Marketing Attribution

Going beyond basic last-touch, first-touch attribution or participation reporting use sophisticated attribution analysis capabilities. 

Attribute credit across all types of marketing events, offline and online and across channels be it a YouTube TrueView video ad or a TV ad, an Instagram photo or a promoted tweet, product discount coupon or a banner ad from a remarketing campaign etc.

Use new models of Marketing Attribution like Time-decay model, Position based model etc.

Integrate with DSPs (Demand Side Platforms) to make real time changes to bids and ad positons, locations etc. based on attribution data available from analytics. 

Programmatic buying the current technology where trading desk managers can buy ad spots across millions of targeted pages, apps, social media networks in the required ad format (video, page overlay display, keyword etc.) in seconds using automated bids. Guide these programmatic buys through analytics to distribute the marketing spend optimally.

Following are popular Marketing Attribution Tools:

• Adometry (now Google Attribution 360)
• Visual IQ

Signature: Roopkumar T.V.

Customer Experience Analytics

Basic conversion funnel reports, user navigation or pathing reports are now outdated and least used methods to measure customer experience. 

Analyse the customer journey across devices and across channels before they converted. Understand which digital properties (website, mobile website or mobile app) are high performers and which are laggards in terms of customer experience. Which devices (tablets, mobiles etc), platforms (iOS, Andriod, windows), networks, cities the customers are on. Set up multi-channel funnel reports to understand the online sales cycle, understand how each channel in the funnel path contributed to conversion. 

Use pages, app screens, events, goals, e-commerce events and transactions to set up and analyze custom funnels. Where do the customers enter the journey and where do they drop off or loopback to previous stage.

Test multiple versions of landing pages, different ad content, different copies of articles (content marketing), different social media posts etc. using A/B or MVT tests before releasing the most effective content copy or landing page to each segment. 

Test multiple versions of goal funnel flows, understand and implement the funnels which have the least drop offs or loopbacks and highest goal completions. 

Target multiple versions of pages, promos, content across multiple customer segments to enable personalized customer experiences. 


Signature: Roopkumar T.V.

Audience Analytics

Understand who is my audience? Collect first party data (from owned media like mobile apps, websites, kiosks etc.), second party data (from partners) and third party data (from data aggregators etc.) to build customer profiles. 
Build segments based on customer profiles available in the DMP. 

Develop marketing campaign strategy, content and content marketing strategy targeted at high priority segments. Developing this strategy involves integrating these audience segments available in the DMP with the Marketing Attribution, DSPs and Customer Experience Analytics platforms and involving multiple business stakeholders for executing the true value of the DMP.

Test multiple versions of the ad campaigns, and marketing content in real-time by integration of the DSP with audience segments available in the DMP. Testing provides a continuous improvement cycle for targeting the marketing campaigns more effectively.

Similarly test multiple versions of pages, app screens, conversion funnels, user flows etc. on your mobile apps or websites in real-time by integration of the Customer experience analytics platforms with audience segments available in the DMP. Testing provides a continuous improvement cycle for sales and other goal completions on the website or mobile app.

Signature: Roopkumar T.V.

Digital Analytics Enablement Overview

Any organization’s successful Digital Analytics execution is solely dependent on the quality of data available. With multiple platforms used for measuring and optimizing Marketing Attribution, Customer Experience improvements and Audience segments, having ready availability of quality data is the primary challenge which can enable or disable any well-articulated Digital Analytics Strategy.

Successful execution of a Digital Analytics Strategy begins with the right analytics enablement plan which involves

1. Business consulting – business analysis, interviews with key stakeholders, understand the business objectives, document business needs

2. Functional analysis of different departments which use Digital Analytics information for making business decisions and preparing a measurement strategy for each of them

3. Technical analysis of digital properties like websites, mobile apps, kiosks etc. digital channels and social media channels and developing a technical implementation plan for each of them

Tag management is the primary method used in Digital Analytics for collection of data used in Marketing Attribution for improving marketing efficiencies, driving improvements from Customer Experience Analytics and is the most important method for collecting first party data used in Audience Analytics.

A successful analytics enablement plan to drive best in class Digital Analytics strategy requires efficient systems and people for Tag Management.

Signature:

Roopkumar T.V.

Mobile App Analytics Tools

A lot of new vendors have started emerging in the mobile app analytics space

1. Google Analytics for Mobile Apps
2. MixPanel
3. Localytics
4. Appsflyer
5. Flurry

With the exception of Google Analytics, every other vendor listed above have been mobile first, focusing first on Mobile App analytics. Google Analytics has been able to quickly catch the changing trends in customer behavior and preferences, such as reduced Average Time Spent on PC websites/ web interfaces and increased Average Time Spent on mobile apps or mobile websites. 

In the largest Internet market by Revenue and RPU the US, Average Time Spent by the users browsing on mobile devices has already overtaken the Average Time they spent with PC interfaces making US a  'mobile first' market. 

Be it in US, EU, China, India, South East Asia or any other large internet market by number of Unique Active Users, Total Time Spent by users on mobile apps or mobile browsers has overtaken the Total Time Spent on PC websites / web interfaces.

Google Analytics is a 'must have' for every organization which deploys digital analytics, given it's powerful integration with Google Adwords, the leader in Digital Marketing execution and many other powerful features included in Google Analytics 360. Also, additionally MixPanel is a very useful tool which needs to be deployed in every important mobile app, given a lot of case studies of top mobile apps (like Uber, Airbnb etc.) using MixPanel.

Signature:

Roopkumar T.V.

Manage Targets feature in Adobe Reports and Analytics

In Digital Marketing and E-Commerce, we always compare the actual performance of various KPIs against the benchmark performance on a daily basis, and even hourly/real-time basis, during peak sales seasons like holiday shopping. Generally the actuals are measured using a Digital Analytics application, imported into Excel or Tableau where it is compared against the benchmarks. Benchmarks are typically the forecasted plan numbers based on the historicals, industry and economic performance trends.

Now Adobe Reports and Analytics, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud (@AdobeMktgCloud) provides a new feature Manage Targets using which, benchmarks for virtually any KPI (Traffic, Order Volume, Order Dollars, even custom metrics like Product Views, Checkouts etc.) can be uploaded into Adobe Marketing Cloud. Benchmarks can be uploaded for daily, weekly or any selected frequency including hourly.  Navigating through the reports menu in the Adobe Reports and Analytics application, the report users can view and compare the actual performance of various KPIs with the benchmark performance within a single view on near real time basis (maximum 1 hour lag). This allows the business users including Analysts, Marketing Managers, Product Managers, etc. to spend less time benchmarking the performance, and instead use their valuable time more productively in taking timely actionable decisions.

Navigation to the Manage Targets menu in Adobe Reports and Analytics, is through Reports and Analytics>Targets>Manage Targets

We can set targets for measuring the performance of actuals versus the planned benchmarks, for not only the basic digital KPIs like Visits/Traffic but also for more advanced KPIs like Order Volume, Revenue, Cart Additions etc. Also the actual performance versus planned benchmarks can thus be viewed and measured within a single view in Adobe Reports and Analytics, using Manage Targets feature. 

Segment Manager in Adobe Marketing Cloud

Adobe Marketing Cloud provides excellent segmentation capabilities with its Segments feature. Once a Segment is created it can be used/reused across each of following products, all part of Adobe’s Marketing Cloud

• Reports & Analytics (formerly Omniture SiteCatalyst )
• Ad-Hoc Analysis (formerly Omniture Discover )
• Datawarehouse (formerly Omniture Datawarehouse )

In this post, I will focus on the Segment Manager feature of Adobe Marketing Cloud. With Segment Manager we can create on-the-fly, advanced segments out of the data stored in Adobe Marketing Cloud. Types of data available in Adobe Marketing Cloud include

• Digital clickstream data collected from websites, mobile and tablet apps and marketing campaigns using JavaScript tags.
• Structured meta-data for Campaigns, Products, Customers, Offers, Pages or any dimension uploaded into Marketing Cloud using SAINT Classifications.
• Structured offline data uploaded into Marketing Cloud using Data Sources.   

Within Adobe Marketing Cloud, the Segment Manager can be assessed  under

Analytics>Reports & Analytics>Favorites>Segment Manager (use the left nav to navigate to Segment Manager)

Once inside the Segment Manager, we can reach the required segment in multiple ways

1. By doing a search  , provided we know the full or partially identifiable name of the segment

2. Click on Show Filters and do either of below

a. Select a tag (for example: all the segments I had created were tagged as Roop_Shared – There were in total 104 segments added to this tag)

b. Select a Owner (for example: all the segments I had created earlier appear under my user name Roopkumar_Tundalam – There were in total 450 segments under this user name)

Once you have reached and selected the desired segment, through any of the means explained above, you can perform a variety of operations on the selected segment. I will discuss about 2 important operations below

1. Share – you can share your segments with other users in your organization who also have access to Adobe Marketing Cloud. Easiest option is to click on All, which will share the segment with every Marketing Cloud user in your organization.

2. Approve – If you are an admin user of Adobe Marketing Cloud, only then this operation will be available. Using Approve, you can review segments created by new or junior users within your organization and approve the segment for larger usage if it’s setup properly. 

In the next blog posts, I will discuss the more important topics on Segments with Adobe Marketing Cloud such as

1. How to create or configure a segment in Adobe Marketing Cloud
2. Discuss a few scenarios in Digital Marketing, where segments in Adobe Marketing Cloud will be highly useful for analytics and optimization.