Mylene Mangalindan of the WSJ wrote a solid piece yesterday that was unfortunately burried at the end of the annual All Things Digital. If you’re a multi-channel internet marketer, read her article, Ad Vantage (no link b/c I’m not a subscriber, I still like paper).
The piece looks at potential pitfalls of advertising online without proper analytics tracking and covers such topics as Garden Harware’s difficulties tracking which search advertising or comparison shopping clicks actually convert (PriceGrabber and Shopping.com are singled out), eBay’s solution for search marketing (seems they developed a system in-house after leaving Efficient Frontier), Alibris‘ problems with affiliate sales (not all affiliates drive valuable traffic), and Limoges Jewelry’s success using Mercent’s tracking systems (sales up, costs down).
What isn’t discussed is a potentially more troublesome problem which the analytics systems from WebTrends, CoreMetrics, Atlas, and Omniture [IPO next week?] don’t necessarily solve: crediting sales to the right marketing channel. As online marketers participate in more online marketing channels (PPC marketing on the main search engines, PPC on the shopping comparison engines, Lead Gen marketplaces, Affiliate marketing programs), giving credit where credit is due and therefore getting an accurate picture of ROI from each channel gets very tricky. And this issue will only get worse as companies shift more marketing dollars online.
If you need help working through online marketing analytics problems (are you sure you’re not double counting that sale from the consumer who clicked on the Google Adwords ad then the Shopping.com ad, then purchased directly from your site 2 days later?) , I know a great consultant you should talk to. Email me and I’ll make the introduction. And no, this is not an advertisement…I still have not taken a penny of advertising on this site.
Brian-
You hit upon a problem all of us in this space face. And it only gets more complicated when you’re trying to determine how much of that traffic is truly incremental. Throw into the mix offline sales and your head starts spinning.
For example, a user goes to Google, clicks on a Shopping.com paid or algo link, visits the merchant site, sees a local newspaper ad, goes to the merchant’s physical store and buys the product. Which channel gets credit for that sale? And with all the cookies being dropped by all these channels, how does a merchant attribute the sale? First cookie or last cookie wins? And was that sale truly incremental or would you have gotten it anyway?