Web Analytics video

Revenue Attribution: Don't Pay Too Much to Your Advertisers - John Marshall (5:09) Dr. Ralph F. Wilson , Web Marketing Today - Mar 15, 2011

In this video interview, web analytics expert John Marshall explains the problem and possibile solutions of attributing an online sale to multiple ads a customer may have clicked on while they shop -- paid search, e-mail marketing, display ads, and an affiliate program -- wrongly counting the sale to only one channel.

The problem, says Marshall, is that each marketing channel claims credit for the sale, when all contributed to it.

First, he says, determine whether you have the problem of multiple attribution. Businesses with shorter sales cycles may not experience this, but with a high value product, it's likely that people will click on multiple ads during their shopping process.

Next, if you do have the problem, try to estimate the degree of overlap by "gut feel," depending on the marketing mix of your advertising program.

The simplist thing to do is to move all your analytics into a single system. For example, don't use your e-mail analytics to determine campaign ROI, bring it into Google Analytics to make that determination.

However, affiliate program analytics tend to be tied to the program you're using and are much harder to integrate into Google Analytics. A few systems, however, are now offering "de-duplication" across multiple sales channels, but these tend to be expensive at present.

Though the answers may not be fully available at present for revenue attribution, at least knowing that you have a problem is the first step in solving it.

John Marshall is one of the founders of MarketMotive.com, which teaches you to do online marketing in a structured online course environment, with a test and certificate of completion at the end. This interview was recorded in August 2010 at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference in San Francisco.