About Cort Gorman
The Gorman laugh. Distinctive? That’s putting it mildly. Loud? That’s putting it honestly. Infectious? We’ll let you decide. (Our vote is yes.) Before joining The Richards Group in 1988, Cort spent four years at Temerlin McClain where he worked in media research. He then moved into media planning, supervising accounts like American Airlines, Armour Food Companies, Dillard’s Department Stores and Chili’s Restaurants. At The Richards Group, Cort oversaw strategic media direction for such accounts as Motel 6, Travelocity, The Catfish Institute, H-E-B, Sub-Zero, Bernhardt furniture, BVD and Sewell Automotive. Cort joined Click Here in 2005 to head up the interactive media team. Born and raised in the Midwest, Cort attended the University of Kansas and graduated with degrees in advertising and business administration (which is nothing to laugh at). In his spare time, he enjoys waterskiing, snow skiing, golfing and the lifetime pursuit of the ultimate roller coaster. Cort also likes a good joke; tell him one when you see him. Then stand back.
Contact Cort Gorman
Posts by Cort Gorman
“Multiple Attribution Protocol” (MAP) may be a mouthful, but it’s an emerging reporting methodology that will redirect the online marketing effectiveness debate and measure what’s really happening when consumers interact with online campaigns. It is also referred to as Engagement Mapping, E2C (Exposure to Conversion) and Attribution Management, among other names.
We can all agree it usually takes multiple exposures to a message to get consumers to take an action on a website … especially when that action is purchasing a product or service. Each of those exposures plays some part in getting consumers to take action.
MAP is the process of tracking, collecting and properly valuing all online advertisements that lead up to an action (e.g., conversion, lead, etc.). It potentially gives credit to all of the messaging that leads up to the action. It’s the sequence of events that is becoming important to report on, not just the last event. With MAP, we will no longer attribute credit, make payments, plan budgets or optimize against the last action reporting method.
Here’s an example of how it works. Let’s say there are four messages that lead up to action:
Using the last action reporting method, the paid search click would get the total attribution for the action (sale). Even though the consumer was exposed to three previous messages that could have influenced the action, they get no credit for it. In fact, the consumer is often already in the bottom of the purchase funnel when that last action occurs. In the MAP method, all four of these messages would get attributed a portion of the action (sale), which could give credence to messages in all parts of the purchase funnel. This could fundamentally change how you plan, buy and optimize your campaigns. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?
Well, it’s not.
The industry is struggling to come up with a sound solution – best practices, if you will – to implement MAP. There are two main reasons why:
1. There can be an infinite number of paths a consumer can take prior to taking an action, which leads to an infinite number of ways to set attribution. Each of these paths could affect how a message gets attribution. And determining these rules of attribution can get complicated fast. As a simple example, in one path to conversion, a click on a display ad followed by a click on a search ad may yield a 50 percent attribution to each. On the other hand, if another path starts with the same click on the same display ad, followed by a click on a video ad, the video ad might get 75 percent attribution since it is seen as a higher-impact unit. The lower-impact display ad gets only 25 percent this time. Imagine how mind-boggling this can get when you’re potentially dealing with hundreds of different paths in which you would have to determine attribution.
2. The volume of data can be overwhelming. It’s like taking your current last action reporting method and juicing it with steroids … laced with crack. And usually there is a cost associated with not only the additional data needed, but the cost to process the data as well. To help us meet this demanding reporting need, we’ve developed our own reporting platform that we call ART™, which stands for Automated Reporting Technology. We are engineering ART™ to have the ability to process the type and amount of data needed to implement a MAP solution.
Yes, there are companies out there that are purporting to have developed solutions. Some of them are as simple as evenly distributing attribution to all of the messages leading up to an action, i.e., Even Distribution Method. So in the example above, if there are four online messages prior to an action, each message gets 25 percent attribution of the action. That might be fine if you are running a simple campaign where all the messages were the same standard display unit. Unfortunately, most campaigns these days have multiple channels and multiple levels of messaging within each channel, so an Even Distribution Method is intuitively the wrong approach.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are companies offering a “black box” approach that weights the attribution based not only on the types of messages, but the order of the messages. This approach is very appealing, but requires you to takes a “leap of faith” since it is virtually impossible to grasp exactly how the distribution is being applied … not to mention the difficulty in explaining it to clients.
While currently there are no industry standards when it comes to MAP methodology, there are a wide range of methodologies being heralded across the country. In addition to the Even Distribution Method and the “black box” approach, some are skewing attribution to the first message, skewing attribution to the last message, or giving attribution to only the first and last two messages. Bottom line, there may not be a “one size fits all” solution once you take into consideration the type of product/service and its purchase cycle. What MAP ultimately will do is take credit away from the messages at the bottom of the funnel and help distribute attribution across all parts of the funnel.
The key to MAP is understanding the influences that each of your messages have on the action and applying a fair attribution to each. This way, some credit can be given to each of the messages seen prior to an action. By doing that, MAP will give a much better look at how each piece of our online campaign works to drive successful actions.
While MAP is certainly a more desirable reporting methodology, there remains much work to be done toward developing practical solutions. Look for greater strides toward more executable solutions in 2010.
View all 10 trends here: Ten Digital Trends for 2010… and Beyond.
No Comments | Trackback | Categories: Digital Trend Reports | Email This Post