Trying to maximize every marketing dollar spent? Then, knowing what’s truly driving customers to purchase from you is critical to success.
Metrics like number of visits and purchases, total revenue, and return on ad spend (ROAS)—the stuff of yesteryear’s conventional wisdom—give you a small piece of the puzzle. But they don’t provide the rich customer behavioral data that enables you to prioritize the right channels and drive long-term growth.
Let’s discuss methodologies for assessing the success of your marketing channels and campaigns—and explore how ecommerce-specific marketing attribution software can help you best focus your marketing resources.
The status quo on assessing marketing channels and campaigns
For many companies, revenue and return on ad spend (ROAS) remain the go-to metrics for evaluating marketing performance. After all, comparing your revenue with your investment in a given marketing channel seems like a no-brainer. However, these metrics don’t work for email or organic channels like search and social media, where there are no direct marketing costs.
This creates a significant gap in understanding the true value these channels provide, and whether investing more time and energy into channels like email or social media is justified. Complicating these challenges is the fact that user journeys to purchase tend to involve multiple interactions with a variety of channels—over what could be many months.
Relying on data provided by paid platforms like Google and Facebook Ads can be risky and costly. For one thing, that data may be biased towards their ad platform, with the platform itself taking full credit for a purchase that involved other interactions. Additionally, ad platforms use different “lookback windows” when analyzing a user’s interactions on your site over a period of time—which means that data from individual ad platforms can’t be compared.
Rising above the status quo involves recognizing the value of data that goes beyond revenue and ROAS, uncovering the trusted data that measures what you need to know over the same comparative periods, and being able to implement this data to drive marketing strategies.
There is no prescription or template to follow for ecommerce marketing success
One marketing channel may drive growth for a specific company in a specific industry. Yet, another company may invest in that same channel and fall flat. Further, new channels, technologies, and trends routinely pop up that merit some consideration for testing in your evolving ecosystem of marketing channels.
In the midst of all these different factors, the ability to assess those channels, technologies, and trends to determine whether they’re driving anticipated growth is a difference-maker. And assessing those properly takes more than surface-level metrics (like revenue and conversion rates). Instead, it requires adopting a more holistic approach, measuring the past and the future value each ad channel and campaign bring.
What’s it look like to properly assess the channels, etc, that are working? Here are a few examples.
Rather than looking at whether a channel led to a conversion, for example, it’s crucial that your marketing attribution software analyzes the customer journey and evaluates the behavior of your customers as they move to purchase. This allows you to track and understand interactions across various marketing channels—from each journey’s initial entry to final conversion. And importantly, the ability of each channel to drive future revenue.
It’s also essential that you assess the role marketing channels are playing in first versus subsequent purchases. With customer acquisition costs (CAC) rising, repeat customers are more important than ever. In fact, repeat customers are critical to short- and long-term success, as they tend to spend more and function as effective brand ambassadors by providing word-of-mouth advertising.
Measuring the value of a given marketing channel therefore requires that you identify how many subsequent purchases it’s driving—and then focus your efforts on driving even more while deprioritizing channels that aren’t pulling their weight.
The right marketing attribution software helps you decide where to prioritize energy and spend
Accessing the right data to make informed, strategic decisions requires the right tools and partners.
Services like Google Analytics may be free, but their data is limited, especially for ecommerce sites that require data that provides deeper insights into their customers, their purchase behavior, and their loyalty over time. They also tend to be more visitor-centric (versus customer-oriented), don’t provide visibility on named customers, and have shorter lookback windows that penalize companies with longer sales cycles.
Free services may also be highly inaccurate. To maintain accuracy, Dimensions uses proprietary technology to provide a reliable connection to a store’s orders. This ensures consistency with the revenue Dimensions Attribution captures—unlike Analytics, where we’ve seen significant discrepancies in the order of 10%.
In fact, Dimensions is designed to provide ecommerce brands with precisely the attribution data they need—critical information that allows them to truly measure the success of their marketing channels and make informed decisions on where to focus precious future marketing resources.
The following features provide the data that ecommerce companies require for an edge in developing difference-making strategic marketing decisions:
- Machine learning-generated revenue forecasts and marketing recommendations
- Site-specific weighting (credit for a conversion) for each marketing channel and campaign in use
- Probability of purchase analysis for visitors from each channel/campaign
- Individual customer journeys leading to initial and subsequent purchases
- Multiple attribution models and the ability to compare selected models
Dimensions marketing attribution software delivers all of these features, empowering ecommerce brands to gain tremendous insight and more strategically allocate their marketing budget to drive sustained growth.
If you’re ready to begin measuring the success of your marketing campaigns and harnessing predictive capabilities that can drive growth, contact us today to request a demo.
