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Attending the eMetrics conference this week in Toronto wasn’t necessarily a huge eye-opener for me, but several insightful discussions did arise from the show’s fundamentally significant panels and presentations.  One such topic included a sore spot for all online marketers and analysts at some point in their career: campaign attribution a.k.a. who gets the final credit for a conversion.

Who gets the credit?  Traditional Marketing?  Online advertising?  Last source of conversion?  Sales?  Or maybe customer service?  Who gets blamed for bad leads?  Someone’s gotta take the heat, right?

Those of you that know me, know that I’m not a very diplomatic person.  I call things the way they are, and don’t necessarily sugar coat the truth to appease anyone.  Truth is a plate best served raw.  That being said, campaign attribution is one topic even I have to soften up to, because in an organization, the actions of many can directly affect the success of few.

Campaign attribution is probably one of the most overlooked elements of an organizations operations because business units within a company can be extremely isolated.  Especially in large organizations, the folks in the trenches of the marketing department may not talk to people in sales, or in customer service.  But each department’s individual responsibility and performance can vastly influence the success of a campaign.

Several opinions were raised at eMetrics to solve attribution problems.  The most obvious solution was to find a happy middle ground with the data available, to mitigate any favortism or bias.  Of course, traditional marketing will have a big impact on search, especially brand- or product-specific search terms, we’ve all observed that to be true.  And search may have a big impact on social marketing, for campaigns that go viral.  Sales and customer service may impact your overall conversion rate outside of your analytics tool, so don’t forget your inside people.

Regardless of which weighing scheme you eventually put in place to measure campaign success, you will probably experience friction with at least one business unit in the mix.  Which brings me to…

Solving Diplomacy Problems in Campaign Attribution:

Wikipedia has some pointers on this issue.  Not being an expert in diplomacy by any stretch of the imagination, I’ll default to their suggestions, but rank them in order of what I would consider situational severity:

• Conferences: the friendly and professional approach, usually a first step in the procedure.
• Negotiations: the not-so-friendly but still somewhat professional and diplomatic escalation to failed conferences and meetings.
• Arbitration and mediation: this can get dirty… let both sides air their laundry and let an independent third party decide.  No one is happy, but at least it’s fair.  If you can’t find a non-partisan voice, you may have to rely on your resident’s HIPPO (highest paid person in the organization).

Things to keep in mind

1. Try to minimize awarding easy to win campaigns any real weight.  Sometimes the house should always win.  For direct request, high loyalty visitors with zero to no interaction with any one team, attribution should be nil.  That’s a house win.
2. Different analytics tools may automatically attribute campaign success differently.  For instance, some have said that Google Analytics unfairly attributes campaign successes to search in order to serve their own interests.  With Omniture, you really have to define what your attribution schema consists of well in advance, you can get very granular and specific.
3. If you’re a search marketer or web analyst, you can work with two numbers. One for straight online marketing conversion and one for organizational attribution.  You may find numbers getting lost in the mix or diluted, making conversion optimization pretty difficult.
4. Consider testing attribution during several seasons.  Depending on traffic and visitor profile, your attribution scheme may not serve all business units fairly during seasonal fluctuations.

I guess with any data analysis, you’ll want to keep testing and adjusting so that campaign successes loosely represent the overall needs of the business.  Each department within your business should be able to get what they need from attribution schemes, and be relatively comfortable with how the analytics numbers coincide with departmental or offline measures.  Diplomacy is key, especially in campaign attribution.  Take it from me, it’s a fight I’d rather not instigate and one that I conceded long ago — that’s saying a lot.