When you are using multiple channels to advertise it’s very important to realize which of them can get some of the profits coming from a sale.
Twitter, Facebook, Paid Search, Organic Search and even Foursquare, LinkedIn and iAd help the in house advertisers, consultants and ad agencies to convert leads. Their tracking tools will help you see how many times the users accessed your ads. Users see your commercials on a social networking site, go on Google, search for your business and get to your site. At this point they may not make any purchase, but they can also click on paid search ads and eventually make the purchase.
Now the questions are: whether or not the entire profit goes to that paid search ad? Do the Facebook ad and the Google list deserve some revenue?
About Cross-channel analytics
Cross-channel analytics shows the interaction between various channels and their impact by performing with different marketing programs. Comparison Shopping, Organic Search, Paid Search, Display Ads and many more are included in this report.
Cross-channel analytics and its advantages
Your marketing strategies can be improved by Cross-channel analytics if you use some of these methods:
Time impact / Latency. Identifying the latency prototype for each visitor and channel can be done by investigating the online advertising channels and their user level data.
Funnel Attribution and Analysis. The right approach of the online marketing channel is to give credit to every advertising channel that brought the user to your site. This shows the marketer which channels combination is more effective. This method will optimize your budget allocation and will maximize the return.
Measuring the Sites/URL/Domain. The URL data coming from the online advertising channels helps the marketers adjust their strategy by following the low/high ROI placement.
Information about user demographic / behavioral leverage. Desktop vs. mobile visits, geographical information and a lot more can be captured by the cross-channel analytics. So, this program helps you track the user level behavior and target dependent on this aspect.
Most Common Attribution Methods
First Click: Through this, all the credit from the sale goes to the first visit, because it’s the one that helps the user form an opinion.
Last Click: This other method helps the final click gather the entire revenue, because it’s the one that really influenced the user to make the purchase.
Linear: This is the fairest method, because it gives equal credit to all the visits and advertisements the user has gone through.
Weighted: This gives each advertising instrument a value. The most effective gets, of course, the biggest value or weight.
Usually, the online marketers are using the Last Click method. But, lately, understanding the effect of each and every channel has become much more important. Your business rules will state what percentage of the profit shall be given to every channel. However, you still need to record the effects of every advertisement, because each has its own potential customers.
Will the weighted model become the most popular now that more and more channels tend to be successful marketing tools and the tracking methods develop? Can a new model be created?
Thoughts and Challenges on the Future
Finding the adequate goals is one of the most important challenges that advertisers have to face.
Why is the cross-channel data needed and what can you achieve if you use it? The answer to these questions is very important, because they define the goal. It helps you prioritize the large amount of data and target your success.
Extracting quantifiable insights from the data is what analytics does. Its purpose is to help you develop your business goals.
Below you have a common data analysis flow:
Many of the analytics providers didn’t overcome the stage of reporting, so it requires a lot of work in extracting the right and actionable data from the raw information.
If you ask us, inadequate ads can be removed only if you have a large amount of data. The developing of the cross-channel analytics will help marketers to quantify their traffic and revenue impact and make great optimization.
In order to perform conversions and to identify the Multi-Channel Funnels you can use the recently updated Google Analytics tool.
