Attribution. It’s a big challenge for e-commerce marketers. Most of these pros use a bevy of technologies and methodologies to concoct their attribution approach. They assign weights to actions across ad channels, and monitor their analytics to determine which of the channels are contributing to sales and how to allocate spend.
If the attribution model reveals that email is the highest contributing channel, marketers will likely pump more dollars there. Display ads are not helping convert customers? Remove or shift budget.
But a problem with current attribution methods is that they look at how channels are related rather than how consumers are related. These models fail to consider the ways in which people, specifically families, influence one another’s purchasing decisions. Think, for example, about how much a teenager can influence a parent’s purchases.
What if marketers could see the domino effect that one consumer’s browsing behavior has on another consumer’s buying behavior? What if marketers could create an attribution model that understands a consumer’s interests or actions based on his or her relationships to others and to their online activity and transactions? Let’s unpack it.
The Family Attribution Gap, Defined
Going back to the teenager-parent example: Mom and Dad are not scouring the web to learn about the hottest new sneakers and counting down the days until their release date. That’s their son, Tim, who’s searching on Google, swiping online review sites, and ultimately clicking on a Facebook ad for 123Sneakers.com (to use a hypothetical example) to see if his size is in stock for the latest Nike LeBrons.
