Jim Sterne at the TagMan Booth at eMetrics New York

We recently caught up with Jim Sterne, the Founder of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit to talk about what happened at the event in New York and what’s happening in the industry overall.

Q:  What were some of the a-ha moments of eMetrics New York for you this year?

A: We are actually maturing as an industry. More and more presenters are talking about how they are integrating data from multiple data streams in order to drive business strategy instead of lamenting how they wish they could. More senior people are consuming the insights bubbling up from analysts. More analysts are reporting into Finance — a huge step forward. Analysts are moving into more executive senior roles as organizations recognize their unique grasp of the inner workings of the company and the behavior of their customers.

Q: We’re moving into a hyperdata era of real-time analytics and big data. What do you think this will mean for analytics and performance?

A: Analysts and optimization professionals will be even more necessary as even more competitive advantage is mined from hyperdata. The ability to monitor sentiment in real time, the ability to respond to sudden shifts in subject matter interest and the ability to leverage predictive analytics across large datasets will continue to put analysis and performance into the spotlight.

Q: Are you surprised by the growth in tag management in the US since TagMan first made its US appearance at eMetrics DC 2009?

A: I am not surprised by the growth in tag management. One company had a tag management offering at eMetrics in 2008 and attendees were very interested. Everybody I encountered lamented their trials and tribulations with tagging. But that firm was unsuccessful at explaining their solution.

When TagMan appeared, people were hopeful that it would deliver — and it did. Now, tag management is seen as a solution for a clear and present problem and those who are not using it are considered a step behind.

Q: Do you see this growth as a fad or a trend?

A: I see this growth as an inevitability. Why would a company not use a content management system, a web analytics tool, word processing, spell check or tag management?

Q: What are your thoughts on the future of tag management?

A: Tag management is one of those necessities that is so manifestly valuable that it will be folded into digital property development and management systems. These systems will include rudimentary tag management functionality, license third party tools or be deemed substandard.

Jim Sterne is pictured above at the TagMan booth at eMetrics New York. He’s driving the Tag Speedway, where eMetrics participants were given the opportunity to test their own speed at slot cars, test their website speed (courtesy of Catchpoint) and road test TagMan. With TagMan site speed is instantly improved, as our smart tag loading features solve the problem of slow-loading tags through conditional tag loading, parallel tag loading, synchronous tag acceleration, and tag killing.  

The digital currency of awarding credit is still on the last click that generated the sale, and this is what they use for awarding their affiliates and other CPA channels commission for the business they generate. However, they use the attribution analysis of the campaigns to work out if a CPA channel is producing a positive ROI – and therefore if they should continue to invest in it.

Non-brand SEO vs. Affiliates

I’d like to illustrate this by looking at two of the campaigns we are tracking for them: non branded SEO and the affiliate sales through a well known and respected network.

On a last-click win analysis (how commission is awarded), non-brand terms in natural search results generated 600 conversions with revenue of £18,000 and the affiliate generated 4,300 conversions with revenue of £170,000.

On the face of it, it doesn’t look like SEO non brand really does much for them, and that the affiliate is doing a far better job.

The catch comes when marketers have a hunch that due to cash-back and voucher-code sites, the affiliate is cannibalising the sales of the other campaigns – shall we call it goal-hanging – and make a decision to stop working with the affiliate on this hunch.

Applied attribution

However, if you look at the sales and revenue each campaign generated not by last click, but by an attribution model it tells a very different story and with the data you can make a much better decision.

Using a flat attribution model where the credit and revenue of each sale is split evenly between all the campaigns that show up in the path to conversion, we see that, over the same date range, the non-brand SEO attributed sales (that is the sales where non-brand natural results show in the conversion path) were 4,050 with revenue of £145,000 and the affiliate generated 1,900 attributed sales with £73,000 revenue.

This shows the marketers hunch was partly right, but the key number is the attributed revenue by both campaigns.  For ease of numbers, let’s say this client had a profit margin of 10%.  Therefore the profit on the SEO work was £14,500 while the profit of the affiliate was £7,300.

Change in budget spend

As it happened, this client didn’t spent nearly £14,500 on SEO marketing and as a result of this data now spend incredibly more and are looking forward to seeing this channel push up last click conversions to other channels.

Moreover, while the affiliate wasn’t generating as much value as reported by last click, the profit was still higher than the commission paid out – i.e. the affiliate is still a channel with positive ROI even with the cash-back and voucher-code sites, and so the client also continues to invest heavily in this area.

I purposefully haven’t provided the length of time this analysis was over as the idea can work for smaller companies just as much for larger companies.  Whether this data spans a single day or three months, it still ensures that as a marketer, you are basing decisions on data and not hunches.

There was – on travel retailer sites specifically –  an astounding amount of new keywords that were quite unique – seeking advice on airline and holiday bookings in the context of the ash cloud.

With site analytics tags plugged in through TagMan, they were able to see this new range of search terms immediately and adjust their site content, first to provide the right advice for customers and, second, improve their natural search rankings on the new keywords.

Every fresh air-traffic shutdown as the winds push the ash cloud across Europe are making these steps regularly useful.