Attribution – Great Series by Lisa Picarille

If you haven’t heard about “attribution” recently, then I highly suggest you head on over to the Performance Marketing Association’s blog.  A good friend of mine, Lisa Picarille, is doing a wonderful series on attribution that if it’s not the best one I’ve seen, has to be right up there.  I highly suggest that any retailer and affiliate manager, and affiliates, take a look and brush up on this.  There are 4 parts to this series so far and I’m anxiously awaiting part 5.

Attribution has been on the landscape, at least for myself and JEB, for many years. Not sure what it is, read this – Read Attribution Part 1: The Concepts.  It’s a great series, gives you a good idea of the topic and should provide you with some food for thought.

In Part 2 of this series, Lisa pulls a quote from a guest blogger, Helen Southgate,  at eConsultancy:

“No it isn’t.” she writes. “This is a channel that pays a commission per sale and the most viable, fair way to do this is on a last click basis. The industry is not looking at a solution to replace this, it works.”

While I am not familiar with Helen or her work (I’m sure she fantastic), I do disagree on this point.  It may simply depend on what/who you deem as the “affiliate industry”.  Almost all our clients, past and present, have struggled with attribution and how to determine who should get credit for what in the customer’s journey from intent to purchase.  I do agree that affiliates are not looking for a solution, as attribution may mean a cut in their commissions (I personally feel it will lead to their participation in orders they are not seeing happening in other channels), but advertisers, especially multi channel merchants, are definitely looking for a solution to this issue.  They want to know how their spend in a particular area affected their sale.  How do they maximize their marketing budgets and what can they reduce to maximize profit, new customer acquisition and overall ROI.  They are definitely looking at this issue – just google “channel attribution” and see how many articles are being written about this.

It’s not a new issue really, maybe new-ish to the affiliate industry.

I first dealt with this issue in 2001 while at Coldwater Creek.  The question came from the top – “Are affiliates really driving revenue?  Why are we seeing sales tagged as SEM, Catalog and Affiliate?  Could we be more efficient in our marketing?  Could we optimize certain affiliate relationships to send more traffic through other channels and reward those affiliates?”  Those were some of the questions that we struggled to answer.  (It’s wasn’t simply an affiliate issue either.  Determining how each channel effects the other makes good business sense.  In the end, each advertiser wants to grow their overall business.)

We did quite a bit of analysis and data gathering in this area and came up with some really good observations.  We also developed some new strategies on an individual affiliate basis to maximize revenue, reduce cost and increase overall profitability.  The key to each success was looking at each affiliate partnership individually.

In the end, with the technology we have, you are still making assumptions, but you have much better data when you engage in an attribution endeavor.  I highly recommend it.  While affiliates and affiliate managers may not be driving this type of initiative, CEO’s, MarCom VP’s and advertisers in general will be.  They have been for some time, not just for affiliate marketing, but for all their channels.  Our industry should be prepared.

Thank you Lisa for a fantastic series!  Looking forward to reading the next installment!

Here are links to all of her posts:

Read Attribution Part 1: The Concepts

Read Attribution Part 2: The Pros and Cons

Read Attribution Part 3: Selling the Concept to Your Organization

Read Attribution Part 4: By the Numbers