Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.
Anyone who has spent time doing marketing has heard a variation of this quote, which generally is attributed to John Wanamaker, the 20th century department store magnate.
Knowing which half of your marketing works is of course highly valuable, and many marketing tools are devoted to providing ways to track this information.
The challenge is that a typical buyer is touched by multiple campaigns, yet most marketing tracking tools attribute 100% of the credit for a sale to the last touch. That undervalues the contribution make by earlier campaigns, without which the sale might not have happened.
Matchback Analysis
WiseGuys has developed a process for doing Matchback Analysis that allows you to more accurately attribute a sale to all the marketing campaigns and stimuli that touched the customer.
Here are some of the strategies we employ:
- Multi-channel promotions – For multiple promotions within a response window, you can decide how to assign credit for the response.
- Segment-specific matchback – The response window is defined as a variable, so you can define a shorter response window for email than for postal mail.
- Unmatched orders – Many times orders can’t be matched back to a mail history record (perhaps a promotion was passed from one household to another). WiseGuys counts these unmatched responses and provides a list. This feature is also useful when tracking prospect mailings from outside mailing sources.
- A/B split testing – You can key “hold” as part of a version code to trigger the version to be held back from mailing. This allows you to analyze whether segments that were mailed to had a lift over the hold segment that wasn’t mailed. For example, you could see if a free shipping order provides lift over a hold segment that didn’t receive the offer.
With more accurate Matchback Analysis, you know which marketing campaigns were effective and can direct your marketing budget more effectively.
