Last click no longer enough

By: Mark Patron | September 1st, 2009

Database Marketing – September 2009

Last click wins means giving all the credit for an online sale to whichever site referred a visitor at time of purchase. No credit is given to previous referrals which assist in the sale. Offline this approach is understandable, online it is downright lazy. More importantly it wastes valuable media budget. It is extraordinary that digital media are the most accountable and measurable, yet only a fraction of the available data is used. The reality is that online media such as search, display or email are still treated in silos with little meaningful integration over and above using similar creative. Integrated creative is not the same as integrated media planning. And integrated marketing requires both.

In the present economic climate finance directors are challenging the need for expensive integrated marketing campaigns when the majority of sales come from a small set of sites and channels. For example many advertisers switch off display advertising because of a lack of last click sales only to find their overall search traffic and sales fall to a level where they re-instigate it.

According to Forrester Research of 275 website decision makers surveyed in 2008, 52% agreed more accurate media attribution would make marketing spend more effective, yet only 31% of web site decision-makers currently claim to perform marketing attribution on their activities. RedEye’s research across multiple websites found that on average 60% of sales have some form of assist. An assist is a visit prior to the visit that generated a sale. Half of all sales with an assist complete on a different channel from the assist.

Whilst multi-channel media attribution is complex, it clearly can be financially beneficial. There is now enough evidence to show that it is worth the investment of time and money to progress proper multi-channel media attribution. Better media attribution has helped many companies get a better understanding of their media spend, including published results showing a 73% reduction in cost per customer from search, and a 14% increase in natural search investment returning a 55% increase in revenue and 45% increase in bookings. So if proper media attribution improves results why is it not done more often?

There are many reasons why accurate media attribution is not a reality. Companies and agencies have struggled to justify investment in more accurate media attribution without any proven benefits, thus a cycle starts where no time is invested without evidence and no evidence is possible without investment. Traditionally companies and some agencies have split who owns different channels and so there is little incentive to look at a global picture. Traditionally each channel has tracked its own data via its own system, leading to multiple sources of data that do not talk to each other. Even when the data is captured in one place there have been concerns about the accuracy of the data because of issues like cookie deletion. RedEye’s research in 2005 found that cookie deletion resulted in over reporting of traffic after 28 days of over 100%. A JupiterResearch survey in 2008 found similar results and quotes that 28% of leading decision-makers dismiss media attribution because it will never be precise. This is simply wrong. Media attribution can never be an exact science. There are simply too many variables. There is no right answer, either overall or for an individual company. The important result is to know what to test and whether to invest more or less in a particular media.

The future holds a world of opportunities for evolving multi-channel media attribution analysis, both in how we visualize the data so that more people can use and learn from the information, and also in how we ultimately evolve the attribution model.

We should remember online marketing has only been mainstream for, maybe, a decade. Internet marketing has lots of available data, but we are only scratching the surface. Over the next decade we can expect digital marketers to start making more and more use of the data it has available. This will not happen over night, but it will inevitably happen. The process will not be dissimilar to how direct marketers started to build marketing databases in the 1980’s, and today no self respecting direct marketer would not have a wholesome marketing database.