ClearSaleing Turns Sesame Street Guessing Game Into Science
- by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, August 11, 2009
Attribution management company ClearSaleing, and marketing analytics provider Vetra Analytics, released Monday the American Attribution Index (AAI) to help marketers and advertisers measure the effectiveness of each online ad in the purchase funnel. The modeling tool aims to help marketers understand the influence that search campaigns or banner ads might have in the process.
ClearSaleing created the technology that captures clicks and impressions from a variety of sources, such as affiliate programs, email marketing and comparison shopping sites. It then calculates profit on ad conversions. That data feeds into models built by Vetra to determine the relevancy of each ad by vertical, company size, and in aggregate.
Similar to Microsoft's push to determine the most influential ads in the purchase funnel, Clearsaleing will continue to champion "attribution" by integrating in more facts around the influence of each ad. "There has to be a certain amount of 'coopertition,'" Goldberg says, defining the word as a mixture of cooperation and competition. "Everyone in the industry believes attribution is important, and we can't just look at the last click. There's cooperation, but the competition will continue to exist in the algorithms."
The next step will take ClearSaleing into integrating offline metrics from set-top boxes and more. Goldberg calls it the "biggest challenge and the holy grail." The move by Google to work with anonymous set-top-box data indirectly supports ClearSaleing's push to integrate third-party data, though the reality still years away, he says.
For example, if ClearSaleing knows that a specific commercial ran at 3:32 p.m. in a particular market, it could look at the Web traffic that came through the site from the time the commercial aired, to a short period of time after, such as a half hour. Did the consumer look for a company name or something the brand pitched in the TV commercial? Goldberg says through the data, the platform will have the ability to attribute online searches, views and clicks to the TV commercial. Companies will also have the same option to track attribution through social media.
ClearSaleing wants to create attribution management standards that Goldberg says the industry lacks. Shop.org, the online community arm for the National Retail Federation, has begun to organize an attribution management panel to push standards, he says. "You really need to know what dollars are working by each individual ad," Goldberg says. "Companies need a clear indicator as to which ads produce the profit and which do not."
ClearSaleing also unveiled an automated bid management module that allows marketers to factor in profit measurement to keyword-buying decisions, and move past the "last click" mentality to identify keywords along a purchase path that might have been missed.
Built on top of ClearSaleing's attribution management platform, the bid management module lets marketers control keyword bids using profit metrics based on its attribution model. It also takes into account conversion latency -- the period of time between the customer's first visit and a conversion. The tool can track profit down to the item level. Marketers can set the profit rules to be as simple or complex as needed.
