Mediarun Opinion Piece – Retailers are making decisions based on incomplete data

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) July 4, 2011 -- Retailers are making erroneous decisions on where best to spend their marketing budgets as well as in evaluating what spend is delivering ROI. Most SME businesses will use Google Analytics as their default visitor tracking software, but good as it is, it provides far from the full picture.

Attributing a value on conversions however has traditionally proved tricky. Writing on E-consultancy recently http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/7229-social-media-and-seo-massively-undervalued-study Paul Cook founder of Tag Man highlights some interesting points. The thesis of the article was that organic SEO and social media channels are being chronically undervalued. Based on ‘attributed conversions’ he identified that SEO should be credited with 14 times more value in terms of conversions and that social media is being undervalued by eight times.

The validity of these figures can no doubt be debated, however the critical factor for marketers to absorb is that the whole value of a conversion cannot be attributed solely to the final click, as this is a flawed model. Many times we have seen retail clients make terrible strategic decisions based on such assumptions. Often these decisions are driven by the Financial Director or other numbers people, who are quite rightly attempting to make fact based decisions by using the figures in front of them. However the problem is, if they only have access to data from tools such as Google Analytics the supposed facts they are working with are far from the full picture.

At the top end of the market solutions such as Tag Man, or within search channels tools such as Omniture and Marin, provide the granularity and accuracy of data required to take the right calls on where to spend budget. Unfortunately, for all but the bigger industry players these solutions can be difficult to justify from a budget perspective. As Google Analytics has become ubiquitous and provides huge benefits, it has been taken up as the leading free software, but the data provided by analytics does not provide enough information on attribution, so retailers who rely on this data cannot possibly take adequately informed decisions.

One tool which does offer the depth of data required at a budget affordable by the wider market is DC Storm a Brighton based business which provides digital marketing optimisation solutions for advertisers, agencies and affiliates. DC Storm will soon also be compatible with AdInsight a solution which tracks phone enquiries back to channels, keywords and even individual browsing sessions providing accurate data for retailers who sell both online and via the phone. In our experience these tools are providing invaluable data and insight allowing for much more informed decisions on where best to place marketing spend. This week Google also announced an updated version of its own free analytics package which should provide visibility on multi click attribution but this will no doubt be a long time in Beta before being rolled out fully (if ever).


Retailers need to ask their digital marketing or search agencies what their view is on this subject; if they are still of the mind-set that Google Analytics is where tracking ends then this leaves big question marks over the agency’s ability. Retailers need to take swift decisions on what, if any, new software needs to be invested in. Without specialist tracking, technology attribution of values to various clicks on a customer journey is impossible, marketing spend is sure to be wasted and poor decisions made.

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