Attribution and analytics are an absolute dumpster fire right now, as governments around the world, not to mention companies like Apple and Google, are tightening their data privacy rules.
But one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. And that’s certainly the case with analytics. Since major ad platform attribution reports can no longer be trusted to dictate spend, brands need new solutions to back up their media investments.
One such new entrant to marketing analytics is SegmentStream, a London-based conversion modeling startup that raised $2.7 million in its first funding round in February.
The need for new attribution tech is especially acute in Europe, where the GDPR makes it much more difficult to track customers around the web. Just this year, EU regulators in France, Germany, Italy and Austria forbade the use of Google Analytics.
More than a cosmetic change
L’Oréal’s global marketing team is piloting SegmentStream in Mexico, said Adriana Ochoa Díaz, ecommerce and digital coordinator for the Lancôme brand in the country.
The decision to test SegmentStream’s conversion analytics was due in part to the structural changes to Google Analytics, she said. “But it’s not just for that.”
The ability to visualize and track customer journeys has diminished. People may occasionally click on a sponsored product or retargeting ad and convert directly on the landing page. But it’s not a real picture of shopper behavior, she said.
“SegmentStream helps with understanding the consumer journey and how much time those customers, from our CRM or first-party site data, actually take to convert,” she said.
L’Oréal can drive traffic to its site effectively, she said. But to drive up the conversion rate the company needs to recognize customers over time and place customers on a journey that encompasses research, testing and, eventually, purchases. That used to be a default capability of digital marketing. Now, she said, L’Oréal must invest in first-party data and new analytics tools to understand customer journeys.
Especially for a luxury brand like Lancôme, Ochoa Díaz said customers make purchase decisions more deliberately over time and after engagements across multiple channels, often online and in-store.
“We have almost 500 points of sale, but ecommerce is the first one,” she said. “So it’s the window into our consumers.”
Switching gears
For Ribble Cycles, an English custom and specialized bike maker, there tends to be a long consideration period, according to Chief Digital Officer Matthew Lawson.
But that’s tough for a pure ecommerce brand – and Ribble is fully direct-to-consumer – because cookies, even first-party cookies, only apply for a day in some browsers and for shortened periods across the board. Mobile advertising hubs like Facebook, Google and Apple have all reduced their attribution windows due to ad policy rules set by Apple and Google.
The net result is that attribution reports by the likes of Google, Apple and Facebook, which were always heavily biased, have become downright unreliable, Lawson said. Facebook lost the signal data it needs to get the ad flywheel spinning, and Google and Facebook, both of which own the signal data, overattribute or misattribute conversions so much as to be useful only as “general barometers” of performance, he said.
Lawson said Ribble started working with SegmentStream in the past year as a way to demonstrate the value of “softer metrics” compared to the avowed direct conversions attributed by ad platforms.
Generating a clear-cut sale is great, but the prospecting pools are running dry, he said. Are ads driving site visitors who go to multiple pages? Do they revisit the content? Do they begin a checkout process?
Strong site and social content that locks people into the brand over time often generate immediately attributable sales that are “really tough to swallow,” he said. The marketing team must make the case in favor of other metrics, rather than the conversion attribution reports.
“And that faith is backed up by the softer metrics that show that people are browsing lots of pages, they’re spending lots of time on the website and are locked in,” Lawson said.
Brands are testing new analytics because the self-reported attribution numbers are missing the contribution of important branding or up-funnel marketing. Marketers must either find solutions that do prove the value of their media investments or make more intuitive calls about which channels, devices and ads are bringing in new customers.
“And the confidence comes from what you can see in the data,” Lawson said.
