Beyond the "Last Click"
We can no longer just look at online campaigns purely in terms of immediate conversion rates.
Digital marketing often involves a build-up of contact over a research-buy cycle, particularly in markets like financial services and travel where consumers are inclined to shop around.
In that context, we have to look at the sequence of marketing events that drive conversions online and look at the interactions and reactions between digital channels to get a clear sense of the real impact of our campaigns and channels.
Growth in online marketing has arguably been fuelled by the ability to quickly quantify return on investment, tracking the sales generated by any given campaign and benchmarking performance by conversion rates.
However, companies engaging with their customers online across a mix of search engine, email, banner and affiliate marketing need to understand how they work together to drive sales.
Two important contexts for understanding impact are the research-buy cycle for consumers and the power of brand recognition in generating and capturing interest. When customers shop around for a product online, they will often interact with multiple channels (for example, recent Lynchpin research showed that 70% of travel buyers didn't transact on their first visit). Equally, research into a product can often translate into interest (or loyalty) to a brand, with product campaigns feeding into brand campaigns and vice versa.
Traditional return on investment (ROI) reporting gives all the credit to the last marketing action prior to transaction. But the online marketing mix is exactly that: a mix, and when the impact of campaigns earlier in the research-buy cycle are ignored value can be wrongly biased towards the last link in the chain.
Off-line can have a real impact too, with evidence of direct mail being a big driver of search engine conversions in catalogue industries for example: pull the direct mail, and the search suffers.
Making sense of all these interactions can be achieved at two levels. Online, sales can be linked back to all the marketing actions leading up to them (often within a limited time-frame, for example 30 days for retail) and the value apportioned between those actions for return on investment calculation purposes. Looking at offline/online reactions, simple cause and effect observations such as spikes in search engine traffic or uplift in conversion rates corresponding to direct mail drops or TV campaigns give a clear sense of impact.
Measuring impact and exploiting campaign synergies is key to maximising return on investment in an competitive online marketplace occupied by increasingly savvy consumers, and getting the right product/service/brand mix to drive sales.
Digital marketing campaigns cannot be viewed in isolation, and tracking, research and planning will need to evolve to meet the demands of multichannel marketing.
