We know that attribution is everything. After all, if you’re not measuring the performance of your campaigns, how are you supposed to prove your value as a marketer?
Yet attribution is one of the greatest challenges facing marketers today. According to a survey of members of the Retail Ascendant, no more than 50% of retail marketers agree to a specific way to measure the connection between media spend and results. Clearly, this is a major disconnect.
We understand the attribution struggle and are here to help. We know that there are many different metrics available to measure your cross-channel campaigns, and selecting the best ones — not to mention trying to compare them across disparate platforms — can be a nightmare. In addition to that, there’s the constant need to prove that your campaigns are driving ROI. So, we’ve put together some basic tips to remedy your attribution woes, so that you can develop a winning measurement strategy.
1. Only use high-quality data.
Let’s start with the basics. When it comes to attribution, the quality of the data you use will determine how effective your measurement is. After all, if you’re not using high-quality data, you won’t gain meaningful insights that are accurately representing your consumers’ behavior — and you don’t want to base your investment decisions on inaccurate insights.
When it comes to location data in particular, you want your data to be accurate at scale, in order for it to be representative of the population. Secondly, it’s important that you be able to understand how long consumers are spending at your brand’s locations, a concept known as “dwell time,” so that you can parse real visits from fake ones. Finally, it’s critical to consider the data collection methodology. All location data needs to be 100% first-party and adhere to a framework that protects consumer privacy.
2. Leverage a universal metric for campaign measurement.
Once you’ve ensured your data fits these criteria, it’s helpful to select a metric that you can use universally in your campaign measurement efforts. After all, if you’re measuring your TV, social, and digital buys with different metrics, it can be hard to compare performance across channels, right?
Location data is the common denominator you can use to measure the efficacy of all these campaigns. With location data, you can see how effective your campaigns are in driving real-world conversions — i.e. visits to store. What’s more, you can even see how effective your campaigns are in driving incremental visits. Incrementality is key to understanding not only if your campaigns were effective in driving people to store, but also how effective they were.
3. Allocate your budget based on cross-channel performance.
Now that you have a universal metric to measure your cross-channel campaigns, you can compare their efficacy in driving visits. This enables you to see how you should reallocate your budget in order to optimize your media mix as a whole. For example, if you see that your TV campaign is driving more visits than your social campaign, you can reallocate some of those social dollars to TV to maximize your ROI.
In addition, you can see the impact that each of your channels has on one another, through cross-channel incremental lift. By allocating proportional credit to each marketing touchpoint across all channels, cross-channel incremental lift allows you to understand how each channel affects the other and overall performance leading up to a store visit. Based on this, you can reapportion your budget to the channels that are resonating the most with your brand’s consumers.
4. Optimize your campaign performance with real-time metrics.
In addition to optimizing your campaigns as a whole, you can also optimize them individually with location data. Using offline measurement, you can optimize your campaigns in real time based on store visits. Real-time metrics enable you to see which ad impressions influenced the best audience segments for in-store visits, so that you can shift your audience targeting to reach segments that have a higher chance of conversion throughout the campaign.
This means you won’t need to waste any impressions — and you’ll be driving the maximum value for each. Ultimately, optimizing your campaigns based on how well they’re driving store visits will allow you to be more effective in your audience targeting, increasing your visits and decreasing your media costs.
Interested in learning more about offline measurement? Check out Cuebiq’s cross-channel measurement capabilities.
