A War of Attribution: Who gets credit for a conversion?

As an analyst for a vendor, I get a question asked all the time that I am sure all vendors and practitioners work with when dealing with their respective HiPPOs (Highest Paid Persons Opinion - An acronym I use fondly).

“How can I prove your campaigns worked?  Show me a nice clean ROI report in my analytics.”

A good question, and a valid one too.  I wish that analytics technology had been built in such a way that it answered it easily and properly…

As a product that personalizes a web visit, Sitebrand has a profound impact on the conversion rate of a targeted traffic segment.  But what if a given client sends out a huge email blast that touches the segment we are optimizing?  What if they redo the SEO on a number of key pages?  What if they do multivariate testing on a shopping cart page?  Who gets the credit for increased conversions?  

The reporting system in our Segment & Serve product is very strong, and has a series of control groups built in to ensure the highest level of data accuracy.  However, our reports don’t take into account any other work that is being done by the customer outside our product.  And this isn’t a Sitebrand issue: with few exceptions, every other vendor in online marketing software is in the same boat.

In their most recent Web Analytics Buyers Guide, Jupiter Research states that “A resounding 86 percent of analytics clients said attribution measurement capability would be the most beneficial feature for their respective businesses.”

Most of the larger paid analytics vendors have some way of dealing with the attribution issue (Google Analytics does not), but these are still evolving, more abacus – less calculator.  So if I click on two different paid keywords for company XYZ.com over my first three visits, and then click on an internal marketing message en route to a purchase, the marketer might get some visibility into those three things in regards to my conversion.  But which was the most important?  Tough stuff.

I wanted to bring up the attribution issue for two reasons.  The first reason is that it drives me nuts, and I felt like sharing.  The second is because the concept of attribution speaks directly to one of the core themes of my blogs.  Technology will not save a marketer with a weak plan.  If you know your web numbers and have confidence in them, you can build a plan to effect significant and transparent change.

Cheers,

Jim

PS. For some nice insight into how attribution works,  check out these great videos by Avinash Kaushik and John Marshall from earlier in the year.

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2008/03/standard-metrics-revisited-5-conversion-roi-attribution.html

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Posted in Jim Cain, Web Analytics, online marketing