Show notes:

• 1:00 CW is the Vice President of B2C Marketing and her team is responsible for running all the marketing programs on behalf of our financial institutions clients.
• 1:30 We spend a lot of time with technology and data, trying to understand performance and how to make our programs run more effectively.
• 2:15 The million dollar question: if somebody opens up an account with one of our community financial institutions, were they exposed to a marketing program we delivered?
• 2:50 Is our marketing working hard to achieve what we need it to do.
• 3:10 Even just a few years ago, we tried hard to measure channel performance, but it was extremely difficult to get a clear picture of where exactly those new accounts were coming from.
• 4:15 We’ve been working really hard over the past few years to define that attribution and bring it to the forefront of our programs.
• 4:45 Executive leadership wants to know what their marketing return on investment is, so in a very real sense, attribution IS a million dollar question.
• 5:50 The easiest channel to get attribution in is a fully digital environment. Digital ecosystems make it very easy to trace consumer journeys.
• 7:10 Paid search is a great example of “last touch” attribution, but it doesn’t give insight into what happened before.
• 7:45 Traditional channels such as out-of-home and broadcast advertising are very difficult to attribute accurately.
• 8:50 Anonymous attribution vs. known attribution.
• 9:30 Is there a reason to stay away from last-touch attribution, or are there reasons why a marketer might misallocate funds based on trusting last-touch attribution too much.
• 10:00 On average it takes a consumer 4-5 online engagements before they convert or make an online transaction.
• 10:45 Paid search and organic search don’t give the full picture into the consumer’s journey
• 11:15 Word-of-mouth marketing is seeing a resurgence on social media. Where does it fit into an attribution model?
• 12:05 Social media is becoming increasingly important in today’s consumer journeys.
• 13:15 Social media is only going to grow. It may even become the most important aspect of what motivates a consumer to take action.
• 14:30 How do you evaluate your cost per acquisition across multiple channels with weighted variables in the advertising equation?
• 15:35 We take a different approach to multi-channel attribution. First of all, we do a lot of testing to find the strategy that drives the best results. And now we’re working on an end-to-end understanding of individual consumer journey. Then we look at channel-level metrics once we’ve identified the best overall scenarios.
• 17:45 Once we’ve identified the best channels, then we look for ways to optimize those channels.
• 18:10 Hopefully as we’re able to analyze the next six to nine months-worth of data, that we can arrive at a more specific cost-per-acquisition value.
• 19:15 We’ve spent a lot of time and energy talking to the big players in data and identity resolution, marketing automation, tracking, analytics. The technology is always changing and we’re staying on the forefront.
• 20:05 It’s nearly impossible to tackle some of these attribution questions if you aren’t leveraging technology and analytics.
• 20:45 For us, the next revolution is connecting the known pool of consumers that we target with the unknown pool of consumers. This allows us to achieve a much higher degree of resolution in our attribution model.
• 22:10 The biggest misconception tends to be that some community financial institution executives assume that attribution is an easy thing to solve for. However, only a third of organizations in the US use any kind of attribution model at all.