Who Sold It?: Understanding How Marketing Channels Influence Sales

Copyright © 2017 Brian F. Pasch, PCG Companies, Inc.

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First Edition Printing: October 2017 – Rev P2

ISBN: 9781543916171

Foreword

As the Ecommerce Director for one of the top 50 dealership groups in the United States, the Jeff Wyler Automotive Family, I am constantly working to put together an optimal digital marketing strategy that will lift our bottom line. Managing a multi-million-dollar budget in this fast-moving market is both challenging and demanding.

I can assure you that in these efforts, defining Who Sold It is at the forefront of my decisions, and a key concern for my counterparts across all industries. The internet has redefined how we market to our consumers today. I, like most others, was quite excited with the opportunities that modern day digital marketing solutions could offer.

Think about it, we could now target our consumers better than ever before, placing our message in front of in-market shoppers. Even better, the digital age promised a new era in marketing where we could simply and directly measure our efforts.

New key performance indicators such as clicks, time on site, bounce rate, and more become common terms in our everyday decision making. Answering Who Sold It? would now become a numerical exercise, rather than an educated guess. Or would it?

My entry into ecommerce began in the early days of eBay, where I quickly became a PowerSeller, and more significantly, I was one of the early pioneers using eBay Motors. I was just one of the cowboys in the early internet frontier, when there were no instruction books or best practice guidelines.

Most of what we learned with ecommerce was by trial and error, and by exchanging ideas with others in the internet space, often via online forums and blogs.

If you recall Cash for Clunkers, I worked hard to get one of the first websites up in my market to capitalize on this new program. I quickly learned that someone had beat me in that effort, but on a national level – Brian Pasch. I reached out to Brian to pick his brain, and found him to be incredibly smart, highly motivated, and very innovative.

I left out one important characteristic – Brian was not only committed to pioneering best practices in ecommerce, he was also focused on giving back to our community and sharing his ideas. He could be found contributing to our early online forums, and was one of the first speakers on the national circuit for ecommerce topics. The one thing that made him different: he was willing to show you how to become better. No tricks, no gimmicks, just great hands-on information that would help you.

Across the last decade, I have exchanged ideas with Brian and have watched as our entire industry has become better because of his efforts. Each one of us learned the importance of using Google Analytics every day, along with an arsenal of other tools, including solutions such as display advertising, remarketing, YouTube Trueview, Facebook, and many more. While the ecommerce market was growing, and becoming better, the answer to who sold it did not become clearer, but rather more clouded.

Why? Have you taken a close look at the shopping path of your consumer? Google has run multiple studies on the typical shopping path of the car shopper, and it shows an average of approximately 23 sites visited. Yet the most common report that automotive Ecommerce Directors run is the traditional Return on Investment report which relies on the last click source that is captured with our CRM tools.

The reality is that auto shoppers visit multiple sites before they purchase a vehicle. A great digital marketing strategy should include having the tools and skills that allow you to see the assists that are provided by marketing solutions in place before the last click provider. Brian has been at the forefront of how to identify those assists and how to best answer Who Sold It.

Brian and I both speak at the national level, and I don’t find it coincidental that we are finding many of the same problems - and solutions - in modern day ecommerce today, to include how to define the assists in the ecommerce shopping process. I have great news for you! Brian possesses the rare trait of knowing how to take a complex idea and break it down into a simple-to-understand solution that you can benefit from. This book is a great example of Brian’s talents.

Who Sold It provides all the information you need to arrive at the leading edge of ecommerce today. The step-by-step instructions, combined with diagrams and screenshots allow you to apply these winning solutions as you read along.

I encourage you to read this book with your computer in front of you. Take the time to visit the respective sites and work alongside the instructions that Brian provides. You will not be disappointed. When you apply the lessons from this book, you will be able to refine and redefine your current marketing strategy to get the most return for your advertising dollar.

Perhaps this foreword can be considered an assist when you calculate your return on investment with this book purchase…

Do you strive to have the best digital marketing strategy in your industry? My advice is simple. Stay humble. This market is moving so fast that one can quickly become overwhelmed. Keep an open mind and never slow down in your efforts to communicate with leading experts in the industry who are working hard to stay one step ahead of our market. Brian Pasch is one of those agents of positive change in our industry. Follow him, learn from him, you will not be disappointed. I hope you enjoy this book as much as I have.

Kevin Frye

Ecommerce Director

Jeff Wyler Automotive Family

kevin.frye@jeffwyler.com

Acknowledgements

I set out to finalize this book for publication in the fall of 2017 after months of planning, reading, and collaboration with industry leaders. My reasoning behind creating another book was quite simple. I am constantly asked by business owners for insights on how to measure the effectiveness of their marketing investments. In other words, Who Sold It?

This book is designed to help business executives and managers of all industries. I want to thank all the people from the agency and vendor community who provided case studies and research to make this book more complete.

I want to thank my good friend and colleague Thomas Gage for his assistance with some of the more complex discussions of this book. Thomas has been involved in online attribution in the auto industry for many years. His ability to simplify some of the more complicated concepts on sales attribution is greatly appreciated.

I also want to thank my editorial team, led by Paul Schnell. Paul has a wonderful way with words and he surely has refined the hard edges of my writing style. Frances Gregory Pasch and Beth Braswell are excellent editors as well and I appreciate their commentary which ensures that my readers don’t get lost in too many acronyms or assumptions of existing marketing content. Thank you, Marielle Lorentz, for your excellent cover design and work to unify the graphics in this book.

There are dozens of business leaders who have contributed their commentary to this book and, for each person involved, I am truly grateful. I want to thank everyone who read early manuscripts and sent their commentary along to create a better story for business leaders. I also thank my wife, Carrie Hemphill Pasch, for her support of the project and for making the Florentine writing office work so perfectly.

In the end, I hope that business owners from all industries will realize the importance of multi-touch attribution, implement better data hygiene practices, standardize engagement and conversion metrics, and kill off last-click attribution reporting as a tool for making marketing decisions.

Table of Contents

Part One - Introduction

Vocabulary & Concepts

Five Challenges to Consider

A Sea of Change

Ignoring A Strategic Asset

The Crooked Yardstick

Self-Inflicted Wounds

Reliance on Email Attribution

Was Digital Marketing ROAS Oversold?

Transactional Dependencies

The Amazon Effect

Align Marketing Channels to Business Goals

Mobile Channel Activity Tracking

Measuring Marketing Influence

Death by Last-Click Attribution

The Digital Blind Spot

Creating A Strong Foundation

Benefits of a Strong Foundation

Establishing a Trusted Relationship

Click Fraud

Measuring Traditional Media

Addressable TV Advertising

Limitation of Set-Top Boxes

Overlaying Traditional Media in Google Analytics

Endemic Advertising Partners

Calculating Relative Influence

Forcing Product Views

The Lack of Referral Traffic

Owned and Earned Media

Owned Media

Earned Media

Using Media Mix to Determine NBI

Tracking Consumer Interactions (Almost) Everywhere

Limitations of Cookies

Google’s SSO

Google Privacy Concerns

Google Ads Data Hub

Facebook’s SSO

Facebook Privacy Concerns

Microsoft and LinkedIn SSO

Location-Based Attribution

Location-Based Campaign Measurement

Location-Based Attribution in Practice

Case Study: Virgin Active

Case Study: Measuring lift in retail foot traffic

Attribution Models

Where Do I Invest My Next Dollar?

Attribution: Probabilistic vs Deterministic Models

Deterministic Models

Probabilistic Models

Planning an Attribution Study

Feedback Loop is Needed

Example: Attribution in Automotive

Deterministic Strategies in Automotive

Case Study: Agency creates lift for Automotive Client

Should I Start an Attribution Project?

Breaking Down Data Silos

Management Summary

Part Two – Practitioners’ Guide

What Google Analytics Can’t Do for You

How Do You Find Out if a KPI is Good?

Search Results Page and Product Page Views

Google Analytics Configuration Checklist

Do-It-Yourself Attribution Checklist

Google Attribution Reporting

Moving from Conversions to Outcomes

Multi-Touch Attribution in Google Analytics

Inspecting Visitor Channels

Using Engagement to Inspect Ad Campaigns

Method #1 – Google Segment Analysis

Method #2 – GTM and Event Tracking

Event Tracking with Facebook

Google’s Customer Match

Engaging an Attribution Partner

Vendors

Adobe Marketing Cloud

CDK Global

Clarivoy

Epsilon / Conversant

Datalicious / Equifax

Experian Automotive

Forensiq

Google Analytics 360

Near

Oracle Data Cloud

Orbee

Placed

RXA

Signal.io

Thinknear

Transparency.ai Attribution Platform

Visual IQ

Troubleshooting

Conversion Tracking

Engagement Tracking

Tag Manager Container Conflicts and Speed Issues

Low Match Rates

Conflicting Analytics Data

Campaign Strategies

Calculate the Value of Loyal Customers

Reviews and Loyalty

Finding the Limits of Local Advertising

Final Thoughts

References

Part One - Introduction

Key trends in marketing are: more choices in advertising channels, greater data complexity, larger volumes of data, and significant innovation in measuring marketing performance.  These growing opportunities give the business owner and marketers more choice than ever, but at a cost. 

While writing Unfair Advantage in 2012, I felt that we were reaching a tipping point in marketing but it was still unclear to me what direction the industry was heading with the proliferation of new advertising technologies. I did realize, however, that there was a sea of change happening and that there was also an increasing gap between those that could take advantage of the new paradigm, and those that could not.

Marketing analytics and measurement of advertising performance has fundamentally changed. Many business executives have revolted and demanded that advertisers demonstrate how their solutions contribute to sales and service transactions.

Who Sold it? is dedicated to helping the business owner run a more profitable, resilient business by sharpening their return on advertising spend (ROAS) which translates to improving the bottom line.

Part One of the book will help the business owner understand the new landscape of return on ad spend.  Part Two of the book is dedicated to the marketing practitioner.  Regardless of need, my aim is to answer fundamental questions about your advertising spend and give you the new tool kit to future-proof your marketing investments.

As business owners review their marketing budgets, they will, at some point, question which combination of specific marketing investments influence their companies’ target audience to increase sales. Sales attribution projects have the potential to create media efficiencies and conversion gains. Progressive business leaders want to know their Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): the amount of revenue a company receives for every dollar spent on an advertising channel.

In larger companies, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) or Marketing Manager will normally field these questions and will be required to present attribution reports which show the influence of each marketing channel on sales. In smaller companies, the business owner will often wear multiple hats including Marketing Manager, Creative Director, Video Producer, or Website Administrator, and have no training on how to determine sales influence or attribution.

Large and small companies are equally challenged in their ability to measure the ROAS of their marketing investments to increase sales. Readers will likely be able to list cases where marketing investments failed and others that the business thought worked, but business leaders are not sure.

I have some great news. In this book, I will review strategies, technologies, and metrics that will help business owners of all sizes to better identify the marketing investments which are helping their company reach their business goals.

There are many reasons why this book will be beneficial for business owners and marketing managers, regardless of the nature of their business. Every organization has sales objectives and marketing goals, which could include:

You want to sell X products this month and can’t continue to invest Y advertising dollars per unit sold.

You want to know which channel, media, and message is most efficient at helping you sell your products.

You need better reporting KPIs to spot changes in consumer response rates.

You want to increase customer loyalty and lifetime revenue through more targeted customer outreach.

You need a trusted third-party to validate the data from your marketing agency reports.

To reach these objectives, business managers will need to embrace change. There are new metrics and methods to determine which marketing channels are supporting the goals of the business. Here is a sneak peek of one of the changes managers will need to embrace:

Metrics such as Cost per Click (CPC), Impression Share, Bounce Rate, and Time on Site (TOS) should not be included in the list of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

One of my most admired industry friends, James Grace who leads analytic products at Cox Automotive, offers this simple advice to clients: 

If you are just starting to optimize your digital marketing, first focus on getting quality traffic over quantity traffic.  Many of us are so focused on visitor counts, however, this metric is not important at all; instead, focus on how many quality visitors are interacting with the site.  If the marketing manager is already there, then focus on understanding and optimizing what assists with generating quality traffic.  Advancing further, establish attribution values for each of those assists so that each channel / solution can be weighted and scored. 

I’d add to that sentiment by also saying that before embarking on this journey, that making sure content, merchandising, data quality are all in order.  I will cover these topics later in the book.    It all begins though with Strategy. 

To create a more effective advertising strategy you must:

Document all advertising investments, agency partners, and the methods by which campaign data and results are presented.

Confirm that you are collecting and have access to your marketing data for proper analysis with analytic tools and sales attribution consultants.

Measure the right things: you may be looking at report KPIs that are not actionable.

Differentiate KPIs based on the type of marketing campaign. For example, differentiate performance metrics on brand awareness vs ready-to-buy campaigns.

Continually test and optimize marketing campaigns based on actionable KPIs.

Pick the right set of tools to facilitate the analysis and insights generated from your marketing data.

Make sure your messaging, customer experience, and merchandising are not getting in the way of your success.

This book will show you how to build a strong foundation for marketing campaign measurement and sales attribution models. This information will build the required confidence to create a practical set of metrics to determine your ROAS.

What’s in It for Me (WIIFM)

In thinking through this topic, my colleague Evan LaPointe described several key reasons people care about attribution. These reasons fall into two main categories: business-oriented motivators and self-oriented motivators.

In a perfect world, these are aligned. It’s necessary to acknowledge that, at times, people take actions that are self-motivated, perhaps overriding the motivation their employer would rather see.

Business-Oriented Motivators:

Elimination of waste

Efficient investment in marketing channels

Accountability

Accurate depiction of ROI for discrete channels and efforts

Self-Oriented Motivators: Justification - There are people, agencies, and marketing channels with a vested interest in being able to take more credit or demonstrate greater ROI than they do today.

With the right processes and technology in place, followed by proper analysis, business leaders can generate significant insights and benefits to their business which include identifying:

Active marketing channels that are providing little value to achieving the sales objectives of the business. This will allow the business to direct funds to more effective channels.

Active marketing channels that were thought to be of little value which play a large role in generating conversions or sales. There will likely be marketing channels which provide more assisted conversions than the business had previously known.

BOT traffic that could be stealing as much as 20% of online advertising dollars48.

Waste in advertising campaigns generated by poor campaign structures, slow website technology, improper targeting, and incomplete conversion tracking.

The online pain points in a current sales process that create friction with consumers, reduce conversions, and negatively impact ROAS.

The proper media mix and the levers that can be pulled to achieve the sales objectives for the business. Proper modeling can help business owners identify their Next Best Investment (NBI).

This book will also cover effective (measurable) strategies to connect more often with prospects and customers, and describe how to include advertising engagement data in an attribution model. This will include:

Moving beyond measuring visitors to people-based marketing.  Understanding how to create a persistent ID for your customers to create a personalized shopping experience.

Engaging consumers across all the devices that they own, not just the one