Are You On The Right Tracks Or Off The Rails?

Are you tracking everything online?

You may assume you are but think again:

Are you really tracking the entire user journey through to sale, monitoring and analysing every single touchpoint along the way?

Until now, the concept of complete holistic tracking unfortunately has been restricted by limited technology solutions.

Online Marketing Tracking - How Has It Been Done Up To Now:

Many advertisers to date utilise a unique URL solution, creating ‘folders’ that track individual users once they land on the site. The user is cookied and whatever has been the last click that attributed the sale, was awarded the full sale.

The URLs may look something like:

www.examplesite.com/landingpage/source?=banner/size/placement

www.examplesite.com/landingpage/source?=email/creative/list

Some advertisers we know of have gone further than this and utilised third party ad serving such as Doubleclick and ad served every single channel of their online marketing.

This has enabled them to completely dedupe across every channel and even attribute post view conversions from Display advertising where there has not been a click based conversion.

More recently, advertisers may even be implementing click weighting (mainly from their PPC activites) within their bid management / third party tool. This enables advertisers to get a feel of what clicks led to the conversion. Using the example of Cosmetic Surgery it may look something like:

Click 1	Click 2	Click 3	Click 4	Click 5
Liposuction	Liposuction london	Liposuction on finance	Harley Medical Liposuction	Harley Medical

This is becoming a more common practice - analysing the entire search journey and identifying trends in semantic search behaviour.

HOWEVER, THIS IS STILL NOT ENOUGH

As online marketing becomes more sophisticated, advertisers need to increase the sophistication of how value is attributed to media channels. To be more precise, how we begin to track beyond the last click.

Beyond Last Click Tracking - Do We Need To Move Past It?

Currently, the last click wins (for most) - however, does this give a true reflection of how users are interacting with your marketing and more importantly, what is driving them to the sale?

If working to the last click rule, how can brand terms be allocated for example 60% of volume in a PPC account when it has been proven that circa 70% of search activity is carred out against generic searches.

The above is taken from a study from Yahoo - it shows the search journey from week 1 to week 12 and the final conversion.

Advertisers are in danger of overstating the reliance on brand terms and may be unfairly optimising generic searches out of the game. If these generic terms are assisting the final conversion - optimising them down or out will inevitably negatively affect overall volume.

Beyond The Last Click - Who Else Wants To Move Past It?

We are not the only ones who think the last click rule is slightly outdated:

• Eyeblaster -  a cross channel, digital advertising technology and services provider and traditionally a rich media ad server - recently launched their “channel connect for search”. Although the product seems only limited to the relationship between search and display (discounting all other channels), its intent is to allow its users to identify the impact display has onto search conversion.

• Atlas Solutions (another large ad serving technology company owned by Microsoft) more recently launched their “Engagement Mapping” tool out of Beta. The tool allows users of Atlas to evaluate the role and impact every single touchpoint that the user passes through on the way to a conversion.

In light of the above, it is clear that this issue of conversion attribution is making its way into the mainstream.

How Should You Be Tracking?

Firstly, you need to identify how many intermediary touchpoints there are on the way to a conversion.

The fewer the touchpoints, the more value we place on each one, as the impact of each could be considered stronger. Ie. if there were only 5 touchpoints - the value of each would be higher than if there were 10.

You then need to attribute values to each of these touchpoints - we choose to make them total 100% - it may look something like this:

Touchpoint 1	Touchpoint 2	Touchpoint 3	Touchpoint 4	Touchpoint 5
35%	10%	10%	10%	35%

As a rule we tend to place more importance on the first and last touchpoint - the trigger and closer of a conversion.

However, if there 10 touchpoints, the percentiles would be less and more dispersed between the touchpoints.

This is not finished though of course. Ie. if a network impression was at the start of the journey and an affiliate click in the middle this of course require a slightly different attribtuion of value.

The next step to take is to identify the following variables and also factor these into the formula:

• Time Lag to conversion - if the process had 5 touchpoints but took 2 weeks to complete the conversion, the value of each touchpoint would be higher than if it took 6 weeks to complete conversion.
• The different media touchpoints - each one of course has a different value:

1. Impression - Network
2. Impression - Portal
3. Impression - Niche / Site Specific
4. Click - Network
5. Click - Portal
6. Click - Site Specific
7. Click - Affiliate
8. Click - Brand Search
9. Click - Generic Search
10. Click - Generic + Brand Search
11. Click - Longtail Search

We then assign different values to each touchpoint depending on when they converted, what type of media touchpoint are they, how many steps to conversion were there.

We are currently developing a tool which will plugin to our adserving solution and seamlessly assign percentile values to each conversion touchpoint. We will then analyse the overall aggregate percentile of each individual media placement and truly identify what drives ROI!

Potential Flaws To Moving Beyond Last Click

The above approach to holistic tracking has its obvious benefits but with it, has its obvious flaws.

The process of assigning values to each converting touchpoint is somewhat subjective - it is arguably your own interpretation - nothing completely scientific to determine whether a search click is more valuable than an email click.

It will also be near impossible to have some industry wide, standardised metrics. No agreed metrics in place presents obvious problems to the affiliate industry!

Although Not Perfect, It’s A Start!

Our approach to tracking online marketing is by no means ideal and flawless however, we believe it is a start into assigning logic and intuition to attributing media value beyond the last click.

To stand a chance of executing such methods however needs FULL integration. If seperate pieces of media are shared amongst various agencies, they REALLY need to all be singing from the same hymn sheet.

Can you really imagine up to 3 or 4 different agencies sharing data and working towards only one common goal?

Being On The Right Tracks Is Easier Said Than Done. But In Online Media, Can You Really Afford Not To Keep Up?

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