Attribution’s Value to the Customer Intelligence Function

Today’s email brings to mind a number of great questions… Read the following for a peek into the future of digital marketing attribution.

Attribution’s Value to the Customer Intelligence Function By Bill Muller, Editor With the emergence of the Customer Intelligence (CI) function within many enterprise-sized marketing organizations has arisen the desire to look at customer behavior across the entire marketing ecosystem. Inherent in attribution modeling’s functionality is the ability to do just that – to not only scientifically assign credit to the channel, campaign and campaign traits that helped marketers achieve success by whichever key performance indicators they choose, but also to associate that media performance success with the demographic and behavioral traits of given audience segments. Let’s look at just three examples of CI value that can be drawn from the attribution process: Customer Value As transactional data that’s associated with customers is fed back into the marketing attribution process, it can be married with media performance data and customer demographic information (that’s collected through the transaction process, surveys, or via overlay by any number of third-party data providers). As a result, algorithmically attributed media performance can be identified for an organization’s highest value customers, or by those with the highest propensity to convert, or by those with the highest propensity to be repeat buyers – as defined by the demographic and behavior traits of a particular customer segment. Armed with this information, CI professionals can advise their online and offline media buying colleagues to adjust their tactics by customer segment to increase LTV, conversion rates and yield. Mapping the Funnel By analyzing the demographic characteristics of customers whose marketing performance data has been fed through the attribution process, CI professionals can also identify the tactics that produce the best results at each stage of the conversion funnel – by audience segment. Which channel, publisher and offer serves at the first touch (“introducer”) for the customer segment with the highest LTV? Which combination of tactics serves as the last touch for the segment with the highest propensity to be repeat buyers? For the highest value customer segments based on several different key performance indicators, what do the ideal conversion funnels look like? With answers to questions like these, the CI function can not only advise the rest of the marketing organization on which tactics produce the highest results by customer segment, but can also prescribe at which funnel stage and in which sequence those tactics should be executed. Assessing Lag Time There are numerous “lag time” metrics associated with every customer’s stack of touchpoints on the path to a conversion. The time between every milestone – first impression, first click, first website visit, last impression, last click, last website visit, conversion, etc.-can be calculated, and as with the examples above, can be associated to the demographic traits and media performance of the highest value audience segments. With the intelligence gleaned from this analysis, CI professionals can advise media professionals on which audience segments have the longest and shortest lag times between critical milestones in the conversion funnel, the lag times for the highest value segments, and which media tactics should be employed to produce faster conversions, higher value customers, and the greatest return across the entire marketing ecosystem. Just Scratching the Surface Though attribution is rapidly on the rise within the media buying function at many organizations, the Customer Intelligence function is rarely taking advantage of the cross channel touchpoint intelligence that only the attribution management process can provide. But as these professionals begin to experiment with attribution and incorporate it in the value-add they provide to their media buying colleagues, it will undoubtedly become their default methodology, never again choosing to look at audience characteristics in isolated, non-attributed silos. Articles From Industry Publications Can Online Marketer’s Lead the Charge for Analytics & Attribution? By Manu Mathew, Co-Founder & CEO, Visual IQ Published in Marketing Land Search Campaign Optimization Through Touchpoint Analysis By Manu Mathew, Co-Founder & CEO, Visual IQ Published in Search Engine Land Proceed With Caution: Attribution’s Insights Not Always A Straight Line By Anto Chittilappilly, Co-Founder, President & CTO, Visual IQ Published in Online Metrics Insider

In This Issue Attribution”s Value to the CI Function Can Online Marketer’s Lead the Charge? Search Campaign Optimization Attribution’s Insights Not Always A Straight Line White Paper Click here to download 10 Steps to Enterprise Marketing Measurement: A Marketing Executive Checklist Note to The Editor Have feedback to provide on the content of this issue? Want to suggest a topic for a future issue? Drop a note to the editor here.

Attribution in 2012 and beyond

To think that analyzing touch points, lag time, and buying behavior has become so systematic and trackable is amazing. Marketing philosophy a decade ago only mentioned these processes, never before has a company been able to document these. Marketing in the past simply just gave into overlap of marketing. You show a message on TV, they see and ad in magazine, they hear your name across the dinner table… 21 impressions… 7 touches before a buy… ALL OF IT GUESS WORK. In the past you really just needed an intuitive guess on what was working. The way of the future will allow even more accurate tracking and documenting of the elusive touche points it takes for a customer to buy.

Related articles

• “Social Customer” Segmentation: Case Study in Tablet Market (customerthink.com)
• Email Continues To Be An Essential Part Of The Online Marketing Mix (b2bemailmarketing.com)
• How Well Do You Know Your Touchpoints? (customerthink.com)