In a recent Online Metrics Insider post, Patrick Dolan discussed the chaos for marketers caused by the demise of last click and the rise of new attribution methodologies. According to Dolan:
“When it comes to attribution, it's unlikely there will ever be, or should be, standardized relationships between the values of channels. For one campaign and its particular goals, it may be reasonable to weigh display ad clicks higher than Twitter interactions; for another campaign, it might be appropriate to give more weight to specific user actions that signal engagement. A vendor that specializes in attribution modeling must tailor its solution to individual campaigns -- not every marketer, but every campaign -- as each has its own unique media mix and objectives.”
Here at UpStream, we agree that each campaign needs to be measured, but we’ve also taken it a step further. Each campaign has its own “decay curve” to calculate the impact the marketing treatment had on the customer over time. For example, an email will have a much shorter decay curve of a few days (who goes back to three month old advertising emails?), while a catalog may have a decay curve of a few months.
Attribution methodology should be designed to handle any number or combination of treatments that occur, both online and offline. Not only does UpStream consider every campaign, but our methodology also takes into account all of the known activity of a prospect (ie. email opens, web browsing, display ad click-throughs, retargeting, mobile, purchase behavior across all order channels, etc.) as well as the incremental effect of marketing.
The incremental effect of marketing separates the revenue marketers were responsible for from customer-driven sales. Customer-driven sales take into account factors such as customer loyalty, the impact of retail stores, and holidays. Another way to think of customer-driven sales is to consider what revenue would immediately stop if all marketing ceased. Only a portion would evaporate (marketing-driven), whereas other revenue would continue for some period of time (customer-driven). Customer-driven revenue can be significant for strong, established brands – between 50-70%, but is much lower for brands without a loyal following.
