For multi-channel marketers, how revenue is attributed to online marketing campaigns can have a profound effect on budgeting and source allocation. Direct mail matchbacks and clicks to bricks studies (for those who can afford the latter) have provided direction on how to allocate offline to online and/or online to offline revenue. Most of these studies are periodic (some weekly, monthly, or quarterly), and the output defines the business rule for how the revenue will be attributed until the next study overrides it, and so forth. Essentially, the findings keep validating and/or overriding the one before it. After years of debating how to properly establish business rules, there is consensus that no cookie cutter model exists that can be applied across the board. The myriad of tactics a marketer employs offline and online, combined with the particulars about what the company sells, require a unique set of rules for everyone.
Solely relying on matchbacks and clicks to bricks studies to determine how to best attribute revenue no longer cuts it for many reasons. Among them: 1) Paid search media spends are too big to rely on loose rules; 2) Non-brand paid search cpcs have risen so high that they are close to knocking a lot of marketers out of the category altogether unless the math can be looked at more deeply; 3) A proliferation of more affordable and better performing display media now exists for direct response advertisers if we can just get the numbers to work; 4) While analytics still aren’t where we’d like them to be, there have been some fantastic evolutions to facilitate more sophisticated attribution of revenue. Some examples of this are ClearSaleing, Google’s Big Funnel Beta, and bid management systems, many of which can now accommodate different attribution rules and models.





which facilitates the remarketing. When a visitor comes to the website and leaves without taking the desired action (buying, inquiring, etc), the person will be subsequently shown display (or text) ads in an effort to lure the person back to the site. These ads will follow the person around the internet provided that the sites they visit are within Google’s network. The size of Google’s network is on par with that of the other big ad networks, so from an audience perspective, the reach is competitive.
