Any marketer who works to attract and retain customers online can profess that consumer behavior is constantly shifting. With the explosive growth of social media outlets, video advertising, and mobile marketing, brands are struggling to determine how to profitably add these new marketing channels to their strategy, without sacrificing their core online assets in search marketing, display advertising, email marketing, and more.

Enter Attribution Management.

If you are not familiar with this concept, you need to be. It is quickly becoming the accepted standard for analyzing your customers’ purchase paths, utilizing your data, and optimizing individual online channels for the most cost savings and best customer experience.

Continue reading the full article at  DestinationCRM.com

COLUMBUS, Ohio, November 10, 2011 – ClearSaleing, an industry leading advertising analytics and attribution platform today announced the launch of ClearSaleing (CS) Barometer™, an advanced analytics solution that enables marketers to measure performance more precisely than ever before. CS Barometer provides deeper and more accurate insight into consumer behavior and the social and economic factors that affect their buying habits, giving marketers the ability to measure performance and react swifter relative to their competitors and other outside influences.

“CS Barometer combines innovative analytics and modeling technologies with hundreds of social and economic indices, allowing marketers to detect and respond fast to fluctuations in their digital marketing performance,” said ClearSaleing president Randy Smith.  “CS Barometer is the first solution to eliminate the complexities and barriers of measuring market and economic influences and empowers marketers with precise insight and confidence to create more targeted and strategic campaigns.”

CS Barometer also provides marketers information around their advertising marketing programs through access to online and offline key performance indicators, including economic information, unemployment rates, housing starts, consumer confidence, and other areas.  Available data includes:

• Economic Indices: Marketers can better understand how economic factors influence marketing success such as how consumer confidence may impact retail marketing tactics to how housing starts influence digital marketing efforts of household goods brands. Specific indices include: quarterly real gross domestic product (GDP), weekly M2 (Money Supply), monthly consumer price index (CPI), monthly producer price index (PPI), monthly consumer confidence index, monthly unemployment rate, monthly retail sales, monthly housing starts, monthly manufacturing and trade inventories and sales, Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index (S&P 500) and others.

• Social Indices: Monitors stats such as Facebook likes and Twitter mentions and enables advertisers to track social buzz as part of their integrated marketing campaign.

• Vertical Indices: Uniquely created for business, finance, services, retail apparel, and retail verticals, these indices are available with pre-populated, channel-specific data for easy search and display of critical metrics.

For more information about ClearSaleing’s advertising analytics and attribution technology, please go to www.ClearSaleing.com.

About ClearSaleing

ClearSaleing is an industry-leading advertising analytics and attribution platform. ClearSaleing enables innovative advertisers to increase sales volume and overall media mix profitability across their complex mix of advertising investments. The ClearSaleing platform and related services allow innovative clients such as American Greetings, Rosetta, Range Online Media and Nationwide Insurance to achieve true transparency across their marketing mix performance and to understand which marketing channels are most influential to profit, engagement, and overall return on investment. The company was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. ClearSaleing is a wholly-owned subsidiary of GSI Commerce. GSI Commerce is an eBay Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY) company.

Attribution management begins with a tracking technology in place that allows you to track both clicks and view-throughs, and tracks beyond the last click. Here’s an example of the type of data available on a particular order if an attribution management technology is in place….

Continue reading article on Search Engine Watch Blog…

Columbus, OH (PRWEB) September 15, 2010

Forrester Consulting today issued a study detailing the value advanced advertising analytics provider ClearSaleing provides to its clients. The study, titled “The Total Economic Impact™ of ClearSaleing”, indicates a 605 percent adjusted return-on-investment for companies engaging in ClearSaleing’s attribution management offering, along with additional benefits of time savings, eliminating waste and more.

The Forrester Consulting study, which was commissioned by ClearSaleing and is available at http://landing.clearsaleing.com/tei, looked at the experience of four ClearSaleing clients, including a national financial services organization, an online retail organization, the online retail arm of a multinational automotive products and services company, and a full-service digital advertising agency. Forrester Consulting found that, by using ClearSaleing, these companies experienced a net present value of more than $2.3 million, in addition to improving efficiencies in decision making and media buying and increasing productivity in automation and reporting.

“We are thrilled to have the validation of a reliable third-party like Forrester Consulting to back up our more than four years of success in working with clients,” said Adam Goldberg, chief innovation officer and co-founder of ClearSaleing. “This study verbalizes what we at ClearSaleing have long known: our model for managing advertising portfolios is a valuable and irreplaceable asset.”

Forrester Consulting also found that customers are able to more efficiently bid on keywords and tighten ad spend by assigning attribution to each channel and by launching new initiatives to increase conversion rates. With more accurate reporting, customers could focus on new marketing campaigns, landing pages and other strategic projects that resulted in improved conversion rates. The companies interviewed by Forrester Consulting also experienced a significant cost and time savings in reporting, creating a more efficient and prosperous organization.

“The benefits of engaging ClearSaleing have proved nearly limitless for AmericanGreetings.com, providing us a strategic guideline for advertising that is based on measurable and actionable results,” said Tessa Fraser, senior marketing manager of American Greetings Interactive, a long-time ClearSaleing client. “Not only do we now better understand our customers and how to reach them more effectively, we also have eliminated tactics which weren’t reaching our desired audiences. ClearSaleing is an important partner in helping us achieve our long-term goals.”

Forrester Consulting’s proprietary Total Economic Impact methodology examines the cost, benefit, flexibility and risk factors that affect an investment decision. Its multistep approach evaluates the impact a company, like ClearSaleing, can have on an organization.

For more information on the Total Economic Impact study methodology, visit www.forrester.com/TEI. For more information and to read the full ClearSaleing study, visit http://landing.clearsaleing.com/tei.

About ClearSaleing

ClearSaleing has been named “Technology Platform Search Marketers Can’t Live Without” at the SES (Search Engine Strategies) Awards. ClearSaleing’s advertising portfolio management platform helps marketers identify ways to more effectively and profitably allocate ad spend across a complex mix of online advertising investments.

ClearSaleing is a thought leader in the growing scientific field of attribution management and publishes www.AttributionManagement.com that provides a rich repository of ClearSaleing and externally published articles, white papers and other material focused exclusively on attribution management.

ClearSaleing’s unique ability to give marketers telescopic insight into their online ad investment is attracting major brand customers such as American Greetings and Nationwide Insurance. The company was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. For more information, please visit www.ClearSaleing.com.

###

A/B Testing

Historically, display optimization has been done through A/B testing. You run the display campaign, you look at how that affects your KPIs (profit, revenue, ROI, CPA, etc.), and if you see lift in the KPIs you’re focused on, you can “attribute” that to the campaign working. If your numbers stay flat or go down, you can conclude display isn’t adding value.

With more A/B testing…

Read entire article on Search Engine Watch blog

Controlling advertising costs is a top-of-mind consideration these days, but negotiating a lower Cost of Acquisition (CPA) is tough without convincing data to back it up. At booth 320 during Search Engine Strategies San Francisco, August 16-20, ClearSaleing, the industry leader in advertising analytics and attribution management, will show how applying attribution criteria to CPA ad vehicles like display and affiliate networks can help advertisers better control ad spend costs.

“By applying attribution to our marketing spend, we save about 18% to 20% per campaign,” says Tessa Fraser, Senior Marketing Manager, American Greetings Interactive. American Greetings uses ClearSaleing’s attribution technology to determine the effectiveness of campaign spend across all marketing channels.

Most recently, American Greetings has been using attribution to work with performance display partners on serving media to increase audience reach. “Through ClearSaleing’s attribution model we know that our display partners are helping us reach new and effective audiences. We are also limiting spend waste on customers we would have received anyway,” says Fraser.

It’s a classic win-win, says ClearSaleing co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer, Adam Goldberg. “American Greetings controls CPA costs and gets better reach while performance media can adjust their campaigns to serve media where there is the most potential for credit, and therefore the most money. It is another example of how attribution is helping advertisers optimize their ad spend.”

SES SESSION
ClearSaleing’s Adam Goldberg will be participating in the SES session, “Channel Surfing, Measuring Profit and ROI Across Channels,” Thursday, August 19 from 12 to 1 PM. The session will examine the use of attribution to determine which types of ads or combination of ads are the most likely to lead to conversion and to result in the highest profit and ROI. In this session, the panelists will identify various methods for determining attribution and will pinpoint common attribution misconceptions.

Participants are moderator John Marshall, SES Advisory Board & CTO, Market Motive; Mikel Chertudi, SES Advisory Board & Sr. Director, Online & Demand Marketing, Omniture; Justin Merickel, Vice President, Marketing & New Product Development, Efficient Frontier, and Chuck Sharp, Senior Vice President, Analytics, iCrossing.

ClearSaleing was named an interactive attribution leader in Forrester Research Inc.’s report The Forrester Wave™: Interactive Attribution, Q4 2009.

ABOUT CLEARSALEING
ClearSaleing has been named “Technology Platform Search Marketers Can’t Live Without” at the SES (Search Engine Strategies) Awards. ClearSaleing’s advertising portfolio management platform helps marketers identify ways to more effectively and profitably allocate ad spend across a complex mix of online advertising investments.

ClearSaleing is a thought leader in the growing scientific field of attribution management and publishes www.AttributionManagement.com that provides a rich repository of ClearSaleing and externally published articles, white papers and other material focused exclusively on attribution management.

ClearSaleing’s unique ability to give marketers telescopic insight into their online ad investment is attracting major brand customers such as American Greetings and Nationwide Insurance. The company was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. For more information, please visit www.ClearSaleing.com.

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.

“We received reports and information that focused on a top-level view—for example, showing us where our money was being spent and highlighting the times of day that our target audience was more active,” says Meyers, Internet marketing manager for Stanley Steemer. “But I had a strong sense that there was a lot more going on.”

Continue reading article on Internet Retailer site..

There are many, many, many reasons why, when comparing two reports, even from the same system, the numbers will not match.

The reasons are (and each week, I will cover one reason in detail):

1. Attribution Reporting

Attribution reports’ calculations update daily and divide credit (orders, revenue and profit) over all of the contributing ads, impressions and clicks that led to a sale or other conversion.  Attribution is a newer concept for many marketers.   The fact that there is now the idea of a fraction of an order is definitely a different way of thinking.

2. Non-Attribution

Most marketers are very comfortable with non-attribution reporting.  Common examples of non-attribution reports are reports that are used for operational decisions, for example a Daily Order Report from a shopping cart.  Problems arise when trying to compare an attribution report to a non-attribution report (comparing apples to oranges).

3. Multiple Data Source – Over Counting/Over Crediting

If web analytics have not been configured to track all of the different sources of traffic to a conversion level, marketers are left to rely on reports provided by the source itself (e.g. Google AdWords Reports, Yahoo Search Marketing Reports, as well as other vendors like Display, Affiliates and Email).  Because none of these sources are ‘aware’ of the other sources, conversions and revenue can be over counted, and therefore, over credited.

4. Under Counting – Under Crediting

This is a by-product of the limitations of last click.  If you are using traditional web analytics, this is likely a problem.  Because the referrer only pays attention to the last place where a visitor came from, you wind up under crediting certain sources.

5. Accuracy – Data Quality of Web Reports

Here is the big elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.  It is possible that the data that you are relying to make important spending decisions is wrong.  The number one cause, in my experience, is a problem with the implementation.  Examples I have seen of implementation problems are code not being on every page, conversion code not being on the page or not being correct, and profiles or other settings that have not been configured properly.  It is definitely worth auditing your implementation, even if you are using a free solution.

6. Bonus:  One web vendor report to another

Even armed with the knowledge that both implementations are correct and complete, it is most often an exercise in futility comparing one vendor report to another.  The reason for this:  each company has a different idea of how metrics should be defined and calculated.  And each company has settings both internal and external that define how metrics are calculated (e.g if someone is on your site for 60 minutes are they one visit or two).

This week – Attribution

Attribution is a difficult concept.  Take pay-per-click as an example.  In order to fairly and accurately measure an ad, you have to think about latency.  On the day an ad runs, some of the conversions will take place.  But some people will come to your Web site from the ad and not be quite ready to purchase.  They may decide to return to your site a few days later and purchase.

To be ‘fair’ to your ads, you have to be able to count these conversions and credit them to the original ad (or multiple ads if several were seen along the way).

For example, say someone clicks on a Google ad on April 27^th.  They get to your site but are not convinced to purchase.  Instead they continue their research.  The next day, April 28^th, they go to Yahoo, click on an ad and purchase.

If you are attributing credit, here is what your reports look like:

April 28, 2010 – Yesterday’s Report

Here’s the tricky thing – the numbers change.  In order to give credit for latent conversions, the historic performance will then change.

April 29, 2010 – Custom Report Range 4/27/2010

There is no additional ad spend, but the .5 order is now credited to the correct day.

And this impacts all of the calculated metrics.

April 28, 2010 – Yesterday’s Report

Here’s the tricky thing – the numbers change.  In order to give credit for latent conversions, the historic performance will then change.

April 29, 2010 – Custom Report Range 4/27/2010

And even a step further, this impacts the ROI for each day.

The best thing about solutions that provide attribution reporting is that they supply this information already pre-calculated, so you don’t have to think about these types of calculations or even consider the fact that there are now fractions of orders.

It seems like just a few months ago we were getting ready for the 2008 holidays, which makes it even harder to imagine that the year 2009 is quickly coming to an end. If you’re like many marketers, you’re wrapping up 2009 and already planning ahead for 2010.  As you’re closing out your 2009 files and looking for ways to add some structure to your pre-holiday workdays, take a few moments to follow these 10 tips for marketing success.

1. Do Some Analytics Housekeeping

The end of the year provides you with a great time to do a little analytics housekeeping, taking a step back and making sure that you’re basing your decisions on good data-something that’s extremely important and can also be somewhat difficult.  The first thing to do is ensure that your analytics and other tracking tags are present on every page of your site, so that you don’t miss out on an ounce of good data.

Next, test your conversions to make sure they are tracking accurately.  Literally ‘do the math’ to ensure that your analytics program tells you the same thing as your back-end CRM and e-commerce systems.  This might take some time, but it’s an investment in your analytics for the future, while also forcing you to do a ‘gut-check’ of your checkout process (or other conversion event).  A likely bonus is that you may find usability improvements.

2. Set Goals with Timelines

Setting goals is great, but setting a goal without an attached timeline is a risky proposition that could cost valuable time and money. Set your performance goals for your campaigns and monitor their progress throughout the prescribed timeframe.   For example, set a goal to decrease your cost per lead by 30% before the end of 2010, then monitor throughout the year to see if you are on track to meet your goal.  If your campaigns don’t achieve the goal or make sufficient progress, revise them or reexamine your goals.   Make sure your time frames are reasonable and give the campaigns time enough to perform, but if you don’t see improvement, don’t be afraid to shift the spend.

3. Create a Maintenance Schedule

Speaking of setting goals with timelines, ensure that one of your first goals is to take the time to improve your marketing on a daily or weekly basis.  The fact is that most of your marketing can be improved if you just spend a little time finding and fixing the things that are not working.  Certainly, there never seem to be enough hours in the day, which makes it even more important to plan and make time for analyzing, optimizing, reporting, learning and communicating.  If you make the time to do a little preemptive marketing maintenance, you’ll save time in putting out fires later on.

4. Analyze and Optimize Your PPC

Not all campaigns are created equally, and this is especially true of pay-per-click ads.  Rather than letting your ads run on autopilot, breaking even or being somewhat profitable, now is the perfect time to take a closer look at your PPC program.  Reorganize or remove your campaigns that aren’t performing well, tighten up your ad groups, tweak your ad spend and weed out the keywords and campaigns that simply aren’t working for you.  Trimming the PPC fat now will save you from getting a PPC stomach ache in the future.

5. Understand and Improve Your Creatives

The best way to understand and improve your creatives is by analyzing campaigns side by side across all search engines.  In this view, you’ll see consistencies among the top-performing creatives.  For example, is there a particular offer that does well, or is there a style of writing that seems to be resonating with the audience and drawing more clicks and conversions?  After reviewing these consistencies, optimize or rewrite any poorly-performing creatives.

6. Report on Measurable Actions

Sure, there is no shortage of metrics that you can report on, but just because it’s in a report doesn’t mean it has meaning to your marketing efforts.  Determine your business goals and then map them into measurable actions.  For example, if one of your business goals is to increase the number of interested clients on your mailing list, you’d want to track the number of people who sign up for your e-newsletter, the number of times your newsletter PPC ad is clicked on, and so on.

By mapping your goals to measurable actions, and then tracking the actions, you’ll have the information you need to determine if your programs and campaigns are on-track.  Use this information in your monthly and quarterly reports, as well as relying on it to help drive both daily and long-term marketing decisions.

7. Stay up to Speed

In case you haven’t noticed, in the world of online marketing, things change fast.  It is likely that social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook weren’t even on your radar (or were just on the edge of it) as you were planning for 2009.  Take the time to research the social networking resources, webinars, conferences and other offerings out there that may have an impact on your online marketing.  Ensuring that you’re plugged in and staying current will increase the chances of your marketing success.

8. Perform Regular Audits

On at least a quarterly basis, schedule time to step back and look at the big picture.  Review all of your marketing programs and how they fit together.  Are there additional opportunities to cross-promote a particular offer, or are your campaigns concentrating on one marketing message, but ignoring others?  Take the time to see what is working, what is not, and what has changed.  By reviewing and re-evaluating your goals, overall strategy and day-to-day tactics, you’ll be taking the right steps toward marketing success.

9. Accurately Attribute Credit

For many marketers, the thought of attribution is one that is overwhelming-marketers think that you must have the perfect attribution solution before you should even take the first step.  This simply isn’t true-some attribution is always better than no attribution.  Every day you postpone using some attribution model, whether it’s an even model, an even with exclusions model or a model that was custom-designed for your particular business-is a day that you are basing your marketing decisions on flawed data.  Don’t go another day without some sort of attribution model firmly in place.

10. Prove your Value

In this still-volatile economy, there’s a lot to be said for reminding your company of just how valuable you are to them and their bottom line.  As you’re making changes to your campaigns, shifting spend to save money and reworking creatives to increase conversions, make sure to take clear notes to share with your supervisors and other team members when the time is right.  By consistently improving your marketing and showing the results in clear business terms, you will easily be able to prove your value to your company.