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5 unexpected

ways attribution can boost the bottom line

Introduction Advertising used to be so simple. In the past, companies would run a print advert, air a broadcast commercial or send out a piece of direct mail and wait for customers to get in touch. Today, the reality is very different – consumers interact with brands through a multitude of touchpoints before they purchase a product or service.

Marketing attribution is the science of using advanced analytics to allocate proportional credit to each marketing touchpoint across all offline and online channels, leading to a desired customer action. Within this model, the goal of the marketer is to determine which touchpoints are producing positive results and by extension generating greater profits.

Viewed from this perspective, attribution offers a means to determine which sales have been driven by which marketing activities. With an attribution model in place, marketers and advertisers can stop wasting their money on touchpoints that don’t work and focus their energy on activities that deliver genuine value. At least, that’s the theory.

In practice, attribution does something much more nuanced than solving the link between spend and outcome. It enables marketers to view all of the customer journeys that take place prior to a sale.

The journeys can then be analysed in detail to determine which ones have been substantially changed as a result of specific marketing initiatives.

To get the most out of attribution, marketers and advertisers need to start asking different types of questions.

The link between digital marketing and offline sales is a classic example. Most marketers want to know whether their digital activity is directly driving their offline sales. Rather than seeking a direct financial correlation, marketers can use attribution to understand the relationship between the two and figure out ways of allocating spend differently. For example, a retailer might want to know if certain types of online activity are encouraging online users to visit stores on a regular basis. Using attribution, the retailer can work out which digital touchpoints are generating store visits and apportion additional funds to those areas to encourage greater footfall.

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5 unexpected ways attribution can boost the bottom line

In fact, attribution can help marketers address a whole range of challenges.

Using attribution, brands can segment new and existing customers and develop tailored marketing for the different groups of users. Attribution can also be used to market specific products and categories more effectively and to deliver

5 unexpected ways attribution can boost the bottom line

the right message to the right customer.

It can even be employed to improve the effectiveness of abandoned basket campaigns.

To discover how attribution can be used most effectively to address marketing challenges, we talked to leading experts at big brands and agencies and collated our findings in this report.

Contributors Kieran McAlpine Paid Traffic Manager, Schuh James Libor Marketing Technology Manager, Virgin Holidays David Taylor Digital Director, Accord Marketing Tim Elkington Chief Strategy Officer, Internet Advertising Bureau Ben Latham Director of Digital Strategy, Summit Media Nick Fletcher Director of Service Strategy, Rakuten Affiliate Network Lewis Lenssen SVP - Strategic Initiatives, Rakuten Marketing James Collins Managing Director, Rakuten Attribution

Over the following pages we will look at five key, perhaps unexpected, areas of your business where attribution can help increase revenue and ROI.

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5 unexpected ways attribution can boost the bottom line

5 unexpected ways attribution can boost the bottom line

1 Prove digital marketing efforts are driving your in-store sales

There is no question that there is a direct correlation between digital marketing and in-store sales. Marketers need to realise that consumers do not make a conscious distinction between online and offline activity – they view brands in the round regardless of how they choose to engage with them.

In the past, marketers would run online promotions and then measure the level of in-store sales to determine whether the campaign had been a success. This process is, by its nature, completely unscientific. Attribution has enabled marketers to map the relationship between online and offline activity with far greater accuracy. Many brands now use unique identifiers to trace customers’ journeys between online and offline.

Voucher codes, loyalty programmes and emails are good examples of these identifiers. Increasingly, brands are also using e-receipts to calculate whether their online campaigns are having an impact offline.

One brand that is using a unique identifier to track customers’ journeys is Virgin Holidays. The company captures email addresses (hashing and encrypting

them to ensure privacy), from a variety of places online. It also acquires email addresses from prospective customers when they ask for a quote or make a booking in a retail outlet.

Package holidays tend to be big ticket purchases. Prior to using marketing attribution, Virgin Holidays assumed that most of its sales activity took place within its offices and retail stores. By mapping its customers’ online and offline journeys it was able to establish that its digital marketing was having a much greater impact than previously thought.

The company has now decided to move more of its marketing budget online in response.

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5 unexpected ways attribution can boost the bottom line

Another company that has established a link between online and offline behaviour is The Body Shop. It has been running affiliate programmes with partners to encourage shoppers to visit its stores more frequently.

The retailer’s partners have been

offering consumers exclusive codes via their websites and mobile apps that are redeemable in The Body Shop stores. This has allowed the retailer to determine which partners are sending customers into stores and whether those visits have resulted in a sale.

The Body Shop has been running affiliate programmes to encourage more frequent store visits

Case Study

Carpetright rolls out a new strategy

Founded in 1988, Carpetright is one of the largest British retailers of floor coverings. The company has a very popular site that allows customers to browse through samples of different carpets. Carpetright wanted to establish whether its site visitors were following up on their online browsing by visiting the stores to purchase carpets. To answer this question, it decided to make its online store locator a central part of the customer experience. Marketing attribution allowed the retailer to capture postcodes inserted into the store finder and match them up with dispatch delivery addresses. As a result, Carpetright was able to establish a clear

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connection between website visits, trips to its outlets and in-store sales. The key project also allowed the company to put an absolute valuation on its digital marketing. It is now putting additional resources into its digital marketing to encourage customers to go to the site and use the store locator.

There can be quite polarised views within companies about the respective merits of online and offline marketing, particularly during times when budgets are stretched.

If properly implemented, attribution can also help settle budgetary debates by putting an absolute valuation on digital marketing.

5 unexpected ways attribution can boost the bottom line

5 unexpected ways attribution can boost the bottom line

2 Prove the impact of your prospecting efforts on driving new customers

The importance of being able to segment user journeys for new and existing customers should not be underestimated. Many sales that retailers receive come from customers that have an established history with the brand.

It therefore follows that the marketing needed to attract new shoppers has to be different from the marketing required to encourage pre-existing customers to purchase again. However, many brands fail to make the distinction and end up wasting their energy on customers that already have an established purchase history with them. In fact, those brands would be much better advised to focus on new prospects who are likely to become repeat buyers if they can be persuaded to make an initial purchase.

A good attribution solution should be able to detect whether a sale has been generated by an existing customer or a new prospect. Furthermore, it should have the capacity to map the journeys that prospects and repeat customers take on digital platforms. By analysing this data, marketers can determine which touchpoints are encouraging new visitors to engage with their brands and increase their spend in those areas.

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One company that is using attribution to improve prospecting is Accord Marketing.

The company is one of the UK’s largest travel marketing agencies and works with a range of cruise liners, tour operators and online travel brands. Many of its clients use programmatic marketing to target their advertising more successfully.

Accord Marketing is now using attribution to help its clients identify whether or not their programmatic marketing is leading to sales conversions further down the marketing funnel. Previously, it was not possible to trace impressions through to sales conversions, but attribution is changing the whole way in which marketing activity is tracked from the top of the funnel to the bottom.

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5 unexpected ways attribution can boost the bottom line

5 unexpected ways attribution can boost the bottom line

3 Discover what mix of marketing channels is the most successful in selling a particular product or category

Increasingly, brands are realising that there are different user journeys that go with particular products and categories. For example, the typical user journey for a pair of jeans tends to be very quick. However, the user journey associated with buying a family package holiday tends to be much longer because the purchase requires much more thought and consideration.

By understanding these user journeys, marketers can develop campaigns across channels that generate interest from their target audiences. This is a strategy that has been employed with great success in recent years by department stores such as Selfridges and House of Fraser. Like all large retailers, there are times of the year when Selfridges and House of Fraser need to sell excess menswear and womenswear stock. By examining the user journeys associated with these categories, both retailers have been able to successfully shift their stock by using a mix of marketing channels.

It isn’t just retailers that are taking advantage of this approach. The travel industry is too. Rakuten Attribution recently worked on a project for a holiday company that sells low cost travel packages in the UK. The company

wanted to reduce the level of inventory it had in particular parts of the country.

By analysing the user journeys of people who are interested in travelling to the an island, they were able to model their campaigns properly to encourage bookings for island resorts. It then used keywords online to flag up its destinations and create a buzz. As a result, the company was able to fill up more places in its resorts and cut its level of inventory considerably.

By understanding these user journeys, marketers can develop campaigns across channels that generate interest from their target audiences.

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5 unexpected ways attribution can boost the bottom line

Booking a long haul holiday is one of the most considered purchases any consumer in the UK can make, not far behind buying a car or a house.

In short, attribution can play a vital role in prospecting and any company that is serious about acquiring new customers Virgin Holidays Case Study should investigate the technology.

Virgin Holidays is one of the UK’s most successful long haul scheduled tour operators in the UK. The company offers holidays worldwide with destinations including the USA and Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, India, the Indian Ocean, the Far East, Australia and the South Pacific.

Booking a long haul holiday is one of the most considered purchases any consumer in the UK can make, not far behind buying a car or a house. Virgin Holidays

knew that its customers were taking a long time to book, but did not have an accurate duration for the average customer journey. By using an attribution platform from Rakuten Attribution it was able to determine the correct duration – nearly 2 months. Up to this point, Virgin Holidays did not know that its prospects were waiting up to a month and a half to book after being exposed to its advertising. The finding has allowed the company to change its media mix and model its spend much more accurately.

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5 unexpected ways attribution can boost the bottom line

4 Ensure you deliver the right message to the right customer

Companies that already have attribution solutions in place are perfectly placed to target customers with tailored messages. They will already have information on their users’ journeys and past purchases. On top of this, they will also have data on which marketing messages have worked on particular groups of customers in the past.

In fact, attribution solutions can give companies a distinct advantage when they are messaging customers. An obvious example is re-targeting. When someone visits a retailer’s website to browse some products, on many occasions they will be re-targeted relentlessly with the products they have previously viewed. However, if a retailer already has knowledge about that customer that they have gleaned from analysing their journeys they can target them with much more nuanced messages.

Which metrics advertisers choose to focus on is all important in this process. In the world of digital advertising, many brands tend to measure the success of their campaigns based on sales and ROI. They seldom look at the lifetime value of the consumers they are targeting and whether or not those customers are VIPs who have purchased from them repeatedly over a long period of time. Targeting these kinds of users is clearly critical to the success of any long term digital advertising campaign.

One company that is putting efforts into segmenting its customers in this fashion is Virgin Holidays. It is in the midst of a large scale study of all of its customer journeys, tracking all of its users’ experiences pre and post sale. Although the project is in its infancy, the company has already discovered

that its customers expect a very different type of communication after returning from a holiday.

But even with the right metrics in place, companies like Virgin Holidays face another daunting challenge – time. While it is possible to use algorithms to understand what appeals to different customer segments, getting tailored messages to users in real time is extremely difficult.

Some companies are attempting to bridge this gap by developing their own in-house solutions. Accord Marketing is one example.

The agency has built a system called Loop, which as its name suggests, is a closed loop reporting system and data management platform. The solution brings together media metrics and consumer records in one place. This has allowed Accord Marketing to look inside channels and apply metrics that are not usually visible during the media planning stage. For example, the company can look at repeat customers in lifetime plan view and adjust its creative and marketing budgets accordingly.

Rakuten Attribution has employed a similar approach to overcoming these challenges, by analysing marketing channel performance based on lifetime value.

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5 unexpected ways attribution can boost the bottom line

5 Make your abandoned basket campaigns more intelligent

Most abandoned basket systems are relatively primitive and don’t positively accommodate a lot of common consumer behaviours. Understanding the ways that people use mobile and desktop to browse and shop is critical to successful email retargeting campaigns.

There are literally hundreds of reasons why people abandon baskets. Brands need to determine whether a person is an idle shopper or someone who actually has the intent to buy. Making that kind of judgement requires a detailed understanding of the shopper and their previous purchasing history. With a good attribution solution in place, brands can look at a user journey and figure out how often a customer has browsed a site, how frequently they have looked at a particular product and whether or not they have checked out other categories during their visits. The solution should also give users an insight into how consumers are shopping across devices.

Typically, a consumer will visit a site three times before making a major purchase and will wait up to two weeks before carrying out their final buy. A good attribution solution should allow a

company to determine when a person is in more or less of a buying mood. This data can then be feed into an abandon basket system to ensure that the person is re-targeted at the optimum time.

At Virgin Holidays most of the retargeting is done via email. The company has developed a sophisticated email communication platform that allows it to trigger different messages at various levels of abandonment on its website.

Although the solution has a high degree of personalisation built into it, the company is continuing to test it and pour more dynamic content into it.

In short, attribution helps brands to re-target customers in a much subtler fashion. It can be a vital tool in increasing conversion rates and encouraging shoppers to purchase on a more regular basis.

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5 unexpected ways attribution can boost the bottom line

Conclusion The marketing landscape that companies operate in is complex, multi-dimensional and fragmented.

Consumers interact with brands through an extensive array of digital, offline, paid and earned media channels. Not only do marketers have to make sense of a multitude of user journeys, but they also have to account for every pound spent on attracting and retaining customers.

In short, attribution can play a vital role in prospecting and any companyathat is Planning successful Case Study serious about acquiring new customers should investigate the technology.

Attribution can help brands to better understand the influence of their marketing, and it can solve problems that will lead to greater customer satisfaction. But for some, it may take time to organise. One business that has first hand knowledge of this is Schuh, the footwear retailer.

We spoke to a senior executive at the company to see if he had any advice for other retailers thinking of venturing down

attribution project

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the attribution path. He emphasised two factors – vision and collaboration. For attribution to work effectively, companies must have a clear goal – whether it is saving money on affiliates or PPC or increasing revenue in a particular area.

Key stakeholders must also buy into the programme from day one. If one part of a business is not able or willing to share data with another then the exercise is likely to be flawed from the start.

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5 unexpected ways attribution can boost the bottom line

5 unexpected ways attribution can boost the bottom line

About Rakuten Attribution

There’s no doubt that marketing organisations appreciate the value that attribution brings to their businesses.

There is no magic bullet to resolve these challenges, but attribution can certainly help companies to move in the right direction. With the knowledge gained from attribution, brands can get a much more detailed understanding of their customer journeys and put in place measures to optimise their marketing mix. Attribution can also help businesses to understand which touchpoints have the greatest impact on their customers. They can then allocate additional funds to these touchpoints to increase revenue.

There’s no doubt that marketing organisations appreciate the value that attribution brings to their businesses.

As this paper has shown, attribution can help organisations answer some important questions. But it is equally clear that some companies are still stuck in old attribution models. For ideological reasons, these businesses continue to

cling to last click and first click models despite evidence to the contrary. Until brands are prepared to put aside their pre-conceived notions about marketing, they are unlikely to make significant progress with attribution.

Similarly, some brands are not putting in place the ground work to ensure that their attribution solutions deliver results.

Attribution marketing can only work if it is made a priority at the highest level.

Key stakeholders must be fully committed to the process and prepared to see it through to completion.

Ultimately, attribution is about developing a new mindset towards marketing and having the courage to ask searching questions. Get these factors right and the rewards can be considerable.

Founded in 2004, Rakuten Attribution delivers cutting edge marketing performance measurement solutions for leading online retailers. We enable businesses that participate and compete in an omnichannel world to measure their business performance and to progressively move to data driven marketing and trading.

We deliver data solutions that drive excellent business decisions, to improve marketing efficiency and effectiveness. We currently work with over 1,000 websites worldwide, across all verticals, including Sky, House of Fraser and lowcostholidays.com. Rakuten Attribution is part of Rakuten Marketing.

About Rakuten Marketing Rakuten Marketing is the global leader in omnichannel marketing, delivering its vision of driving the omni experience – marketing designed for a streamlined customer experience. Offering an integrated strategy that combines consumer centric insights with e-commerce expertise, Rakuten Marketing’s omnichannel services include Rakuten Affiliate Network (formerly LinkShare), Rakuten Display and Rakuten Attribution.

Operating as a division of Rakuten Inc. (4755: TOKYO), one of the world’s leading Internet service companies, Rakuten Marketing is headquartered in New York City, with additional offices in Australia, Brazil, Japan, the United Kingdom, and throughout the United States. Follow us on Twitter or learn more at rakutenmarketing.com

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