Tackling attribution

There are other ways to tackle attribution than the myopic view of clicks and view-thru. What every business should do is define what would make the campaign a success, and then ask how they can measure that. Unfortunately many brands do this after the fact. They look at the available data that they can get from running a campaign online and what the system has measured and then decide whether the campaign is a success. I cannot stress enough that a more strategic approach is necessary.

You must go beyond the metrics that are easily provided by ad delivery systems. You have to develop a metric that gives you the data you need to be actionable about your business, instead of just lifting that report on the number of users that a campaign drove in views and clicks every week. The reported metric must be quickly actionable. Often, people seek to get at every little piece of data. They want to know everything. That is fine, but you will end up being mired in data atrophy. Does it take months for you to get an internal report through on the long-term value of your users? Then do not build it into your ongoing metric and actionable reporting. Measure that quarterly so you stay on track. But anything that you build as your optimization metric must be able to be pulled and reported, tracked and acted upon quickly. Enough data is enough.

Back to our phone example: Are you introducing a new phone brand that no one has ever heard of? You want consumers to get familiar with the features of the device and check out content on your site about it; and you want to tie the metric into priming them for purchase. In this case, PPTI (pages [of content viewed] per thousand impressions) could give you how much information a user who has seen an online ad, and been cookied, has absorbed on your site.

Think of it as a proxy for consumption of information -- priming consumers for conversion later in the cycle. You can optimize against that metric by modifying your creative and shifting your media plan. The trick is to use actionable metrics or even create ones for your business that go beyond the norm that you can optimize against.

Are you an online brand? A service? Do visits to site-per-consumer translate into income? You can use you own site data to track retention and the frequency with which users go to your site who have seen an ad. Are they coming back? How often? Layer in the cookie data and you have an exposed and a non-exposed group to track the differences in your user base. New visitors will have different performance characteristics from returning visitors. You can adapt your media plan and set target goals for the number of new users you acquire. Find an optimal balance of exposure.

How many times were your targets exposed to your online creative? More importantly, what combination of online creative were they exposed to and what creative is actually driving conversion?