My circadian rhythms are still lost somewhere off the coast of California, but the rest of me is back in New York after a fantastic week in Australia, where I attended Digital Cream Sydney and visited with marketers around the city.
It was a pleasure and inspiration to meet so many smart, creative people and to hear what they’re excited about (and frustrated by) in digital marketing.
In this post I take a term that you’re all probably well aware of and try to enlighten myself, and hopefully the few of you who are just as baffled as me, on its actual meaning.
As I dive deeper and deeper into the world of digital marketing even more words and phrases float up to reveal themselves, particularly ones that perhaps are more on the business end of the spectrum.
Last week I shot my investigative glare towards Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and Single Customer View (SCV). This week: attribution.
Smartphones can support impulsive purchasing – browsing a retailer’s website while waiting in a supermarket queue and clicking ‘buy now’, for instance.
Meanwhile, the widespread use of tablets as second screens presents the opportunity to make purchases, perhaps in response to advertisements, from the comfort of your sofa.
Digital window-shopping, or showrooming, is common among smartphone users and often leads consumers into physical stores to try on or test products, or to making online purchases from another device at another time.
Marketers live in a world that is creating 2.5 exabytes of data each and every day.
This provides both a challenge and an opportunity to marketers. How can they process and harness big data in faster and more innovative ways to deliver deeper insights and improved business performance?
Is eBay’s latest report on paid search really a blow to search engine marketing? Or are we throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
Following the release of the final results of an ongoing study, there have been headlines proclaiming that “eBay warns that search ads have ‘no measurable benefit’”.
So, either eBay is making an outrageous claim that paid search ads don’t work. Or, the headlines are slightly misleading.
Having now read the paper by eBay, it would appear that both may be true.
When we tell businesses that getting to know their customers is vital, it’s not just so that they can provide the best possible customer experience for them.
Getting to know your customers is most crucial when it comes to helping businesses identify enemies disguised as customers.
Fraud is becoming increasingly widespread since the dawn of ecommerce and as it becomes more and more sophisticated, we need greater visibility to fight malicious activity on our websites.
Many decades ago, the arrival of the telephone in the office was a radical step. But now, many debate as to whether we still need a landline.
The answer is yes, and here’s a couple of ways that you can use that archaic piece of equipment to improve your marketing’s performance.
If you ask anyone in the industry what the biggest trends and challenges of the last 12 months have been you will receive a range of answers.
Chances are the answer will involve ‘not provided’ and content marketing if you are speaking to someone working in the SEO field.
If you are talking to someone with a PPC focus they will probably cite PLAs or rising CPCs.
If it’s a social guy you’re chatting to he will tell you how his channel is finally starting to deliver an ROI.
They will probably all talk about the phenomenal growth in mobile and tablet usage.
What there seems to be very little discussion about right now though is the marked increase in the amount of times potential customers visit your site before committing to a purchase.
This is partly influenced by the changes in device usage but is also symptomatic of changes in user behaviour – price comparison, voucher usage, and the convergence of offline and online worlds all contribute to this trend.
The challenge it creates is how to limit the amount of times we are paying to bring these same users back to the site, and how to pay as little as possible each time.
It’s a challenge which affects everyone working in digital and will hopefully drive more unified strategies, and make us all work closer together.
Digital Cream is a series of international events hosted by Econsultancy where marketers and business representatives are invited to network, exchange experiences and learn from one another’s progress in digital marketing.
This year, I had the opportunity to attend the latest conference at Emirates Stadium in London and the chance to sit-in on three of the day’s marketing attribution roundtables.
Attribution is clearly an area of contemporary business which a range of delegates were interested in. Many, however, were quite new to the concept – and there is a clear risk of inertia when presented with the somewhat limitless complexities the subject can present. Not to mention all that data…
I collected my notes in this Marketing Attribution Trends Briefing (thanks to our sponsors Adometry for their assistance and case studies included). But for a short summary, here are four of the key takeaways from that day…
If you don’t think identity plays a significant role in user experience, think again.
Case in point: I was recently browsing my favorite footwear site on my smartphone for the perfect pair of shoes, but when I returned to purchase my pair of choice via desktop, I had to spend upwards of 10 minutes trying to find it again.
How much better would my experience have been if I had instead been greeted with a personalized product showcase featuring my ‘most recently browsed’ items?
We’re at an inflection point in B2B marketing, and marketers should celebrate the opportunity to show their true contribution to revenue and not fall back on squishy metrics like ‘attention’.
Last week the esteemed Top Sales World blog published a piece entitled, “Attention (not leads) should be B2B marketing’s primary measure”.
I couldn’t disagree more. And, since the post doesn’t include a way to comment, I couldn’t disagree on the page itself, so I’ll do it here.
If advertisers want to be truly multichannel then they need to have access to, and control of, their product data.
By extracting product data from several different sources, you can fulfil any required channel marketing application.
Data can be extracted directly from your ecommerce site, existing data feeds or an API, and can then be distributed into hundreds of different online channels, increasing the visibility of your products in front of online consumers.
However, it all hinges on having high-quality product data that is comprehensive, accurate and consumable.