It often takes a while between the time we are making a marketing effort until the time these efforts makes a business impact. This time gap that creates the marketing  time attribution problem can often distort reports and can drive to wrong business decisions. In the context of internet marketing, any web analytic solution must attribute the conversion to the time in which a click occurred, or to the time in which the conversion occurred. Google products (Google Adwords, Google Analytics) for example, attribute the conversion to the time of click.

But what happens when we are taking the cost from one source (e.g: an ad-server) and the conversions from another source (e.g backend reporting tool)? How can we know how long elapsed between the click and the conversion? How can ROI be calculated when the conversion are still coming in?

This problem can be resolved to a large extent using tracking cookies. If you are a website owner that injects tracking cookies to your visitors, and this cookie records your campaign attributes, you can add to that a click time stamp. Whenever this user will visit your site again, and will make an action, you can pull the campaign attributes and the time in which the user clicked your ad. The time of the click is indicative of the time in which the cost incurred.

This way you can report cost and conversions plotted on the same timeline.
Though it will not be suitable for accounting purposes, for optimization and business decisions, it will be often much more of a precise view than the alternative. Let me know how it works!

Yours, Dada

I know that the title “attribution problem” sounds intimidating or even boring but first, it’s one of the most important principals of internet marketing and second, I swear to god, it is simple to understand.
Let’s say you have a hot dog stand inside a mall and you came up with creative ways to boost up your sales.

Creative way No. 1: You found someone to handout flyers wearing a hot dot costume at the mall’s entrance.

Creative way No. 2: You placed a new sign saying “Awesome hot dogs here”.

A week later, you can definitely say that your sales went up, but you don’t know why. You do have more customers coming in, but you don’t know whether it  because of the hot dog guy, or because of the new sign. We will call that source attribution problem and the asense of that is that we can not attribute new business to acquisition source.

Cause you so damn clever, you decided to write a coupon code on the flyers the hot dog guy is handing out. This way, when a new customer is dropping by, he is likely to show you his flyer and you will know that he was the acquisition source.

Another week later, once you solved the source attribution problem you found out that the sign didn’t bring any new customers even though it was a costly marketing efforts for you.
Without further dues, you stoped paying for the sign, and you tried to figure out whether or not to continue with the hot dog guy. Even though it does drive sales, it was costly (Warning: Attention required). You paid the hot dog guy $1000 during previous month, and he generated only $700 of operational yield (What you actually earned, deducting the cost of the hot dog itself). Based on that calculation, you halted hot dog guy marketing but than something unexpected happened.

Customers with coupon codes kept arriving. At the first few days, there were many, and later there were few. When you re-did you calculation, you noticed that actually there were $1200 worth of sales attributed to the hot dog guy. You understood you did a mistake. You attributed the cost and the revenues of the hot dog guy to the same month, even though the revenues kept  growing while the cost remained the same. This problem will be referred as time attribution.

So I know it sounds pretensions but I truly believe I’m about to share with you the best internet marketing tip out there. You can spend hours reading internet marketing blogs, browsing through blackhat forums or hiring a social media expert. You can go to conventions or even take online courses, but there is one internet marketing tip that there are only few which are brave enough to share.

OK, I know it doesn’t come across as the most constructive piece of advise but it is and I’ll explain. In this allegedly perfect market called “The Internet”  there’s allegedly perfect competition, in which everything is known and everybody have the same access to resource. In these conditions, no one can earn a significant amount of money or at least to operate in high margins.

To a degree this is true, especially when running around the most popular online forums and competing with all the others in the same game, but in reality, pockets of profitability will always be found, regardless if it’s inbound marketing or paid marketing.

And now I’m getting to the point.

In reality no one knows anything, you must experiment all the time, and to make sure you have the ability to attribute the success or failure of every effort.

The cost and revenue of each and every marketing effort, suppose to be measured. Based on ROI, whatever effort which is working should be expanded, and whatever activity which is not, should be optimized or eradicated.

So to wrap-up this post, no one know more than you, and if someone does, he will not tell you that. Experiment everything, but before experimenting, make sure you know how to measure your success. Get your numbers right and make quick decisions.

Does it make sense?