At the dawn of the Web, tracking and data wasn’t regarded as powerful as it is today (anyone remember server log analysis, or the 30 page Webtrends reports?). Today, analysis is at the heart of a successful e-commerce strategy, although there has been a grave oversight which has only now been remedied.

As marketers run more and more advertising channels in driving users to the website, they’ve rightly relied on tracking to identify what worked and what didn’t. The problem is they have been looking at the wrong thing and basing media decisions from the wrong perspective.

The last-click model has been the demise of many marketing channels which perhaps played a valuable part in the brand discovery or product selection process of the consumer. Once the consumer has decided what they wanted to buy, they’d typically go directly to the site (via a branded search term) and convert in that visit. As the last click, that branded search term would have been credited with the sale and all the valuable media they consumed in getting to that decision was ignored and not credited. This leads to money being directed away from valuable media and fed into the direct channels and very much away from profitability.

With our clients now basing media decisions on attributed data (where the credit of the sale is shared between all campaigns in the path to conversion), very different media decisions are being made and happily they are reporting a great increase in overall performance of their activity. Check out our new Boden attribution case study to see this in action.

Why it’s taken so long for the industry to grasp this with both hands I don’t know, but now the tide has changed this is excellent for marketers for a number of reasons:It makes marketing much more fun as you can try out lots of smaller channels using attributed data to show their true value

1. It makes the Web better as publishers can be more focused on providing the excellent content to capture the user’s interest rather than keep trying to get them to click through to an advertiser and buy right away
2. It will continue the growth in the digital marketing industry as ROI get higher and higher (perhaps to the detriment of the other traditional media)
3. Oh, and it will get you a promotion and that healthy bonus as you will see far greater returns for your marketing than before!