Your Brand is an Illusion – Attribution reveals The Real

Gabe Gayhart SEO Marketer                   

Gabe Gayhart as of Jan 2013

  If the internet was the Land of Oz, then the purchase path would be the yellow brick road between Dorothy’s landing and final words “There’s no place like home”.  The purchase path, also known as the buy funnel, follows a consumer’s buying cycle. Without the purchase path a marketer cannot recognize they have a problem or exploit an opportunity.  Usually, after an evaluation of alternatives or comparison shopping,  the consumer makes the choice to convert. If your marketing depends solely on optimizing based on last (converting) click then you most likely think your brand terms are the chief converter in your strategy. Guess what? They are not. Granted they convert, but true attribution would show a marketer there was an introduction and influencing factors prior to the converting click. Hence, brand terms obtain more credit than they deserve since they usually are the last click. Does your integrated strategy attribute conversion metrics based on a last click method?

Understand the fact of your Marketing tactics 
Banner and paid search ads have different jobs to do, and using the last click method won’t give proper attribution to the role your marketing tactics play. Attribution assigns facts to your tactics. Here’s a fact: a Banner is typically higher in the buy funnel than a paid search ad. Therefore the value assigned to a banner ad shouldn’t be discounted because of conversion rate. Even certain search behaviors should be seen differently too.

Another Fact: Brand terms are often an indicator of a navigational search because the user has already made a decision to purchase, not because your brand is so awesome they just automatically think of your company at 2:13pm on a Tuesday afternoon – get over yourself. Perhaps your brand has touched the consumer multiple times in a purchase path and for one reason or another brand has been associated by the consumer to their purchase. Perhaps it was messaging, perhaps it was dominance, but more likely it was a combination of multiple touch points combined with solid pricing.  Studying the path helps you understand the facts that surround your converters’ search experience, and each tactic has its own attribute that it contributed to that experience.

Being an integrated agency, we stare at a ton of buy funnels all day, and it is safe to say, from a strategic perspective, that banners often introduce the brand, meaning that typically they are at the top of the funnel.  Engagement tools like blogs, videos and social media influence search behavior. Search via paid and organic typically relate messaging, drive actions and close deals.  When thinking of this buy funnel as an experience, you can then conceptualize the first point of contact to the converting click, as a period of latency until conversion.  Measuring the length of conversion latency gives a 360 degree perspective to optimizing your campaign. For example, if a display ad introduces the brand and the next day there is a click on your PPC ad that is a category-related keyword (Example:  ‘white shoes’), and then later a conversion via a brand-related keyword in organic, which is the most valued keyword? If you understand conversion latency then the PPC click (even though it doesn’t count as last click) is just as valuable, if not more, than the brand related converting click. But, if it isn’t credited as an assisting click to the conversion, then it could be seen as a low PPC converter with a higher CPO, and possibly eliminated from the search strategy altogether. Ouch.

Love your Step-Children
Don’t ignore the abandoned path; a lot of attribution is valued for understanding the conversion funnel and optimizing around what is working. That is like only loving your own kids in a remarried family, but ignoring your step-children – it feeds dysfunction.  Attribution can actually help understand potential business problems like pricing, fulfillment etc. by studying the paths that did not convert, also known ‘abandoned paths’. Simply looking at the buy funnel of people who did not convert can help either identify messaging issues or, even better yet, appreciate a larger business problem that is preventing the influencing factors from creating conversions.

Article by Gabriel Gayhart
Originally written on Search Shots when Gayhart was at Razorfish

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