Attribution Management DIY - Part 1 | Attribution Management solutions such as the ones offered by Atlas, Doubleclick, Clearsaleing and C3 Metrics are not for everyone. In fact, if you are 80-90% of the e-commerce operations bidding on keywords, they offer far too much for what you need and are probably too expensive (more on that later). But never fear fellow SEO/SEM expert, the editors of Last Click News have been researching the crevices of the Internet and have even had a chance to ‘look under the hood’ of all 4 of the the Attribution Management solutions and have come up with our ‘Do It Yourself’ Attribution Management system.
Just a warning and disclaimer. This is ‘Do It Yourself’ .. as in ‘DIY’. This typically means more heavy lifting .. more math (lots more) and always the risk of things not working out at all.
Part 1 involves looking at Google Analytics in a completely different perspective.
Instead of the typical ‘last click’ — first click or first exposure will provide completely different insight.
Direct from Google:
If a visitor clicks on ads from multiple campaigns before converting for a goal, which campaign gets credit for the conversion?
Google Analytics will attribute the most recent campaign information to a conversion. For example, a visitor may initially reach your site through a CPC ad and not make a purchase. Later, this visitor may return to your site via a tagged link in an email to make their purchase. In this case, Google Analytics will attribute the more recent campaign information to the resulting sale – the tagged link in the email.
This behavior can be modified by adding the following to the end of all of your tagged links:
&utm_nooverride=1
When Google Analytics detects this variable, it will retain the first campaign’s information, regardless of which links the user later followed to arrive at the conversion. In the example above, the conversion would be credited to the CPC campaign, if both links were tagged with the nooverride variable.
Of course — this is only where your problems begin.
So now your analytics are going to tell you where people originated from and not last click … and only if you tag them properly. (Remember what I said about the ‘heavy lifting’)
Depending on your industry — first click vs. last click may be more important to you. So for some of you .. that’s all you need and you are smiling.
But for most .. you want first click and last click.
And here’s where the REAL math comes in.
Sign up for another Analytics provider — there are tons of free ones (Clicky, Piwik, etc) and they all measure last click. Most important — just be certain they allow export to a CSV file.
Now you are able to track 1st click and last click.
This is DIY — never said it would be easy!
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Written by industry insiders, addressing these three issues:
1. Does the online media industry have a flaw in its reporting?
2. Is there over counting and double paying for conversions?
3. How do we properly attribute a sale with multiple media sources?
