Each “touchpoint” associated with each individual has numerous attributes or characteristics associated with it. For example, each search impression or click has attributes such as keyword, engine, placement/ranking, ad creative, offer, landing page, day-part, and more. Each display ad impression or click has a different set of characteristics associated with it and the same is true for each channel.

When all the data from all these touchpoints across all your channels has been assembled, not only is it possible, via the attribution management process, to assign the appropriate amount of credit to each touchpoint (and each marketing effort), but a value-added process called touchpoint analysis can also take place.  This can be a treasure trove for search marketers.

What Can Touchpoints Tell Us?

By looking at the group of touchpoints associated with an individual’s “touchpoint stack,” and in turn all of the touchpoint stacks of all the individuals exposed to your marketing efforts who have and have not converted, a number of findings emerge.

In particular, a picture of your various conversion funnels (for each of your products, product lines, products types, etc.) will come into focus.

• You’ll be able to see the relationship between organic and paid search – and, for that matter, direct navigation – and the extent to which each plays a role at each stage in the engagement/sales funnel.
• You’ll learn where in the funnel both branded and non-branded keywords play a role.
• You’ll identify the specific keywords that are particularly effective at generating top-of-funnel activity (“openers”), the keywords that appear at the middle of the funnel (“advancers”), and which perform best at the bottom of your funnel (“closers”). Again, these findings may vary widely for each product or service you sell, so there may be many different funnels you will uncover with these insights.
• You’ll also be able to identify the sequence of touchpoint attributes that generate the best performance toward your marketing goals, as well as any “typical paths” through the conversion funnel.

For example, do people start with a specific non-branded keyword in paid search at top-of-funnel, move to a specific branded organic keyword mid-funnel, and direct navigate to your site at bottom-of-funnel? Do certain keywords used at one stage of the funnel lead to specific keywords at the next stage of the funnel?

Turning These Insights Into Campaign Optimization

Once you’re armed with these type of touchpoint analysis findings, you can focus on optimization strategies and tactics to utilize the most productive touchpoint attributes and apply more of your budget on those best performing combination of attributes.

For example, is a particular keyword, ad creative, bid price, landing page and day-part combination found to be the best “opener” for a specific product type?

If so, decrease budget on less productive attribute combinations and devote more budget to this more effective combination. Of course, it’s also important to make sure that the combinations on which you decrease budget aren’t top performers at other stages of the funnel.

You also have the opportunity to strengthen the attributes associated with each funnels stage. If a particular keyword, engine or ad creative is an effective opener, you can modify the copy of the landing page so that it doesn’t try to “close” the conversion – but instead helps cultivate the prospect.

If you find that there is a particular sequence of keywords that’s more effective than others, perhaps you embed a call to action using that keyword sequence on the landing page used for the previous stage of the funnel.

As a search marketer, your very nature is to mine insights like these and convert them into optimization strategies that you can test and refine. If you or your colleagues are already doing attribution management, consider performing touchpoint analysis in order to uncover this additional dimension of valuable insights.

For three days, 1700+ manager, director and C-level marketers from most of the county’s largest brands, as well as folks from many of the top ad agencies networked, shared and braved 100-degree “dry heat.”

While many think of this gathering as the barometer of what’s going on in marketers’ minds, the anecdotes that were brought back to our office from this event exceeded our expectations.

What’s The Buzz – Tell Me What’s A-Happening

First off, marketers are now, more than ever, painfully aware that online and offline channels have an impact on each other’s performance.

As a result, they are either feeling compelled to seek out solutions that will quantify that impact or fearful that they are at a competitive disadvantage if they haven’t started to seek out a solution.

What we found truly fascinating, however, is that even some brand marketers – not just the direct response crowd – are talking about the need to quantify that influence in order to make informed decisions about moving the needle from a brand equity perspective.  Wow.

Second, beyond just the online-offline and offline-online synergies, marketers have a heightened understanding that there is significant inter-channel and intra-channel influence taking place in their multi-channel advertising ecosystem.

For example, it seemed to be almost universally understood that online display advertising and email marketing impact search marketing performance (inter-channel), and that impressions/clicks on non-branded keywords early in the conversion process drive the performance of branded keywords at the end of the conversion process (intra-channel).

It’s an acknowledged pain point on the part of most organizations that they do not have the metrics and analytics infrastructure necessary to optimize their marketing performance based on these channel synergies.

Finally, as if those learnings weren’t enough, the most encouraging finding we brought back from the Arizona desert was that even VP and C-level marketers (not just their in-the-trenches foot soldiers) – are talking about and seemingly understand these issues fairly clearly.

Where there still seems to be a long way to go, however, is in how to research, select and implement attribution management solutions that can provide the insights and recommendations on how to optimize cross channel performance.

But at least these high-level decision-makers recognize there is a problem, and in my eyes, that’s  progress!

Who Will Lead The Attribution Charge?

It seems obvious that the ideal constituency for leading the research, selection and implementation of cross-channel marketing attribution within any organization is its search marketers.

In their current roles these individuals already demonstrate the mindset, skills and discipline required to focus on quantitative results; use analytics to guide their optimization strategies; work with multiple pieces marketing technology; and research, vet, select, implement and integrate those marketing technologies.

The key is for search marketers to widen the lens through which they view their marketing performance to recognize and appreciate the impact that adjacent channel activities have on search marketing. It’s all about increasing the synergistic impact.

Based on the buzz in Phoenix, momentum is starting to build and the time is ripe for search marketers to take on their next great challenge – mastering the cross-channel attribution equation within their organizations and leading them to new levels of performance efficiency and effectiveness across their entire marketing portfolios.

These professionals accomplished this with search in the late 90s and are poised to do so again as we enter the second decade of the 21^st century. As they say, the future belongs to the bold. Who is ready to step up?