned that the Hebrew University developed a technology that has the ability to analyze conversations for positive or negative sentiment.  When tested against human reviewers, their algorithm agreed with humans nearly 80% of the time. So, there is hope that this common problem will be solved.

Actions That Are Clear

It’s obvious to me that if a company is using a social media monitoring tool, one worthwhile action to take is to reach out to those who have had negative experiences with your brand. Not only do you have a chance to turn this customer’s negative experience into a positive one and to hopefully retain them as a customer, but you increase the likelihood of that customer posting a positive message next time.

Another use of social media monitoring is to use the negative comments about your product or brand and address those at a more macro level. By this I mean that you can incorporate negative feedback into future product development or to create whole new business lines to address overarching complaints in the marketplace.

Many social media monitoring technologies allow you to monitor more than just your brand. Therefore, one smart action to take is to monitor your competition.  Understanding your own competition from their customers’ point of view can create opportunities for yourself to either expose your competitions weaknesses or capitalize on these weaknesses and turn their customers onto your company product offerings.

Actions That Are Not So Clear

Do positive comments equal profit? By this I mean does increasing the number of positive sentiment on the web increase profitability, and if so, is it quantifiable and by how much? If you could clearly state that for every positive comment, I get X return in profit, then one can easily determine how much time and how many resources should be dedicated to increasing positive sentiment on the web. But I’m not aware of social monitoring technologies being able to quantify this, so it is impossible to determine how much money and man power should be invested on generating positive sentiment.

If you could determine the ROI of positive sentiment, how do you generate more positive sentiment? Ideally, positive sentiment is driven by you providing a great product and service that people want to tell others about. The only way outside of creating great products and services to generate positive sentiment without using unscrupulous methods, like hiring cheap labor overseas to post positive things about you, is to ask your customers to post things on your behalf. “If you like our new X, please become a fan of our Facebook page.” Twitter’s new advertising model is another method that could potentially help you drive positive sentiment by paying for it.

There’s no way to track the influence of positive sentiment at the customer level. For example, if a person was in the market for product X and went to Amazon to read comments about the product, and while reading the comments learned about product Y, then went to a search engine looking for product Y, clicked on an ad and bought product Y, all a tracking technology would know about this customer is they clicked on an ad for product Y and converted. There is no tracking today that would also incorporate that the user read a positive review beforehand. Without this type of tracking, social media will never be able to be accurately valued, and therefore, it is impossible to know how much time or resources to dedicate to these types of endeavors.

I am by no means an expert in social media monitoring or in executing social media strategies. I am an expert in advertising analytics and quantifying the value of trackable steps in a purchase path. I am sure there are other actions that one can take from the data that social media technologies provide today, and I would love to hear what those are. Please feel free to share those below and hopefully change my opinion on social media monitoring for the better.

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.

Another key differentiator between SIS and other conferences is that it is structured to allow ample time to get to know the other attendees. The sessions run from 8am to 2pm, followed by several activities that allow you to partake in with other attendees. It’s during these activities, the drinks that follow, then dinner, then more drinks, that you really get to develop relationships with thought leaders in the industry. SIS conferences are held in beautiful locations and while there’s plenty of time for fun and drinks in the sun, most importantly, there’s a whole lot to be learned.

Below is a compilation of some of the more interesting companies and takeaways that I had from this year’s show:

Blue Kai:

• Wants to be the “Intel inside of display advertising”;
• Able to incorporate data from places like Acxiom and Experian, along with the companies own data to better target audience’s online;
• Has a lot of knowledge about where the consumer is at in the buying cycle, so you can target the right message to them;
• The types of data that they furnish allows for real-time bidding and display.

Microsoft:

• Discussed new type of user experience for search;
• Download GetPivot.com. This is a new way to think about search using images.

Yahoo:

• Discussed their rich ads in search, which is a search ad that also has the ability to play a video. Yahoo mentioned that click through rates and conversion rates have gone way up for customers who’ve used these ad formats, and in some cases, customers conversion rates have gone up by 50%;
• They will be targeting ads using a person’s search query history. This means if someone does a search for something which they have no ad inventory, they will look at that person’s prior searches and show ads related to those;
• Will start showing ads before a full search query is typed in. Using the Search Suggest feature, Yahoo will guess when you start typing a query as to what you’re looking for and show ads. They said that this could mean that people will start bidding on letters and syllables in addition to complete words;
• Lastly, Yahoo’s Sketch-A-Search is a new local search feature for smartphones that allows you to draw a shape or a line on a map and find restaurants, stores, etc., within that shape or on that line.

comScore:

• Discussed ‘The Wharton Project: The Future of Advertising’. This is a huge research project funded by companies such as Google to gain greater insights to how advertising actually works and what the future of it is. You can learn more by going to www.youtube.com/fastforward.

Razorfish:

• “Don’t position search by insulting other tactics.” This statement means that just because other forms of marketing aren’t as quantifiable as search does not mean they can’t be just as important;
• Forget ROI – Remember the Audience;
• Enables Stories Everywhere – this means that you’re consumers are not just on search, they are all over the Internet, and anywhere you can engage in conversation (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) is a worthwhile exercise;
• Resist the DR Temptation – this again speaks to the first point that just because an ad is not designed to do direct response does not mean it is not a worthwhile marketing exercise.

Efficient Frontier:

• “Errors using inadequate data are much less than using no data at all,” said by Charles Babbage;
• Presented a lot of interesting data about attribution management and how different types of ads can work together to achieve sales;
• Talked a lot about how display and search work very effectively together;
• Referenced a comScore study from 2009 about how search and display work together.

Other Notes:

• An attendee referenced an interesting article titled, “Sit. Walk. Slouch. Communicate. Create. Consume. Why the iPad Will Be A Hit” by Rishad Tobaccowalla
  • The iPad was discussed a lot at this conference and what it means for the future of marketing
• Chris Copeland, CEO of Group M Search, was a great presenter. He talked about a world without Google. His firm has done a lot of research on how social influences other channels. Chris wrote a good whitepaper called ‘The Influenced: Social Media, Search and the Interplay of Consideration and Consumption’.
• It was noted there are two types of agencies: implementers and consultancies. I thought this was an important distinction because too many agencies out there just do the busy work. They don’t provide insights, they are more reactive than proactive and are there simply to get ads running, whereas consultancies help you to achieve business goals with their primary tool being the use of advertising and the interpretation of advertising to reach those goals.

For this post, I want to go one step further and explain how you can use several different types of technologies for operational and project-based attribution. The tables below should help you select the most appropriate technology based on your own attribution needs.

Operational attribution allows an advertiser to see all the steps or clicks that led to conversion in real-time and continuously attributes conversion credit across the team of ads. The three most common technologies used for operational attribution are display ad servers, website analytics and advertising analytics.

Continue reading on Search Engine Land site…

I found it interesting this week to read What Celebrities Make For Twittvertising, which discussed the heavy payouts celebrities receive for tweeting about various products and brands. After reading this, I couldn’t help but think about how this relates to valuing a Facebook fan, so I decided to have some fun by identifying ways to truly value these celeb tweets…

Read the entire article on the Search Engine Land Blog…

Read the entire article on the Search Engine Land Blog…

Reading the report will give you an understanding of how Forrester sees each vendor in the space and what each vendor’s strengths and weaknesses are. One key point in the analysis is there is not one specific way to do attribution—each vendor approaches attribution in a unique way. For this post, we’re going to focus on the two specific types of attribution: “operational” (or day-to-day) attribution and “project-based” (or strategic, high-level) attribution…

Read the entire article on the Search Engine Land Blog…

Attribution: What It Is And Why Its Important

This is the eighth blog in a 10-part blog series for the Attribution Management Buyers Guide. This eighth section focuses on Basic Attribution Models.

When engaging with a new attribution management technology, you should be able to start performing attribution on day one out of the box. Though attribution can be a very complex exercise, there are also some simple attribution models that can greatly improve the performance of your online campaigns. To ensure the solution you decide to go with offers attribution models that you can use on day one, ask the following questions:

1. What kind of basic attribution models does your platform offer?

2. Can you verify that using these base attribution models will improve my accuracy and performance?

A robust attribution platform should be able to offer basic attribution models out of the box, such as:

• Even - where conversion credit is spread equally across all participating ads in the Purchase Path
• Even with Exclusions - the even model with the additional ability to exclude specific ads, such as Branded terms, at the end of the Purchase Path
• Path Length – the ability to assign specific percentages to participating ads based on the number of steps in the path

• Rules Based - the ability to assign specific percentages based on the types of ads and the number of steps that are used in each step along the path

An experienced attribution management provider should be able to provide you with case studies or examples of how these basic models were able to increase the accuracy of conversion valuation and, ultimately, how that improved performance, as measured by increased profit and/or ROI.

Of course, the best indicator of an attribution management models success is its ability to grow your own bottom line profit. You’ll need to have a benchmark in place before you start attribution to make sure these models truly are having the desired impact.

Part 9 – Mathematical Attribution

This is the ninth blog in a 10-part blog series for the Attribution Management Buyers Guide. This ninth section focuses on Mathematical Attribution.

After you find success using basic attribution models, you may want to move to more advanced attribution that allows you to set specific weights for different activities that occur during the purchase path. When selecting an attribution management vendor, it is imperative they offer not only basic attribution models but also provide you the ability to build more sophisticated models either through the use of their technology and/or with their consultative services.

Asking the following questions will ensure you have the ability to be more sophisticated in the future:

1. What kind of customization options do you offer?

2. Do you offer any consultative services that can build custom attribution models?

Moving beyond an Even attribution or an Even with Exclusions model requires an understanding of some complex mathematics. Setting custom attribution rules should not be a subjective exercise and should only be taken on by attribution management vendors with solid statistical and mathematical knowledge. Custom models should be able to include variables like the decay rate of different types of ads, the influence potential of different types of ads, additional time variables, types of products sold, type of customer, impact of social media, etc.

Part 10 – Data Warehousing

This is the tenth blog in a 10-part blog series for the Attribution Management Buyers Guide. This tenth section focuses on Data Warehousing.

When you make the move to attribution management, you’re going to then be collecting a wealth of information you did not have access to before.  For example, you’re now going to have information for all the ads involved in the sale(s) versus just the last ad. If you are tracking true profit that means you are also going to have individual product information. You also know a lot more about your customers buying behavior since you are able to see all the ads your customer uses versus the last one. To harness this information and to make it actionable, it will require the use of a data warehouse, which can be a powerful marketing intelligence asset for your company.

Ask the following questions to determine how your attribution vendor will allow you to get even more value out of the data being captured:

1. Does your technology reside on a data warehouse?

2. Do you offer a data warehouse as an option?

3. Can the warehoused data be queried to create custom reports?

Attribution management systems that are built upon a data warehouse will provide you with much greater flexibility in building custom models and custom reports. Additionally, it will be able to provide further analytics around things, such as product trends, customer buying behavior and lifetime value, for example.

Conclusion

Sophisticated marketers are keenly aware of the importance of Attribution Management in accurately measuring and improving the performance of their cross‐media advertising campaigns. The challenge for these marketers is to find a robust advertising analytics platform that is built on a foundation of attribution management. Hopefully, this Guide will help you assess whether the solution you’re considering measures up to the robust requirements of an effective attribution management platform.

Want to get more involved in attribution management? We invite you to become a member of the Attribution Management Forum, an online group that represents more than 300 leading marketers from a diverse range of companies across nearly every industry segment. For more information on joining, or for additional information on Attribution Management, visit us online at AttributionManagement.com or ClearSaleing.com.

Check out the remaining blogs in the Attribution Management Buyers Guide series:

Part 1 – Attribution Variables

Part 2 & 3 – Products and Ad Sources Tracked

Part 4 & 5 – Display Advertising and Exclusions

Part 6 & 7 – Purchase Path Stages and Time