4 Things Every Retailer Should Know About Attribution Management
It all started with a click. Or was it a call? Or could it have been that direct mail piece? In a world with seemingly endless customer touchpoints, if you don't know what's driving your customers to your business, you're not alone.
Attribution management, the science of calculating the contribution of each marketing touchpoint on conversion, is finally bringing science and reason together to answer the age-old question: "What caused this customer to make a purchase?" As a result, it plays a significant role in enhancing the quality and effectiveness of interactions that retailers have with customers and prospects, which translates into increased return on investment. Here are four things every cross-channel retailer should know about attribution management:
1. It’s science, simplified. Attribution management often sounds a bit complex, and it is. But with the help of today’s technology, it no longer requires marketers to perform heavy-duty data gymnastics and sophisticated marketing science that few want — or are qualified — to tackle. Through sophisticated mathematical analysis, attribution management software first identifies the extent to which each channel, campaign and component of a campaign contributes to every conversion that happens.
The software then recalculates the marketer’s own critical success metrics (e.g., cost per acquisition, ROI, revenue, etc.) for each channel, campaign and component. It does so while taking into account the influence that each had on the other. The results are quantifiable, cross-channel insights that provide an actionable path to optimize one’s marketing efforts.
2. It killed the last click. With the advent of the internet and e-commerce, marketers suddenly “knew” that 100 percent of the revenue produced through clicks on a search engine was a direct result of their investment in that search engine. That made calculating the ROI of that channel easy enough. But did they really know?
