attribution case study - online retailer
DESCRIPTION
When it comes to maintaining your position as one of America’s top ten retailers, digital marketing plays a critical role – especially in a highly competitive marketplace in which online retail sales reached over $40 billion in FY 2012 alone. But managing complex online marketing campaigns effectively across different business groups, channels, and product lines is no easy task.TRANSCRIPT
When it comes to maintaining your position as one of America’s top ten retailers,
digital marketing plays a critical role – especially in a highly competitive marketplace
in which online retail sales reached over $40 billion in FY 2012 alone. But managing
complex online marketing campaigns effectively across different business groups,
channels, and product lines is no easy task.
Tracking Online Campaigns Holistically Is Challenging
This leading national retailer faced two big challenges. First, there were many different
groups across the organization running their own online marketing campaigns
for individual product lines. The company had no way to track these campaigns
holistically. Second, the retailer needed a way to accurately measure the impact
and performance that various marketing channels and campaigns have on driving
sales. This included understanding the true lift that display advertising had on other
types of online marketing. With marketing campaigns running for 20 different product
categories and a dozen business units across display, search, e-mail and affiliate
sites, being able to measure these effectively would help the retailer determine
which channels deserved credit for conversions and sales so it could improve future
campaign investments.
Using Tags to Improve Insights into Online Behavior
For all of its campaigns across the organization, the retailer tracked its cross-channel
marketing events and conversions. The Adometry Ad Tag was deployed through
the ad server and used to collect display impressions bought by various business
units on sites such as Google, Facebook, and Yahoo!. This same Ad Tag was used
to synchronize with TARGUSinfo audience segments, as well as provide verification
data that identified ads below the fold or never seen. The Adometry Page Tag was
employed to collect all of the clicks landing on the retailer’s pages from channels
including display, paid search, organic search, e-mail, affiliates, and others. The Page
Tag was also used to collect retail sales events such as conversions, complete with
their associated item product categories and revenue.
Top 10 Retailer RealizesIncremental RevenueThrough Attribution
BACKGROUND
One of America’s top ten broadline
retailers - operating over 3,000 retail
stores in the US and offering more than
45 different brands - is taking action to
strengthen its connection to consumers
by strategically investing in online
media attribution.
- Director, Online Media Analytics
Online RetailerC A S E S T U D Y
A Leader in Forrester’sInteractive Attribution
Wave™ 2Q 2012
A Leader in Forrester’sInteractive Attribution
Wave™ 2Q 2012
“The reports we received from Adometry helped us understand in actionable and simple terms the complex interactions of our campaigns. Moving from measuring our performance based on last-click has improved our ROI in a number of ways by implementing frequency capping recommendations, eliminating overlap, and re-allocating our ad spend to the best performing sites.”
Adometry, Inc.4301 Westbank Dr.Building A, Ste. 100Austin, TX 78746
Uncovering Actionable Insights in the Data
To help it analyze and make sense of the enormous volume of
cross-channel campaign data collected by its tags, the retailer
turned to Adometry Attribute™ – one of the industry’s most
powerful and sophisticated attribution solutions. Adometry Attribute
is designed to give online marketers an accurate view of their entire
campaign ecosystem so they can determine how to better invest
and optimize their advertising dollars in the future. By uncovering
insights through attribution and improving performance through
optimization, the retailer was able to correlate and increase revenue
resulting from online purchases. With ad spend touch points in
a variety of marketing channels, it was able to improve new key
performance indicators (KPIs), such as attributed conversions,
cost per attributed conversion, attributed revenue, and return on ad
spend (ROAS).
A major finding that Adometry Attribute uncovered for the retailer
was an overlap between different marketing channels. Over 50%
of the conversions were from visitors that saw ads on two or more
channels. This helped the retailer understand that it needed to
ensure that all marketing and product groups within the company
running online media campaigns work together so that they could
invest more efficiently.
Furthermore, through its integration with data provider
TARGUSinfo, Adometry Attribute identified the audience segments
that converted best so the retailer could implement better audience
targeting initiatives in the future. For example, it discovered a three-
fold spread between the highest and lowest targeted segments in
their propensity to convert. This insight showed a large opportunity
for selectively buying audiences in the future that have conversion
rates significantly above their current averages.
Significant Tangible Benefits
These are a few of the significant benefits Adometry provided this
online retailer:
• Discontinuing sites with poor ad viewability – one site
displayed over 7 million impressions; however, over 95% of them
were below the fold and 80% were never seen. By exposing
this poor performing traffic source, the company recognized
substantial savings. And as bonus benefit, this also provided the
retailer with a way to use these insights to negotiate better rates
with the ad supplier.
• Frequency capping – Adometry Attribute showed how the
retailer’s re-targeting initiatives eventually reached a saturation
point, leading to wasted ad spend. By delivering new frequency
capping recommendations for individual re-targeting campaigns,
Adometry Attribute was able to save approximately 15% on
monthly ad spend on some of the top buys. With the re-
investment of the savings generated by limiting the number of
times an ad was displayed on one particular site, the advertiser
recognized over $200,000 in incremental revenue in one month.
• Optimization recommendations – Attribute uncovered
significant lifts that display advertising had other ad channels.
The data indicated that on average if a user saw an ad prior to
search, s/he was 15-30% more likely to convert. Additionally,
since the monthly budget was held at the same level, Adometry
recommended changes within display that generated over a 40%
lift in conversions and a 29% drop in eCPA. With almost $200 of
revenue per converted user, the revenue impact from incremental
conversions to the bottom line was millions of dollars.
One of the biggest overall takeaways for the retailer was the
impetus that attribution provided for the various departments
across the company to work together. Adometry Attribute helped
the marketers in each group understand the role that display plays
on all of the channels. As a result, the retailer is now tracking its ad
spend much more holistically and globally, resulting in improved ad
performance, communication and team efficiency.
About AdometryFounded in 2005, Adometry, Inc. provides ad verification and cross-channel attribution intelligence, plus auditing and scoring metrics, to optimize results for the world’s leading online advertisers, publishers, and ad networks. Through its SaaS-based advanced analytics, Adometry processes and analyzes tens-of-billions of impressions and advertising transactions per month to identify the true consumer purchase-decision journey and to maximize marketing ROI. Adometry combines a scientifically proven methodology with a flexible and easy to implement solution to generate results in as little as two weeks. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Adometry is privately held and backed by Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. For more information, visit www.adometry.com
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