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Anto Chittilappilly is the President, Founder and CTO of Visual IQ, a marketing business intelligence company that provides the end-to-end insight needed to execute successful campaigns, deliver maximum ROI and measure multi-campaign attribution. Prior to Visual IQ, Anto held senior technical roles in Oracle Corporation and Sun Microsystems.

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The Art of Attribution: Credit Where Credit’s Due

Written on
Dec 18, 2009 
Author
Anto Chittilappilly  |
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The Art of Attribution: Credit Where Credit’s Due

thumbs_small.jpgADOTAS – Does attribution make your bottom line look better?

Until recently, this was a topic discussed only by MBA students and high level marketing officers of large brands. Now it is a hot topic of small and large marketers, being discussed at every level. People are realizing that their current measurement practices could be improved and understanding the opportunities ahead of them to make their revenue and profits way better by employing better attribution methodologies.

In broad terms, marketing attribution is assigning the credit of marketing results to the marketing initiatives that lead to that result. If the result of marketing is conversion, then you attribute each conversion to the media that made that conversion possible.

Currently, the most widely used method is last-click attribution, which assigns 100% of the credit to the last touchpoint of the customer and the media that made that last touchpoint possible, by ignoring all the previous touchpoints that customer had. More accurate attribution methods use multiple or all touch points of each user in order to more fairly and accurately allocate the credit.

Why is attribution important to you? Take the stack of touchpoints that individual users are exposed to. We can classify them into three roles: introducers, influencers and converters. Introducers are very good at bringing the brand to the user; influencers are good at keeping the user engaged and persuading further; and converters cause the user to do the desired action, like making a purchase.

Different marketing initiatives and media properties have varying levels of efficiencies in accomplishing each of these roles. All roles are required to get the user to convert to your brand. But last-click attribution gives the 100% credit to mostly the converter-type media that may have happened to be on the top of the touchpoint stack.

Online search is a great converter but it does a poor job in introducer or influencer roles yet often gets the 100% of the credit. Optimization methodologies based on last-click attribution give the search the highest weightage and recommend moving more money to search. No wonder Google is so profitable.

According to Forrester, only 13% of advertisers and only 15% of agencies use attribution as of today. This means the introducer and influencer media are undervalued in the market — which is important for your campaigns to be successful. If you can find the right mix of spend, you can get substantial improvements in your revenue, brand measurements and other KPIs that your top and bottom lines are depending on.

Undertaking a detailed marketing attribution method is a major task, but well worth the time, money and effort. Before taking any major steps, you first need to secure the buy-in of your company’s senior executives to ensure they are not only invested in the strategy, but also understand the many benefits it will deliver. Once they are on board, it will be easier to spark a cultural change within the organization that moves away from “tried and true“ practices within siloed teams.

Until recently, technology was not mature enough to find and process all the touchpoints of all users. But now that there is technology to support attribution-based optimizations, your job is even easier. When you look for and attribution and optimization provider, be sure to ask the following important questions so you know if they are capable of managing your full range of needs:

  • What is their attribution methodology? First and last touch-point attribution, equal attribution or true attribution?
  • Does the tool provide you attribution based metrics that you can use in your optimization strategy, or are attribution and optimization bundled together?
  • Does the tool or provider work only on specific areas like ad-serving, online search or open to all channels?
  • Does the tool measure attribution based on your company’s goals or do they use fit-all type of attribution methodology?
  • What attributes do they measure?
  • How do they give weightage? Are these weightages fixed or adjustable based on the changes in your business?
  • Does the tool use 100% user-level-data or sampling?
  • Does the tool integrate all channels (including online and offline), and if so, is there a standardized set of metrics?
  • What methodologies are used when the user-level-data is not available?
  • Can the tool provide optimizations and recommendations, and can they be integrated with your agency’s operational tools? This is important to make your attribution-based insights to be made actionable.

Once you have implemented cross-channel attribution and attribution-based optimization, continuously measure the performance of your campaigns and optimize the media to keep your return on marketing investment (ROMI) higher. Remember that it may take time to see positive results and dramatic changes based on how you optimize your campaigns, but patience will pay off.

At Visual IQ, we’ve seen marketers with less than $1 million spend to the largest spenders have increased their ROMI to an average of 18% year over year using attribution. To give some perspective, a major financial marketer has increased their conversions about 16% and revenues by 22% within a year after they have started optimizing the media using attribution-based metrics. They also have improved their brand metrics, average order value and average customer life time value with a 1.5% less spend than the previous period.





Reader Comments.

hi anto….read the article. It was good.I am at New Delhi now heading Connaught place branch of CSB. Ajayakumar and Rani are here. Regards…Merry X’mas & Happy New Year to you. Chacko

Posted by chacko | 8:49 pm on December 27, 2009.

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