To Attribution and BeyondLewis Lenssen – Commercial Director - DC Storm

Lewis Lenssen• 5 years leading and building a search agency

• 1 year consulting on social media and online PR for retail brands (focusing on measurement and valuation)

• 18 months as Commercial Director of DC Storm

DC Storm – Optimising Digital Marketing• Delivering attribution for over five years

• Over 1,300 tracked websites with configured attribution

• Consulting service as well as technology

• What is attribution?

• Understanding paths to conversion

• Rules based attribution model

• Attribution model design and implementation

• Alpharooms.com case study

• Beyond……

What is Attribution?

PurchaseConfirmationResearch Suppliers Choice

Sale

‘PRPS skinny jeans’

Sale Attribution

• Actions are rarely driven by a single website visit or touch point• Actions are frequently driven by multiple marketing channels• The path to conversion is often days or weeks

‘Designer Jeans’

‘PRPS Jeans ‘Matches’

IMP IMP IMP

Understanding Paths to Conversion

Understanding Paths to Conversion

Attributes that must be understood:

• Length of path and numbers of touch points

• Touch points and their positions relative to each other and sale

• Touch point attributes:• Device

• Channel

• Keyword

• Creative

• Use of brand

• Combinations of touch points

Understanding Paths to Conversion

Useful segments

• User Attributes – M/F, age, registered, first/last visit date, visit frequency, etc.

• Sales/Action attributes – First sale, product category, sale value etc.

• Contributing events – Paths that include remarketing etc.

Rules Based Attribution

Rules based attribution

Flexible attribution of sales across all or a subset of the visits

Configurable rules for defining attribution period:• Fixed length of time• Period defined by visit gaps

Configurable rules for weighting:• Control of channel weighting• Control of brand weighting• Control of chain position weighting

Configurable rules for specific sale segments:• New or existing customers• Sale value

Allocation of multiple sale related values (e.g. margin)

Designing and Implementing an Attribution Model

• The results must be used to take action

• Must be well understood

• Must be fair to all channels and teams

• Attribution workshop

• Introduce the challenge and discuss the issues

• Manually attribute ten paths to conversion

• Aggregate and review the results

• Build an attribution model that best fits the target results

• Test and challenge the automated model

Alpharooms.com Case study

Alpharooms.com

• Successful discount travel website trading for 13 years

• Foundations in selling discount hotels

• Developed into flights, transfers, car hire, packages and insurance

• Sophisticated online marketing optimised based on performance

• Utilising all online channels

History

• Working with DC Storm for 5 years

• Early adopter of rules based attribution

• Attribution rules were designed for the hotels business

Project

• Analyse paths to conversion and evaluate against the existing attribution model

• Design a new attribution that reflects the current paths to conversion

• Implement the new model and compare the new and old

Findings

• More varied paths to conversion for the new products

• The existing model reflected the average but not the specific paths

• Value being attributed to channels and keywords was not ideal

Solution

• Implement chaining to identify contributing touch points

• Attribute to brand based on the position in the path to conversion

Results

• 18% shift of sales value between channels

• Significant shift of sale value between keywords

• Overall increase in sales whilst maintaining ROI

And Beyond? – Multi-Channel Modelling

Multi-Channel Modelling

• Define the touch point clusters:• Session Clusters – Touch points relating to single user sessions

• Booking or Buying Clusters – Touch points relating to bookings/purchases

• Identify attributes of touch points, clusters, ‘exposures to marketing’ and conversions that influence conversions (decision tree analysis)

• Calculate influence coefficients for the influential attributes (logistic regression)

• Build an attribution model based on the attributes and coefficients

• Utilise the insight to convert the non-converted paths

Summary

• Huge value in implementing the right attribution model

• Build a model for your business - The combination of technology and expertise is available now

• Alpharooms.com case study demonstrates the value

Beyond

• Multi-channel modelling

• Attribution based on statistical analysis

• Drive action as well as analysing performance

Q & A

Lewis Lenssen

lewis.lenssen@dc-storm.com