Greetings WOW members and Web professionals everywhere. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.
Today?’s podcast is continued coverage of the Search Strategies 08 Conference that took place in San Jose, CA late last month.
In addition to personally attending a couple of keynotes sessions, I sat in on a few of the more relevant presenter oriented sessions and walked the conference halls in search of relevant topics to podcast about for Web professionals.
One of the keynotes that I found particularly interesting was the panel discussion entitled, “Marketing Attribution-Why Does Search Get Credit for Everything”? This panel promised to focus exclusively on gaining a better understanding of how, when, and where to attribute revenue gains and they delivered.
Whether you?’re managing a multi-million dollar marketing campaign for enterprise level corporations, or helping small business clients or companies get more bang for ad or e-mail marketing campaign ROI, then you owe it to yourself and to your clients to listen to the interview with Mikel Chertudi, Sr. Director, Online & Demand Marketing at Omniture, an online optimization company.
Mikel provides us with an excellent summary of the panel discussion complete with a few “walk a way?’s” that you should keep in mind.
Check out today?’s four minute podcast on WOW Technology Minute website.
A complete transcription of today’s podcast will be available in twenty-four hours.
Today’s WOW Technology Minute is sponsored by Adobe Systems and their series of MAX conferences for 2008/2009
MAX is an experience unlike any other — an opportunity to connect with thousands of designers, developers, partners, executives, and Adobe staff for education, inspiration, and community. MAX 2008/2009 will be held in San Francisco, Milan, and Tokyo. Be sure to mark your calendar for this important global event.
MAX is an experience unlike any other — an opportunity to connect with thousands of designers, developers, partners, executives, and Adobe staff for education, inspiration, and community. MAX 2008/2009 will be held in San Francisco, Milan, and Tokyo. Be sure to mark your calendar for this important global event.
Register today on the Adobe Max website!
Transcript of Marketing Attribution-Why Does Search Get Credit for Everything?
BILL CULLIFER: Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute here at Search Strategies 2008 in San Jose, CA. I have the pleasure to be interviewing and discussing and conversing with Mikel, Chertudi.
BILL: You?’re the Senior Director of Demand Generation at Omniture. Omniture is a great company, it?’s been around for a number of years. Today you were on a keynote, you?’re presenting here and I?’m curios to know if you could summarize for the subscribers of this podcast, many of whom work at the enterprise level of professional organizations a to z, many are small business and many teach these individuals, both within a community college or university setting, for those audiences could you summarize this conference or your presence here? And can you also provide a couple of walk-aways for those audiences?
MIKEL: Yes, absolutely. This morning specifically we were addressing the issue of marketing attribution. And specifically for this conference, which is heavily ladened for search marketers, we were talking about ‘why does search get credit for everything??’ or ‘why does search appear to have attribution that may be unfair?’. So what we did is we attempted to uncover the issues related to that. And what happens is when companies attribute too much or too little success to a particular channel such as search engine marketing, whether it be SEO or SEM paid search or display or print or TV, whatever it is, companies are either under investing or over investing in those specific areas because they don?’t understand their attribution models and the cookie settings about how the tracking works for those initiatives. The other thing that happens is companies often are spending dollars in the wrong areas and not understanding where they should be investing both people and dollars.
And then thirdly what happens is it creates this unhealthy tension among the marketing teams especially in the enterprise where you have people that are responsible for search, people responsible for display, people responsible for email, people responsible for TV and there?’s a bit of a contention because they?’re all saying, “Well we all took credit for all of the 400 million dollars that we generated last year,” when in essence there was a daisy chain or a hand-off point among all of them. So the key issues that we?’re addressing today is how do you best find out how to deal with these issues.
Some of the best practices that we walked away with were number one, make sure that you?’re standardizing on one tracking platform for all of your reporting analytics and make sure once you?’ve done that if you?’re integrating and ad serving and email service providers and other types of bit management or whatever the marketing applications are, that they?’re all tying into one common Web analytics foundation so that you?’re not double counting.
Secondly, make sure that you understand on a cookie basis if there are two or three chains in the sequence of a purchase, so if someone first clicks on display, then they click on an email and then they lastly click on a search keyword, come to your site, register or purchase, understand how each of those three previous — email, display, paid search — interplay with each other. Understand the cookie settings so if display was the first in the chain that if your cookie settings are set to expire after 30 days and then they click on the email at day 31 the display advertising is not going to get any credit for that. So the best practice is to measure all of those views and to set your cookies for a duration that?’s appropriate for your sell cycles.
Then I think the last piece of advice that I would give is focus on making sure you?’re tracking initiatives separately. So what?’s driving people to your site is tracked separately than what?’s converting them once they?’re on your site verses what is working when you?’re remarketing. Making sure that those three initiatives and the tracking of those three initiatives aren?’t overriding each other or erasing each other because most of the time the cost data is associated to what brought them to your site. If you override it with a non-type promotion you can never do ROI analysis.
So those are some of the general issues to be aware of.
BILL: Great summary and great walk-aways. I really appreciate that. Excellent job today in the keynote and the roundtables.
MIKEL: Thank you.
BILL: Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute here at Search Engine Strategies 2008. Mikel thank you so much for your time.
MIKEL: You?’re welcome.
BILL: Today?’s WOW Technology Minute is sponsored by the Adobe Systems Corporation and their series of MAX Conferences for 2008 and 2009. MAX is an experience unlike any other, an opportunity to connect with thousands of designer, developers, partners, executives and Adobe staff for education, inspiration and community. MAX 2008-9 will be held in San Francisco, Milan and Tokyo. Be sure to mark your calendar for this important global event and check out their great links on the Wow Technology Minute website.