The lack of visibility into the mix of events leading up to conversion, coupled with the proliferation of online and offline channels have left marketers wondering where to allocate budgets to optimize returns. Should marketers allocate more budgets toward social and mobile channels or less? Are mobile store locators or e-mail marketing campaigns ultimately propelling customers toward conversions on e-commerce website or in stores?
Few marketers know how to advance beyond click-based attribution and therefore are not finding actionable answers that help them advance their multichannel marketing efforts. One answer to this challenge is the Marketing Attribution model for evaluating the performance of all channels; convertors and non-convertors. The Adobe Insight, a cornerstone of Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, can integrate event-level log data from practically any data source. Adobe Insight can combine not only web clickstream data, but also event-level data from store sales (POS) systems and data from marketing vendors like ad servers or e-mail marketing service providers.
Conversions do not have to be e-commerce cart checkouts. Attribution can be made to multiple conversion points, online, retail store counter purchases, hotel check-ins, airport kiosk events, rental car check-outs, B2B lead form submissions and webinar attendance. Adobe Insight can correlate precise events within a single view of each customer and understand how each display ad view, email send and direct mail piece - in short, every addressable marketing touch point - influences conversions. Individual events can be associated and grouped by customer, then organized by experience, such as web visits, store purchases, call center sessions and more. All events are ordered by time, presenting fast, multi-dimensional analysis on any level of the data.
Many marketers start by experimenting with a few preconfigured models and then tailor them based on the specific business requirements. Examples include:
- FIRST AND LAST TOUCH - The first marketing touch receives the full credit for the conversion in one model; the last marketing touch garners the full credit in the other model
- EVEN (LINEAR) - Every marketing touch within a defined period of time receives an equal share of credit for the conversion
- STARTER/PLAYER/CLOSER - The Starter (initiating) touch receives a set percent of credit for the conversion, the Closer (last) touch receives a set percent of credit for the conversion.
- LATENCY SCORE - Every marketing touch is scored with a numeric value reflecting how many days it fell prior to the next conversion.
- PATHING - Advance visualizations in Adobe Insight help the marketer understand both the direct and indirect paths among customers' experiences' with various touch points.
- STACKING - Pinpoints how many interactions and channels precede a purchase.
A further enhancement is MindShare's CORE marketing intelligence platform which is used along with Adobe's Insight to help clients make better data-driven marketing and advertising decisions. CORE enables marketers to mix their business intelligence (CRM, sales and supply chain) data with an integrated, single source of marketing intelligence. This single source contains media channel spend and performance data; social data; paid and owned media audience data; in-stream data; third-party (household expenditure/demographic/online behaviors, etc.) data and real-time trading data. When mixed with the business intelligence, this reveals consumer actions and insights at a granular level, eradicating the guess work and siloed nature of marketing-spend decision making. Essentially, it enables marketing executives to rapidly get to the bottom of questions that they have been asking of their data, but unable to answer until now.
Steve's most recent book You Can't Fall Off The Floor - The Insiders' Guide to Re-Inventing Yourself and Your Career chronicles his 50 year career working for over 25 different companies with 189 lessons learned and insider tips from Gayle King, Cathie Black, Chuck Townsend and 28 others; Blacker is still going strong today as a partner in Frankfurt & Blacker Solutions, LLC. His web site is blacker-reinventions.com and e-mail address is blackersolutions@aol.com
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