Digital marketing and social media will make or break your business in 2014. But here’s the tricky part: For a multibillion-dollar business, digital marketing still leaves a lot of important measurements to the imagination.
Facebook
Social media and digital marketing are constantly changing, and that natural evolution is behind the biggest and most sinister problem facing the industry: proving a direct return on investment.
Attribution is the process by which a marketer gives credit to different campaigns in terms of how much they impacted a specific action. Attribution is a critical concept for business executives to understand so they can decide which large-scale marketing campaigns are the most effective and determine how to improve them.
The secret to seeing an ROI in digital marketing is solving the marketing attribution problem — a problem you may not even know you have.
The Heart of Every Attribution Problem
All marketers and agencies suffer from the attribution problem, regardless of budget allocations.
Let’s say someone sees your ad and clicks to your site on a mobile device. Did the user click to your site through a pay-per-click (PPC) search campaign, a mobile display campaign, or an in-app advertisement? You may never know. That’s because many users eventually come back to your website on their desktop computer at a later time to ultimately convert those previous actions. Your mobile efforts won’t be tied to that final conversion event.
That means your mobile campaigns are accruing cost without getting any credit for their part in driving sales or leads, while your branded search or direct traffic on desktop ultimately gets more credit than it deserves.
The Future of Marketing: Tying Attribution to Real Shopping Experiences
The attribution problem has frustrated marketers for a long time, but the future looks promising.
Advertisers using Google AdWords can already modify how aggressively they want to pay to get in front of users who interacted with a site previously and tailor their messaging based on users’ actions.
The next step is for advertisers to tie this information into the brick-and-mortar experience.
When customers shop online, you expose them to targeted ads based on their behavior. When these same customers walk into your store, you should give them specific in-store offers based on their online activity and direct them to the section of your store in which they’re most interested.
Here are some industry-wide shifts that will give marketers a better way to measure and evaluate their efforts.
1. An “always logged in” approach will improve attribution tracking.
There are large holes in attribution models now because today’s cookies cannot accurately measure cross-device traffic or activity occurring on different browsers.
In the future, Google is going to push for users to be logged in to their email and social media accounts so it can track browsing habits and clicks across devices — even in their physical homes. By pairing up your unique device IDs with your Google ID, Google will be able to seamlessly tie together your digital touchpoints across all of your devices.
2. Business will need to accept an “always testing” mentality.
Clients may be apprehensive or unwilling to go outside their comfort zone and put dollars into testing an unknown channel, but to be successful in 2014, more businesses will need to accept the “always testing” mentality and rely more on instinct and less on formulaic budget allocations.
Businesses that keep a set-in-stone budget or who need 100 percent assurance before moving forward with a campaign will need to allocate a testing budget so they don’t fall behind on key marketing channels. In today’s fast-paced social world, you don’t want to miss out on a huge opportunity just because it’s new and you didn’t have a line item for it when you made your budgets.
3. Marketing budget allocations will see more variety in campaigns and devices.
With better attribution modeling, certain outlets will begin to appear more valuable than others. As brands research and develop their attribution results, expect budgets and campaign spends to vary greatly from any of the following outlets:
- Social advertising campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
- Non-branded search
- Contextual, placement, search companion, in-market, and other display campaigns
- Video campaigns
As advertisers start to get a truer ROI for their campaigns, expect them to want to spend more or less on certain devices, carriers, and other technology-related data based on reach and ROI.
It’s safe to say that the big players in online advertising are working on making attribution a much clearer science, which will ultimately improve real attribution modeling for all advertisers by leaps and bounds.
The most important thing for marketers today is to embrace an attribution model that goes beyond the last click. When attribution tracking and reporting is more transparent and precise across devices and browsing sessions, it will become more and more obvious which campaigns are worth your time and money. sharing is caring follow my blog post a comment enjoy@@
No comments:
Post a Comment