• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 10, 2011

Virgin Atlantic is creating a "best-click attribution model" to better manage online marketing campaigns and attribute the sale to the correct channel. It happened when Allison Wightman, the company's head of e-business, realized that Web site revenue racked up to less than the cost to run email, display, search, and affiliate campaigns.  

Something just didn't jive.

Alternatives like Microsoft Atlas' engagement mapping strategy, Google DoubleClick or an agency's third-party tools didn't offer the same autonomy to manage tags and activity on Virgin Atlantic's Web site, she says. "We are taking all the data built up from using Tagman to see to whom we will make the payment by changing the attribution model from being the last click to the best click," she says. "We think it will become groundbreaking and something we really want to push toward."

Wightman will pick a partner to help analyze the data, examine results and then talk with content partners to develop possible models.

Attribution mapping has been on the rise for years, but companies still continue to struggle. There are many partners in the supply chain, such as comparison engines that might contribute more to the sale compared with the last click. Tagman, a universal container tag management platform that monitors visits to Web pages offering real-time attribution, will provide Virgin Atlantic data on what that might look like.

Tagman reports the rule data, but doesn't suggest the modeling. Virgin Atlantic will find a new attribution model, but Wightman admits it's something she will have to review ongoing. Search engines allow consumers to land on any page in the Web site, so Tagman containers get embedded into every page on the Virgin Atlantic Web site to track any and all entry points.

The container turns the process into content management. Working with a specific company on a campaign can require many tags on multiple pages. The more tags on a page, the slower the page load time. Slow load times can cause consumers to abandon the query or increase the bounce rate on the site. It's especially important to know the specific phrases that consumer query, such as "traveling with children," before coming to the site.

Virgin Atlantic has mobile applications and a site, but there is no plan to integrate this model for handsets and tablets. The company will need to gear up for mobile and tablet in the future, but at the moment, the two strategies are very different.