This document discusses attribution and how to properly attribute leads and conversions to specific marketing activities and touchpoints. It notes that attribution has become more difficult as the number and diversity of marketing channels has increased. Several common attribution methods are described, including last touch, first touch, equal weighting, and customer reported touchpoint. The document advocates for aggressive data collection, various web analytics techniques to track attribution over time, and careful analysis of attribution including dark testing and correlation analysis to understand how marketing activities relate to outcomes.

1. AIM 2010 Where to Leads Come From Multi-Channel Attribution Gary Angel

2. What is Attribution Attribution is a process for assigning/crediting a lead or a conversion to a specific set of marketing activities and touchpoints.

3. Easy or Hard? Sometimes it’s easy: Sometimes it’s not: We got 1,500 calls. Saw TV Visited Web Searched Visited Web Called

4. It’s Getting Harder The number and diversity of marketing channels is growing making attribution even harder.

5. Why it Matters Fights over attribution are sometimes perceived as being largely political: My TV ads drove 5 million in business My PPC campaign drove 2.5 million in business How come we only had 6 million in sales? My Display Campaign drove 1 million in business

6. Why it Matters But you can’t optimize your overall Media Mix or your individual channel strategy unless you understand how each marketing channel works and how the overall program works together.

7. Why it Matters For Instance: If Natural Search attracts early-stage buyers, it may seem to perform worse than Paid Search even though it drives more new customers. If Paid Search is heavily dependent on branded traffic, it may only perform well in conjunction with Mass Media buys. If Display creates awareness but doesn’t drive direct traffic it may only work in conjunction with heavy search buys.

8. Common Methods of Attribution Last (Most Recent): The last known campaign touchpoint gets the credit for a conversion. First (Original): The earliest known campaign touchpoint gets the credit. Equal: Credit is divided equally between all known touchpoints. All: Full credit is given to every touchpoint. Spoken: Credit is given to the touchpoint identified by the customer.

9. Last (Most Recent) The more your lead/sales environment is multi-touch – the less well this method works. In this example, 35% of the visitors who clicked on a paid brand term had already clicked on another paid term in the SAME session!

10. First (Original) Especially problematic with longer sales-cycles. For this logged-in site, 33% of the people who registered used a different cookie IN THE SAME MONTH. More than 50% used a different cookie within 3 months.

11. Equal (Shares Credit) Doesn’t really help with Marketing Mix calculations.

13. Proper Attribution

14. Aggressive Collection

16. Code all URLs with Params

17. Don’t neglect URL Shorteners

19. Internal

20. External

22. Use a cookie to store all campaign values recorded for a visitor

23. Pass to a variable in your web analytics solution

25. We suggest the following attribution strategies:

26. Campaign = 45 days

27. Internal Campaign = visit

28. Redundant Campaign 1= Visit

30. Use a cookie to track the visit number of each visitor to your web properties

31. Record the Visit Number in a web analytics variable

33. Time-stamp key events in custom variables

34. The timestamp should include at least the full date (YYYYMMDD form)

35. Key events to timestamp include external campaign arrival, lead and conversion

37. Record the Lead Id in your web analytics solution

38. Where possible (Omniture, Unica, Core), update this value with actual lead-status

40. Necessary Research

41. Recommended Conceptual Model

42. Recommended Attribution Model

47. Key Take-Aways Aggressively Code Sourcing Multiple #800s and Campaign-Specific #800s Multiple Asks Reward Asks Code Campaigns Everywhere

48. Key Take-Aways Over-Time Tracking Campaign Stacking Universal Sourcing Time Encoding Global Rollups Shared Cookies

49. Key Take-Aways Analyze Carefully Segment by Attribution and Life-stage type Look at attribution beyond just marketing campaigns (existing customers/visitors) Use Dark-Periods to Baseline and Tune Media Mix Use Correlation Models to track marketing impacts vs. econometric variables

50. I’m Out! Gary Angel President, Semphonic 415 884-2511 gangel@semphonic.com http://semphonic.blogs.com/semangel/ http://www.semphonic.com @garyangel on Twitter