Del Monte Adopts Encore Attribution Ad Model To Credit Impressions, Clicks

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In a move that may lead the way for other consumer product goods companies, Del Monte will adopt an attribution model from Encore Media Metrics in the coming weeks.

Doug Chavez, director of digital marketing at Del Monte, hopes the strategy will allow the CPG company to gain better insight into ads and searches on publisher sites, social networks and search engines that lead consumers to purchase its products.

Del Monte will begin by testing the model with one or two brands, determine the difference between them, and then decide whether to add others to the process. One brand will rely more heavily on paid search, the other on social media.

Having the ability to track attribution becomes increasingly important, since management wants to know the ROI for each Facebook investment. Since zero transactions occur on Facebook, Chavez needs to quantify the time consumers spend with the brand.

"If a consumer is on our Facebook Milk-Bone, it's good to give the page, and then go to Milkbone.com. I know that person is spending between three and four times more on that site compared with someone who comes from organic search," Chavez told Online Media Daily. "Attribution continues to be a piece marketers need to figure out." Attribution, as Chavez describes it, becomes a "very tangled story to tell." Encore Media Metrics helps him untangle the Web without having to troll through pages of raw data.

Several years ago, Microsoft began talking up engagement, mapping the consumer's path from awareness to purchase. Gian Fulgoni, comScore cofounder, has also been an advocate of attribution, encouraging the ad industry to move past the last-click metric.

Display ads are effective in creating awareness early in the purchase cycle, but search and email have proven to be better channels for driving preference and action. Social media contributes to all, but because analytics platforms attribute credit for the conversion to the last click, they fall short in measuring the supporting role played by display, social and other media.

The on-demand attribution service from Encore, which emerged from "stealth mode" in February, tracks the source of the traffic and the time that lapses between impressions, visits and conversions, as long as consumers don't clear cookies from their browser. A dashboard aggregates the information, allowing companies to see the path in one place, explains Encore founder and CEO Steve Latham.

Latham's former company, a digital agency called Spur Interactive, began making the transition to Encore after acquiring an analytics platform from Austin in 2006, which focused on paid search and search engine optimization. Shortly after, the company began building out the platform to support attribution. "We were an agency that needed a technology," Latham says. "It lets us look at customer behavior and buying cycles by looking at the time lapsing between processes."

 

5 comments about "Del Monte Adopts Encore Attribution Ad Model To Credit Impressions, Clicks ".
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  1. Mark Hughes from C3 Metrics, March 18, 2011 at 1:39 p.m.

    Bravo. The more advertisers understanding the problem of attribution, the better. http://C3metrics.com

  2. Christopher Brinkworth from Ensighten inc (acquired TagMan), March 18, 2011 at 2:21 p.m.

    Agree. I do suggest if readers are interested in this area - they look at case-studies TagMan(.com) have done on real-time attribution including natural search - but ALSO, do visit the NRF's work in this area: http://www.shop.org/attributionsig

  3. Sam Diener, March 21, 2011 at 5:15 p.m.

    Congratulations on the press. I wish this article actually talked to things that were realistically doable with attribution. This is a bunch of hot air...

  4. Laurie Sullivan from lauriesullivan, March 21, 2011 at 5:46 p.m.

    Sam, In your opinion, what's "realistically doable" for attribution? Believe it or not, technology should enable this. So, I'm wondering what you think is "realistically doable." Feel free to detail in the comments.

  5. Sam Diener, March 22, 2011 at 8:09 a.m.

    Laurie,

    Thank you for the opportunity to address. Even though I am saying "this is hot air," I hope you understand I am not calling you out as the writer personally. I am calling out the misinformation in the space.

    Speaking of misinformation, there is a lot there. Too much to outline. However, let's take two examples:

    The article says: "Having the ability to track attribution becomes increasingly important, since management wants to know the ROI for each Facebook investment."

    The reality is that there are major barriers to this, the technology available right now will not allow this to happen effectively or correctly.

    Additionally, the article states that "If a consumer is on our Facebook Milk-Bone, it's good to give the page, and then go to Milkbone.com. I know that person is spending between three and four times more on that site compared with someone who comes from organic search,"

    This is simple web analytics, and not attribution.

    Certainly happy to discuss further.

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