SMX Advanced Live Blogging Post 3

Demystifying Online Attribution
Speakers, In Order of Appearance:
Richard Zwicky
Cameron Cowan
Jonathan Colman
Dennis Goedegebuure
First up is Richard (Applause)
Looking into server logs can reveal everything about your customers. It shows where they came from, where they went, what browser they used and many other things.
Now Richard talks about the ever elusive attribution over time marketing strategy. Customers see tons of advertisements on various platforms and mediums everyday and it’s a tricky procedure to watch the user from start to finish.
Proper attribution is understanding the overlaps. Understanding which mediums influenced and lead a customer to the next step will lead to more successful marketing and a better acquisition rate.
Wow, Richards presentation was really good. I found myself listening to him more than watching his slides and typing here. I’ll write a follow-up based on his presentation later this week.
Next up is Cameron (Applause)
He’s threatening the audience with more questions than we came in with. Apparently he has answers that lead to questions.
Cameron is starting us off with a definition of attribution which he takes from the audience which is, “Attribution is assigning the credit.”
Now we’re going into various methods of attribution, Last-Click Allocation, First-Click Allocation, Linear Allocation, Decaying Allocation, Reverse Decaying Allocation (Growth Allocation), U-Shaped Allocation. All of these are ways to give allocation to the various parts of the goal-funnel.
The next piece of information is attribution duration, how long do you keep the cookie alive? Some users take a long time to convert, others are instant land, instant purchase.
Really important final takeaway, the “First Step of Attribution Analysis for your
business is to see if you even need to worry about it.” If you have less than 50% of purchases from 1st click attribution than attribution analysis is really important. If it’s over 90%, it’s not as important.
Next up is Jonathan (Applause)
Ooooooo… Shiny. Jonathan has data from a paid search test that shows that natural search traffic increased with a surge increase of their PPC. Ultimately the PPC leveled back down to the old level after the surge, but the natural search leveled out to a higher than before level.
Another test they conducted was to reduce the amount of paid advertising and reducing on-page real estate advertising. Originally over 50% and they took it down to about 30-40% and saw a drop in traffic that cost them more than the save in spend.
The key take-aways:
Integrate your search marketing programs
Optimize spending for cross-prgoram efficiency
Measure results across paid and non-paid search programs
Reapply saved budget to strategic initiatives, testing
Next up is Dennis (Applause)
Dennis is the In-House SEM manager for eBay who apparently does last click attribution for it’s winning bid tracking meaning the last thing the user did before he made the winning bid is the medium that is attributed with the credit.
There’s some very interesting stuff here about how eBay variates it’s winning bid attribution based on cross-channels and cross-borders. He’s giving out various examples of how channels are credited based on the various situations that lead to a winning bid.
Now that was a fun-filled session. Next up folks is the You & A with Matt Cutts which I will not be covering live, but Barry Schwartz will so go check it out here. And that marks the end of Day 1. Hopefully I’ll have time tonight to reflect on how I did today and will do even better for you tomorrow.
Have fun!