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?

Marketers can now tell that last-click metrics are often extremely inaccurate because they don't take into account all other influences that contributed to that eventual purchase. With attribution management, a direct correlation between all the influences that contributed to a purchase — and the revenue produced by that purchase — have been enabled.

3. Offline matters, so measure it. A lot of customer activity happens beyond the internet, which is why it’s critical that it be measured. It's now possible to perform attribution management between online and offline channels, whereas it used to be limited to online only. Attribution management can be performed using either user-level (i.e., cookies) or campaign summary-level (i.e., nonuser-level) data. User-level data had previously been required.

4. Retailers are already on board. If this is the first you're hearing about attribution management, you're already at a competitive disadvantage. In fact, retailers were among the earliest adopters of attribution management because they often market their products via many channels, have an abundance of data and record many transactions. All of this, when properly analyzed, contains a wealth of marketing insight and provides the opportunity to give credit where credit is due. Attribution management allows you to invest in the efforts that are truly driving your business.

Manu Mathew is CEO of Visual IQ, a provider of cross channel marketing intelligence software. Manu can be reached at manu.mathew@visualiq.com.