NBA performance is measured not just on the basis of the points you score but on the basis of points you assists, total rebounds, and total blocks. A player who made 58 baskets possible, scored only 2 times. But we can all agree that if it was not for his perfectly timed passes, those scores would not have been possible. This is exactly how performance in a game is measured and attributed… and it also applies to online business sells and eCom attribution.
Something very similar happens when you deep dive into a user’s buyer journey. Consumers go through multiple touch points while shopping online – sometimes using multiple devices before the final transaction is made. Clearly, as in the NBA, going by the last click attribution would just be plain unfair.
Attribution is the holy grail in advertising. And for businesses which heavily rely on advertising, attribution is becoming even the more important. Sources estimate that e-commerce will bring the global e-commerce market to $2.5 trillion in 2018, that’s 10% of total retail sales in the US.
The e-commerce industry is bloated with metrics. And most marketers do not look beyond the last click conversions. This often presents a picture that paints one channel as the ultimate hero. With this article, I want to take a shot at helping marketers who are scaling their business crack the problem of attribution wide open. This article will help you identify marketing channels that are contributing “significantly” to your user’s buying journey.
The Yardstick for evaluating online stores changes with every milestone that they hit. As online stores evolve, so must their metrics. I am not saying that tracking these metrics would be wrong – just that they are vanity and more than often these are false positives.
81% of organizations are using marketing attribution, but 70% are still finding it hard to act on insights – Source
You know what our problem is? We are biased without even knowing it. We usually consider the last channel that has interacted with the user to be the star, the lifesaver of marketing efforts, the ultimate channel you need to shove more money at.
It makes sense to start off attributing the last channel the user interacted with if you are just starting off or are a newbie eCommerce business owner. But as your business grows and you start seeing a measure of success, you need to track which channels helped bring your online shoppers to the point of conversion as well. Again, this depends on the business you have and if you sell high-value products or not. Once your business starts growing, it is always advisable to analyze multiple touch points that encourage users along the way to attribute credit to the right channels.
