By Glenn Taylor, Senior Editor
With nearly nine in
10 retailers having increased their marketing budgets in 2018, according
to RetailMeNot, merchants are strongly motivated to ensure the money
is being spent effectively. But with the oversaturation of available data points
changing how retailers view the shopper journey, the a question that should be
on every retailer’s mind is: Am I measuring this spend accurately?
The RetailMeNot survey indicates that the top three ways
brands measure the success of offers and promotions include:
·
Increasing sales revenue (56%);
Advertisement
·
Driving new customer growth (55%); and
·
Increasing brand awareness and brand perceptions
(50%).
EBay, Verizon Share
Attribution Success Stories At Shop.org
Revenue and overall growth are obvious indicators of a
retailer’s success across the board, but understanding and calculating attribution across channels is a major
puzzle piece necessary for marketers to track their campaigns. In a session at Shop.org
in Las Vegas, Tony Flanery-Rye, Senior Director of Growth Analytics for eBay, and Andrea Wasserman, VP of Retail
experience at Verizon, gave a
deep-dive look into their marketing spend and attribution strategies.
EBay’s attribution strategies still depend on the product
sold and the length of the typical sales cycle, said Flanery-Rye. He noted that
there is still no definitive answer as to whether the company should move
entirely away from “last-touch attribution,” which credits the last channel to
present an advertisement to a converting customer for the sale, to “multi-touch
attribution,” which credits various channels throughout the customer journey
for sales conversions.
“What I would advise people to do is to decide, what do we
sell?” Flanery-Rye said. “What do our customers do? If I do some research here,
how many of them are actually making lots of stops along the way, and how many
are just coming once? You then have to make the tradeoff decision between
wanting the extravagance and overhead to get a multi-touch campaign going,
because it’s a lot of work and it’s hard to interpret.”
It’s true that attribution can appear throughout the retail
enterprise, whether it’s in the store, online or at home. Verizon is using multiple
tools to figure out where to place attributions correctly. The company uses customer
surveys to gather Net Promoter Score (NPS) data on service interactions, and
even rolled out a “Smart Setup” where customers can enter a store, purchase a
new device (either an upgrade or brand new) and then go back home while the
contacts and settings gets transferred to the new device.
“Certainly there are quantitative elements there, and also
some qualitative insight, into how customers are feeling as they engage with us
across channels” Wasserman said. “We’re looking at what the initial behavior
was, whether it was a purchase or the beginning of an order. What does it look
like as people do, or choose not to, follow the experience all the way through?
There’s certainly a lot of information that we can learn from that.”
Overstock.com Takes
Incrementality Approach To Attribution
Attending this session took me back to RTP’s Retail Innovation Conference in May, specifically the session
titled: Controlling And Measuring
What Matters In Digital Advertising. In this “fireside chat,”
Nariman Noursalehi, VP of Marketing and Customer Acquisition at Overstock.com, revealed the benefits
his company saw from modernizing its approach to measuring advertising ROI,
particularly by focusing on incrementality.
Overstock
spends approximately $50 million annually on Facebook, with the
retailer generating 6.5X incremental
ROI via digital advertising through A/B tests performed on the platform, said
Noursalehi.
“Until you can tie ROI to an actual incremental value, I
think it’s just a number,” said Noursalehi during the conference. The larger
point here is that a campaign’s ROI total doesn’t mean as much for a retailer
if it still includes customers that convert regardless of whether they even saw an ad.
All these cases show me that the old ways of attributing a transaction
are only going to continue to drift away — especially as more retailers sell
through more channels, expand product lines, create more content offerings and
gather a larger social following. In this new environment, retailers will have
to test and measure their campaigns more thoroughly than ever before.
