Online retailer Indochino uses a variety of digital ad tactics to promote its custom-made men’s suits, including search and email marketing, mobile outreach and retargeting on the Facebook Exchange. Along with attribution software company Convertro, Indochino brings together all these marketing channels and determines what is working and what is most valuable, said Antonio Guzman, manager of online marketing.
“We’re really trying to put the right messages in front of the right person at the right time,” Guzman said. “We want to understand that mix of messages, frequency and timing, and understand what levers we can move and change, and how that will impact subsequent touches.”
AdExchanger spoke to Guzman about how Indochino works with Convertro, the importance of attribution tracking for the company, and the challenge of still not being able to track every visitor.
ANTONIO GUZMAN: We use Convertro to understand the different touch points that eventually lead to a transaction, as well as other events that happen on-site. We know that people will probably experience more than one marketing message before they decide to purchase, and we want to better understand the influence of each of those marketing channels and messages.
Convertro also has the ability to reassociate an individual who may have opened an email on their phone, browsed our site, and then gone home and used a different device to do a search query. Or maybe they had used a work computer or tablet and then made a purchase. There are communication touch points all along the customer journey, and being able to re-associate them, not just see them as individual site visitors, helps us contribute the right weighting for each of those touch points.
Ten years ago, people were tied to a last-click attribution model, but there has been an evolution. Convertro gives us the tools to look at revenue attribution on first-click and last-click on a weighted regression model, as well as an equal distribution model.
What are the challenges when it comes to attribution?
A lot of people in these attribution discussions get excited because there is progress being made. And part of that progress is having more confidence. As digital marketers, we’ve always been limited to the capabilities of the platforms and technologies we use to make decisions. People were making decisions based on last click [because] it was the best information they had, but the information we have now has only gotten better. We’re not yet at a place where we know everything. There are some folks, depending on device or other settings, who we are not able to reassociate. There are still some limitations, but it is getting better. We are just looking to have the most confidence possible in the decisions we’re making, and to recognize that some things are still unknown.
What results have you seen from the work you’re doing with Convertro?
One of the big things is that we’re able to reassociate as much as 12% of our customers across devices. For us, that validated the need for this technology and made us feel good that we can now see that path. In the past, because we were looking at everyone as an individual, we were probably undervaluing some messages and overvaluing others. We can spend less money on things that we know aren’t having as big of an influence and impact on final transaction, even if it’s something we have been doing for a while. We can make those changes, optimizations and adjustments, and see if other channels are having as much influence. We’re now being more cost-effective.
Convertro’s CEO Jeff Zwelling has said the company typically boosts a marketer’s revenues or reduces its cost per sales lead by between 7% and 12%. Has that been true for you?
We’re definitely within that range. There are lots of factors for us in revenue growth, but the initial value is in saying “Look at these channels we thought were having a much bigger impact.” If you’re overvaluing the impact of a channel, you’re spending more than you need to. So we’re spending less here, monitoring it, and seeing if we see a decrease in revenue. If we don’t see that, we see how Convertro has given us a chance to decrease our spend to save money without impacting our growth. Then the question becomes “Where is the best place to put it?” We’re in line with that range on both sides of that fence – cost reduction and revenue.
How do you plan to upgrade your work with Convertro in the future?
For us, it’s incorporating things like our marketing costs into Convertro so we can really use it. It’s a robust tool and they’ve been rolling out new reports, new optimization strategies and recommendations. We’re able to incorporate cost data directly into Convertro alongside our revenue and growth data, and that helps us be more efficient as a marketing department.
