Attribution: Do you give the last touchpoint all of the credit for a sale?

[Billy B]

LOVE this discussion!

Such a big part of the conversations I have with dealers all the time..

And NOOOO you should definitely not be giving all credit to the last touchpoint or click. We all know the customer journey is far more complex than that, and your marketing efforts deserve more individual credit than that.

SO, one way to get around this is to measure each channel individually in terms of how dollars spent within each stack up to the gross you made from each deal.

• Clean sales data from the dealership (everything starts here)
• Utilizing offline conversion measurements in Google (if you're running Adwords)
• Utilizing offline conversion measurements in Facebook

Google can be a biiiit iffy in terms of match rates with sales data, while Facebook has been far more consistent for us.

Another big challenge in this space is that the larger media companies/agencies just aren't able to do what's required to properly attribute sales to ad efforts. This is because most of them have hundreds/thousands of clients. Impossible for them to do, since alot of the work needed is fairly manual and requires human eyes to interpret.

So, I've always encouraged dealers to do it themselves, train staff, or hire a smaller team. The big boys are still quite focused on "here's how many clicks/leads you got, thanks!"

For anyone interested, my post here talks through offline attribution for Facebook:

GUIDE: Facebook Campaigns That Crush | Attribution, Funnel + ROI Insights, What's Working!

Intro Hey guys! Haven't jumped on the forums in a LONG time but I'm hoping it's ok if I revive this account :D I'm Billy Bambao, car guy, dad, founder of a marketing studio out of Toronto, Canada that does a lot of work with some of the country's top auto dealers. I feel we've really cracked...

forum.dealerrefresh.com

Cheers

 

[Alexander Lau]

You'll be forced to go back to last-click, because Google is killing 3rd party cookies via the most popular browser in the world.

Google, You Finally Really Did It

Google, You Finally Really Did It | AdExchanger

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Ari Paparo, CEO at Beeswax. "You finally really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up!" – Charlton Heston, “Planet of the Apes” Personally...

www.adexchanger.com

Techniques change
Let's start with the deadpool:

• View-through attribution: dead.
• Third-party data: dead.
• DMPs: dead.
• Multitouch attribution: dead.

The removal of view-through attribution in particular is likely to cause the biggest change to media buying habits as it is a mainstay of most digital display measurement. It is hard for me to say this, but it seems like we will be moving back to last-click as the gold standard for attribution (sorry, I vomited on my keyboard). Although, it is worth noting that virtually all in-app attribution is last-click, and they are sustaining a multibillion-dollar ecosystem.

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P.S. this makes @jon.berna even smarter for not jumping down the "attribution" rabbit hole and he called this long ago. Duh... bye, bye MTA companies in auto and anywhere else.

 

[jon.berna]

Cough Cough:

 

[BillKVMotorCo]

The best way to handle this is to just email all the third party companies, listing sites and automotive news sites and ask them to put your tracking snippet on their website so that you can see everywhere a customer went and then run metrics against it to see which sources most often lead to a sale.

I can't tell if this is a real thing you can ask for or if you are being snarky.

 

[BillKVMotorCo]

The best way to handle this is to just email all the third party companies, listing sites and automotive news sites and ask them to put your tracking snippet on their website so that you can see everywhere a customer went and then run metrics against it to see which sources most often lead to a sale.

NVM. Saw the later reply.