ClearSaleing Finds Profit, Loss In Purchase Path

Adam Goldberg of ClearsaleingClearSaleing has been working on an advertising attribution platform that measures performance by profit and loss, rather than conversion rates, leads, clicks and cost per acquisition.

The goal is to measure the purchase path -- the chronological sequence of events that take place prior to conversion. And while the advertising analytics company's platform already offers some attribution management, Adam Goldberg, co-founder and CIO at ClearSaleing, Columbus, Ohio, hopes to roll out additional services in an out-of-the-box package during the second half of 2009.

Think shelf life for a banner ad -- how long can it impact the consumers? "A banner ad can last for three days, but how much influence does it have when compared to other ads in the funnel?" Goldberg asked.

Goldberg, a marketing guy who spent a few years at Google trying to prove some of the sale concepts, said the forthcoming feature aims to predict sales paths that most likely offer the highest profit and loss for both online and offline ads and events.

But as more companies rely on analytics to measure success, the biggest challenge for marketers has become their lack of mathematical skill sets, Goldberg said. The good news is that the mathematics needed to track attribution exists, and it's related to advanced statics.

For ClearSaleing, that advance in statistics has come from a partnership with Vetra Analytics to help identify an ad's "rate of decay." Combining statistics from Ventra and data from ClearSaleing allows the company to determine that timeframe. The platform will also measure the potential influence for each event and ad.

For instance, tracking events from phone calls, the application connects into back-office platforms such as enterprise resource planning suites to tell whether the leads generate results or simply waste a salesperson's time.

One ClearSaleing client has integrated the platform with its point-of-sale (POS) system at brick-and-mortar stores. At the time of checkout the clerk collects the consumer's email address. A link in an email promotion sent later brings the consumer to the company's Web site to see her order or get warranty information. From that click, ClearSaleing knows if the consumer visited the Web site prior or post purchase in the store.

The platform also excludes credit to a specific ad. The most common is when a branded term closes the deal advertisers exclude giving that ad credit, and instead assigns the credit to ads that precede it. ClearSaleing will now go after what historically has been known as untrackable advertising. "How do we know how much credit to give to blogs or social media when there's no trackable event similar to those available for paid search, shopping engines or banner advertising?" Goldberg said.

1 comment about "ClearSaleing Finds Profit, Loss In Purchase Path".
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  1. John Grono from GAP Research, May 7, 2009 at 8:41 a.m.

    I'd be interested in how this system tracks the "chronological sequence of events prior to conversion" for non-electronic and non-online media. Take the person who sees the ad in a magazine, hears the ad on the radio on the way to work in the car while driving past the billboard. They then see it on the coffee-cup advertising before seeing it on TV that night. Lo and behold they see it again on the big screen at the cinema that weekend and say "that brand is for me". They go to the store and see the carpark advertising, the floor-tile ads in the store, the shelf-talkers spruiking the product.

    The problem is the launch is so successful that the store has run out of stock. So our consumer trudges home and tries their luck in a search engine. It' a one click conversion.

    What a travesty such analyses are.

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