DIGITAL ANALYTICS MINIDEGREE / CXL — BLOG 12

In the last blog post, we talked about the Google Tag Manager concepts and it’s capabilities in detail. In this blog post, we will continue to talk about Attribution and how to understand consumer behaviour to drive value for the companies with the last and 12th part of CXL Digital Analytics Minidegree.

You can go to the CXL website from here.

1. Marketing Attribution

Marketing attribution is the practice of evaluating the marketing touchpoints a consumer encounters on their path to purchase. The goal of attribution is to determine which channels and messages had the greatest impact on the decision to convert, or take the desired next step.

It seems simple enough when you think about the final sale. But does a customer ever go straight to a website and make a purchase? Rarely. Multiple channels and messages were responsible for the final buying decision, including the Facebook ad they initially clicked on or the email they received when they signed up for the newsletter. In an ideal world, you’d be able to track the entire customer journey from start to finish with personal anecdotes from each customer about why they made the decisions they did along the way. But that’s not realistic, or scalable.

Attribution has a difference when it comes to B2B and B2C. Attribution in the context of B2C is the easiest option because you have a direct relationship throughout the entire journey with an individual. One of the struggles we have with attribution for B2B is that it could be five, fifty, or five hundred different individuals in an organization that engages with the brand before it leads to the ultimate conversion.

2. How to Use Attribution

The key thing when you’re using attribution within decision making is when all of your teams are using the same model. You don’t want to be in a situation where your display team is using one model, your PPC team is using a completely different model, and your affiliate team is using a model from another piece of technology. Attributions have many other outputs like the lag between interaction and conversion, or the makeup of a full customer journey.

3. Attribution Models

With so many touchpoints to consider, operational marketing roles are becoming more and more complex. Luckily, there are a number of marketing attribution models that have been introduced and evolved since the digital boom to account for multi-channel selling.

Last Non Direct Click

If there is less than 30 days between the last non direct click or visit before that direct visit where the conversion was driven, then the sales credit goes to the last non direct click.

Last Interaction

• This is going to be the actual last interaction within a journey and therefore this will be where the sale actually happens.
• This interaction does not have to be digital.
• PPC brand does very well in last click converting.

If you just have a last interaction, or a last click, or a last non direct click model, you are missing out on understanding what activities driving that user from awareness through to behavior into conversion.

Last interaction and last non direct interaction are both not very good at understanding the consumer behavior through the whole journey. They focus on activities that are actually driving a conversion at that particular point.

Linear Attribution

• Linear attribution is where you distribute the value through every interaction equally.
• This does not actually Show the marketer what campaigns, what channels actually impacted that user.

Therefore; you can not really use this to understand why someone interacted with that activity and did it actually make a difference to their decision making.

Time Decay

When the conversion happens, let’s redistribute the value of that conversion back through previous historic visits.

Position Based

Everything in the middle has lower values. This attribution model is called bathtub model.

That gives us understanding of the challenges of acquisition and the challenges of conversion.

4. Different Channels Applications

We will look to the individual channels and how attribution can tactically be deployed to be utilized across multiple channels, individually, and in combination with each other.

CRO

• CRO Stands for Conversion rate optimization. Conversion rate optimization typically focuses on improving the conversion rate on a singular interaction.
• Conversion rate optimization is not just about an individual, it is about groups of individuals.

PPC

PPC Stands for pay per click. If a person is engaging with your website on a generic PPC term, they tend to not have as much knowledge of the product or the service that you’re offering. In generic PPC we observe that the user is not yet ready to convert. So we need to provide them with an incentive so that they come to the website and convert. What you want to do is increase their likelihood to buy in the future and this is where the attributed value helps.

SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. When we talk about SEO from an attribution perspective, we’re looking at the impact that has on the consumer journey and their decision-making.

Other channels are Display, Affiliates, E-mail, TV,Direct Mail.

Value of Brand

Brand awareness: Brand awareness is the extent to which customers are able to recall or recognize a brand under different conditions. Brand awareness is one of two dimensions from brand knowledge, an associative network memory model.

Product Awareness: Product awareness is the degree of knowledge that customers have about a product. The first step in purchasing a product is developing the knowledge that the product exists. Information about function, benefits, quality, price, compatibility and usability may also be important to a sale.

Brand Propensity: This application can identify the likelihood a customer will purchase a particular brand in the future.

Product Propensity: Combine customers’ online behavior with historic purchase data to determine exactly the right product and customer pairing.

Life Time Value

When we talk about lifetime value, we want to understand the value of a consumer over the entire time that they have engaged with our brand.

The new Customer acquisiton cost is very high.

When is the right time to advertise through them?

You need to look over the whole journey and undertsand really, how much value that Customer is going to give you over their lifetime.

Final Words

Digital analytics is becoming more and more important for all companies. Understanding the movements of the users and taking actions according to these movements on the website and in the application increases the conversion rate of the company and provides positive feedback from users.

With its expert instructors and detailed course content, CXL is an excellent platform for those who do not know where to start in digital analytics or who want to improve themselves. Thank you very much to the whole CXL family, I learned a lot of valuable things during this course. I hope I was able to convey some of this information to you while I was learning.

See you on other blogs.

Thanks,

Mert Kolay