“The Click”
With click-through rates (CTRs) clocking in at a fraction of 1% at best, we know that they are not the best metrics to measure the success of campaigns. Otherwise, we would accept the fallacy that 99 percent or more of our marketing dollars have no effect on consumers and are wasted spend. But the CTR is like the “easy button” – it’s easy to track, easy to report. I worked at DoubleClick in the early days of online advertising, so I take some credit for promoting this metric as the end all/be all. That was fifteen years ago, and today we’re smarter marketers with smarter technologies that allow us to better measure the efficacy of our advertising.
The idea that the last click should somehow get all of the glory would imply that the first four exposures in a campaign with an average frequency of five had no impact, or that 80 percent of our impressions and 80 percent of our spend was worthless. Logically, we know this isn’t the case, but the “easy button” reporting systems often facilitate our dependence on this metric.
Attribution companies offer marketers the ability to view the impact of all campaign exposures on a consumer and on that consumer’s behavior with regard to the brand. This insight is critical to gain a comprehensive and transparent view of marketing performance. The ingestion of this data into a platform like MediaMath’s TerminalOne allows our decisioning algorithms to consider additional attributes when determining whether to bid on an impression and the value of that impression to a marketer.
Moving beyond the click to a more fractional attribution approach not only allows marketers to understand the media scenarios that yield the best results, but – supported by a technology platform – to activate against that data.
Full-funnel approach
Remarketing is a retailer’s best friend. It delivers measurable sales lift at a high ROI. And why wouldn’t it be effective? Remarketing simply reminds folks of what they already know: they want to buy that sweater (or TV, or toy, etc.) they’ve been considering on your site. It’s a tremendously successful tactic to get consumers over the finish line and secure the sale. For retailers, that results in higher site conversion rates, more orders, and higher revenue. Awesome!
What marketers often lose sight of, though, is that they need to employ upper funnel digital marketing tactics to drive awareness and consideration of their brand to attract more website visitors. (This is with the understanding that the vast majority won’t click on that ad to get to the web site, although they may visit later. You’re staying top of mind!)
The idea of keeping the funnel “full” is critical when you realize that a remarketing pool is only composed of the shoppers that have actually landed on your site. That’s a limited number of visitors! Digital media offers a unique opportunity to get your message and brand in front of a whole lot of eyeballs in a cost effective way, adding more shoppers to the top of the funnel and keeping the remarketing pool full of new customers rather than simply delivering your message to the same folks over and over again.
Going Beyond the Last Click
Employing prospecting tactics that leverage digital media will build awareness and consideration – and ultimately grow your remarketing pool. Building your remarketing pool is a crazy-successful way to increase conversions. But what happens if you do this, and then use last-click attribution as your performance measurement strategy? Your campaigns will be just as successful, but you’ll be giving ALL of the credit to the remarketing tactic. That could result in a reduced budget for prospecting because it’s not “performing”.
The best way to prevent this from happening is to identify goals per tactic. Prospecting will never perform like remarketing; it’s not supposed to. The goal of prospecting is to bring new (incremental) consumers to your site, adding them to the pool. Then the remarketing campaigns can do the heavy lifting, reminding shoppers that they’ve been considering a purchase and still need to pull the trigger.
Learn more about MediaMath’s Retail capability.