Attributing influence on sales to digital media channel

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Attributing influence on sales to digital media channel

It is seldom the case that a customer will go straight to a site and purchase, or that they will perform a single search and then purchase. Instead, they will commonly perform multiple searches and will be referred to the ultimate purchase site by different types. This consumer behaviour is indicated by This shows that someone looking to purchase a car may be referred to a site several times via different digital communications channels.

A common approach to attributing the influence of different online media a customer consumes before purchase has been the last-click method of digital media channel attribution introduced well by Lee. Gives an example of using a social media marketing tool to assess effectiveness on a last click basis.

 It shows that when a business shares content across different social networks they can review how many clicks and conversion to leads are generated. In this example, Facebook is most effective by volume.

However, Lee explains that this can give a misleading picture of which marketing channels are effective

In an analysis of visitors to an airline site for non-brand terms and PPC for brand terms are more significant when looking at the contribution of all sources. Referring to you can see this has the benefit that we don’t credit multiple affiliates with sale for affiliate marketing only Affiliate 2 is credited with the sale, a process known as digital media deduplication. But it has the disadvantage that it simplifies the reality of previous influence or digital media ‘assists’ and previous referrals influenced by other customer touchpoints on other sites are ignored, such as the natural search or display ad.

So, for the most accurate interpretation of the contribution of different media, the online marketer needs to use tagging and analysis tools to try to build the best picture of which channels are influencing sales and then weight the media accordingly. For example, a more sophisticated approach is to weight the responsibility for sale across several different referrers according to a model so just considering the affiliates, Affiliate 1 might be credited with 30 per cent of the sales value and Affiliate 2 with 70 per cent, for example.

This approach is useful since it indicates the value of display advertising a common phenomenon is the halo effect where display ads indirectly influence sales by creating awareness and stimulating sale at a later point in time.These are sometimes known as ‘viewthrough’ or post-impression effects.

These allocation approaches won’t be possible if agencies are using different tracking tools and reporting separately on different media channels for example, the ad agency reports on display advertising, the search agency on pay-per-click, the affiliate manager on affiliate sales.

Instead it is important to use a unified tracking system which typically uses common tags across all media channels. Common unified tracking solutions that consider all media are available from the likes of Atlas, Doubleclick Dart and some of the larger media agencies.

Further sophistication of tracking will be worthwhile for companies investing millions in digital media in order to understand the customer journey and the contribution of media. 

A useful analysis to perform is in the formThis anonymised example shows the importance of display ads, for example, and how different channels support each other.

It can then be worthwhile understanding the role of individual channels better, and in particular paid search. Marketers need to understand how consumers use different types of terms. The repeated use of different types of search terms for a single customer (other digital channels such as affiliates are ignored here). 

The two columns on the right show how it is unrealistic to attribute the sale to the last search since the influence of the assists isn’t shown.

Achieving and measuring repeat visits is worthwhile since, according to on average, purchase intent sees a double digit increase after someone has been to a site more than once. For some promotional techniques, tagging of links on third-party sites will not be practical.

These will be grouped together as unattributed referrers. For word-of-mouth referrals, we have to estimate the amount of spend for these customers through traditional market research techniques such as questionnaires or asking at point of sale.

The use of tagging enables much better insights on the effectiveness of promotional techniques than is possible in traditional media, but due to its complexity it requires a large investment in staff time and tracking software to achieve it. It is also very dependent on cookie deletion rates. To see how a budget can be created for a digital campaign.