Marketers rely on a variety of online channels – such as display advertising, affiliate marketing, search and email – to provide a highly accountable means for generating new customers and retaining existing ones. While using multiple digital marketing channels increases opportunities to attract and convert customers, multi-channel marketing also presents unique challenges. How do marketers properly attribute credit across all of the channels that contribute to a sale or conversion so they can allocate budget to maximize ROI? How do advertisers that buy media on a performance or revenue share basis ensure that they do not pay for a conversion more than once? These issues can be addressed with a proper cross-channel measurement and attribution plan.

In this article, I will address:

• The benefits of properly attributing your online media
• Best practices for developing an appropriate attribution framework – regardless of your media mix
• A real-world case study of a retailer who performed a cross-channel analysis and found they were significantly overpaying for their conversions

Why is Cross-Channel Measurement & Attribution Important?

If marketers do not analyze and properly attribute conversions and revenue across all of their online media channels, they risk wasting dollars on programs that do not perform as well as reporting figures show. SearchIgnite analyzed the online advertising spend for a number of marketers and found that some waste as much as 30 percent or more of their online marketing budgets due to a lack of proper measurement and media attribution. This can be avoided by taking a more holistic, cross-channel approach to media measurement.

The benefits of proper cross-channel attribution:

You can avoid overpaying for conversions. Without a unified reporting system that removes duplicate conversions (“de-duping”) from multiple channels, you could be paying multiple times for the same conversion.

For example, an advertiser might manage search on a CPC (cost-per-click) basis, display on a CPM (cost-per-impression) and affiliate on a share of the revenue generated from the program. Naturally, the advertiser will pay for every search click and display impression. They will also pay the affiliate a revenue share on any conversion on which the affiliate had an impact.

But what if a consumer sees advertising from all three of these channels before making their purchase? Which channel should get the credit? If all three take 100 percent of the credit, the advertiser will pay for the search click, the display impression and pay the full revenue share owed to the affiliate on just one conversion.

If the marketer in this example centralized their reporting across search, display and affiliate – or at least analyzed conversions across these channels – they could catch instances where they were overpaying for the same conversion.

You can move beyond the “last click” mentality. Without a unified reporting system that tracks and analyzes all customer clicks and impressions with their media prior to transacting, it is impossible to know the affect of all the media that you are purchasing. When a customer clicks on a display ad then clicks on a paid search ad and then makes a purchase, both display and paid search had an impact on his/her decision to purchase. Almost all integrated tracking systems, even if they solve the duplication problem above, do not appropriately attribute credit to multiple media channels that lead to a customer conversion.

You can find the right media mix. Display, once the main form of online marketing, has lost favor as engagement metrics have dropped. But is this fair given that channels play off of each other within the sales funnel? Which media channels are working best together to increase the likelihood that a consumer will convert? When evaluating the performance of search and display, it’s important to look at the effect display has on driving search volume and, ultimately, if it’s contributing to conversions that may otherwise be credited only to search. Armed with more detailed information about how different media channels complement each other, you can improve the overall effectiveness of your online media plan.

You can achieve true optimization. One of the major benefits of advertising online is that you have the ability to track media effectively and optimize it accordingly. But most marketers optimize each of their online media channels independently and rely on top-level statistics to make marketing decisions. This means that they are looking at each channel in a “vacuum” and making budget decisions on a channel-by-channel campaign basis, rather than allocating budgets to the best performing media.

If an advertiser buys display across five advertising networks, standard reporting would show the aggregate amount of impressions and clicks for each network and indicate how many of those impressions and clicks lead to conversions. But how many of the marketer’s ads is each consumer seeing? How does the marketer know if they are delivering and paying for the right number of impressions needed for the consumer to convert?

By looking at potential redundancy of ad delivery across networks, marketers can avoid spending more than necessary on their advertising, improve their return on ad spend (ROAS) and create the optimal media plan that maximizes conversions most efficiently.

Attribution Best Practices

It’s impossible to apply one attribution formula to every media plan since the best attribution will vary by marketer based on their unique business goals and media budgets. However, there are still universal best practices that every marketer should follow when performing an attribution analysis.

Centralize your technology. Without a centralized platform for viewing and attributing/crediting performance across multiple channels, marketers cannot spend their media dollars most effectively. So, it’s crucial that marketers and their agencies use a centralized online media platform that can aggregate, de-dupe and help attribute conversions across search, display, affiliate and more. The ideal platform should also help you execute on this data by automatically optimizing your media budgets against your business’s unique attribution rules and cross-channel performance.

Think intra as well as inter. Don’t assume you are being as efficient as possible when evaluating one online marketing channel. Are people exposed to too many advertisements before they convert? What is the optimal number of exposures by a media outlet in a particular channel? If you are not answering these questions when allocating your media dollars, you could be wasting money or missing valuable opportunities.

Remember the ties that bind. Proper setup of each media channel is crucial to performing an attribution analysis. This can be as simple as creating a unique identifier for each sale that spans all marketing channels, including online and offline. You may also want to assign an order number, lead number or quote number to each conversion. This identifier will act as a primary key for your marketing data, allowing you to easily and quickly review the overlap of conversions across channels.

Forget the last click rule. Every tracking and ad serving technology is different, but almost all attribute conversions solely to the media channel that generated the last click. While this is a simple way of attributing conversions, it is not necessarily the most efficient way. Crediting other channels that ultimately led to a conversion – whether click-based or impression-based – will give the truest picture of your media plan. Creating rules that make sense for you business and that go beyond “the last click” rule will provide the best optimization strategy to help you achieve your goals and spend most efficiently.

Case Study: How One Retailer Discovered Waste in Their Media Budget

Client: A major retailer with a strong online and brick-and-mortar presence

Challenge: The retailer challenged SearchIgnite to figure out where there was overlap in their search, affiliate and display budgets and to quantify the impact on their overall media cost.

Solution: To do this, we looked at unique conversions (conversions by order number) to see which media channels were taking credit for sales. SearchIgnite discovered that – because the retailer was not tracking and managing their search and display budgets together – they were often paying many times for the same conversion.

Conclusion: This retailer had wasted 34 percent of their media budget by overpaying on conversions.

Recommendations: We recommended that the retailer centralize their media management and reporting so they could more easily and regularly perform cross-channel attribution analysis. This enabled them to evaluate the interplay between search, display and affiliate advertising, helping them de-dupe conversions, save money and better optimize their media spend.

With marketing dollars becoming increasingly tight and CMOs and CFOs looking for more accountability, it is incumbent upon marketers and agencies to provide a fuller, more accurate view of their marketing spend.