You are entering a period of high activity and you have planned a rich marketing communication on all your digital channels. This time, in order to optimize your investments, you decide to put forward only your most reliable media partners, those who really contribute to the achievement of your objectives. To choose these partners, you decide to conduct your first attribution analysis: what are the 5 key steps to implement this marketing attribution analysis?
STEP 1: DETERMINE THE OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY AND THE MOST APPROPRIATE ANALYSIS PERIOD
To avoid any unpleasant surprises, set the scope of your study in advance. What is the final objective of your marketing action, all channels combined: boosting sales, improving ROI, maximizing traffic? This will be your main KPI, the prism through which the effectiveness of your entire media mix can be evaluated.
Do you operate on the basis of half-yearly/quarterly reviews? Do you focus on an evolution study, i.e. from one semester to the next for example? Do you mainly run ongoing campaigns or do you want to know specifically the impact of a special activation? Compare the evolution of the media mix with and without specific boost campaigns.
There are many possibilities for analysis, but before diving into the details, identifying the priorities in terms of KPIs and time frame will facilitate the implementation of the analysis, as well as the interpretation of the data.
STEP 2: COLLECT AND/OR STORE RELEVANT INFORMATION
Once the scope of the analysis is determined, make sure the necessary data is available. To measure your ROI, are you collecting the amount of the shopping cart during the purchases made on your e-commerce site? Do you have a matching key to estimate the contribution of digital ads on sales made in physical stores? To judge the quality of your leads, you monitor the conversion rate, but do you collect all the necessary details to be able to sort out the successful leads from those without follow-up?
If data is not available for past periods, make sure you adapt your tagging plan so that the data collected over a period of time can be used to judge your KPIs that meet the objectives of the study.
For your media partners’ campaigns, are you sure that the nomenclatures established allow you to clearly distinguish their nature? Connecting the performances of all the channels by distinguishing the names of the campaigns and partners in the redirection links requires good communication with all the actors, and this is a non-negligible step when collecting data for analysis. Don’t forget that the more granular the tracking, the more relevant the analysis of the contribution of your levers will be. Do not hesitate to remind your media partners to respect the nomenclature in the redirection links, at the risk of seeing the value of the contribution of certain levers attributed to those who have respected the instructions…
STEP 3: FOCUS ON CONSUMER BEHAVIOR AND CONVERSION PATHS
The scope of the study is now determined and all the data needed for the analysis is normally available. After the first reading of the descriptive statistics (overall revenue generated over the period, average and median basket, conversion rate), it is the consumer-centric behavior that will be the focus of the contribution analysis. How many touch points on average does it take before conversion? What is the average time from first ad interaction to first site visit? What is the profile of buyers for each product type?
These questions can only be answered if you follow the path of each consumer in its entirety, linking the different actions of the same user over time, while respecting the GDPR. To do this, choose a 1st party tracking solution to limit the collection gaps linked to ad-blockers and ITP measures, but also a solution that will allow you to track post-click and post-view interactions in an exhaustive way, to reflect user behavior as accurately as possible.
STEP 4: ANALYZE INTERACTIONS BETWEEN CHANNELS AND THEIR ROLE IN THE CONSUMER JOURNEY
Once the typical consumer profiles have been established, it’s time to see if the digital communication is well adapted to each of them. If it is often possible to follow the statistics of the advertising interactions within the platform with which the campaign has been launched (Google Ads, Facebook…), a holistic vision of the performances and the detection of the synergies between the different actors are only possible outside these closed ecosystems. As the consumer does not distinguish between the networks where the advertising message is delivered but interacts with the brand that delivers it, it is important to keep in mind a consumer-centric approach, and to reproduce the paths containing all the touch points between the consumer and the brand for all the activated partners, online or offline such as TV/radio, in order to analyze the contribution of each of them in the conversion, and this with the least bias possible.
STEP 5: IMPLEMENT A STRATEGY IN LINE WITH DATA-DRIVEN INSIGHTS
You’ve finalized your contribution analysis and selected the best media partners to achieve your marketing objectives! But for how long do these choices remain effective? In today’s changing digital environment, performance tracking is becoming a necessity for most industries. A first analysis allows you to have a picture of your performance, but it is also important to have a vision on their evolution: keep the scope of your first analysis in order to compare the performance at a period n+1, and be able to judge the impact of your actions on your media performance over time.
CONCLUSION: KEY POINTS FOR SUCCESS IN ATTRIBUTION
As you can see, many elements are essential for an accurate analysis of the contribution of your marketing channels in reaching your objectives. In particular, data is the cornerstone of an accurate marketing contribution analysis.
