This month Stylight participated in the 3rd edition of the Lengow Ecommerce Day in Paris. Within only 3 years the event has become one of the major ecommerce meetups in France, offering an exceptional speaker line-up with the likes of Facebook, Alibaba and Yandex, amongst others, attending. The relaxed, warm environment ensures that you can’t miss this very special networking day.
Mickael Froger – Co-founder and CEO at Lengow
Kicking off the day, Stylight brought expertise to the roundtable discussion entitled What are the Best Practices When it Comes to Acquisition Channels? A lot of advertising spending on the market is not profitable and it is crucial for ecommerce companies to identify where the value lies. We’ve rounded up the most noteworthy contributions from the talk with the other roundtable participants R-advertising, Le Guide, and Mazeberry.
Why might some ecommerce companies not always understand where the value lies when it comes to evaluating the contribution of their online marketing channels?
The answer has to do with how they attribute value to their online acquisition channels: often focusing only on the last interaction, i.e. the last touchpoint before the customer buys. Attributing all value to the last touchpoint means we assume that what happens before is irrelevant in the purchasing and decision-making process. We all know that most of the time customers need more thinking time before clicking “buy”: they might want to define more precisely what they want to buy, e.g. find inspiration when it comes to fashion, or find out what’s on trend now. They also might want to compare prices before making a final decision. Fabien Dutrieux from Mazeberry, a specialist in attribution questions, recalled that there are on average 10 touchpoints with the customer before the sale effectively happens. If we don’t give value to those interactions, because they are not the final step, why should we keep paying for them?
Damien Verichon – Senior Business Development Manager at Stylight
Why is the value often attributed to the last interaction only?
Ecommerce professionals are aware that a sale is rarely generated from one contact only, nonetheless a line needs to be drawn: it is called deduplication of sales, i.e. the process of allocating a sale to a single online marketing channel. In these instances the last interaction often wins.
Deduplication, attribution and business goals definition
You nail it: deduplication needs to be differentiated from attribution if you want to keep an effective online acquisition strategy. Defining an attribution model means you define how the different steps of the customer journey are valued. It needs thorough reflexion because eventually you determine which acquisition channels count for your business and in the end, how you run that business. The attribution model tells you how you spend your marketing budget relatively across the different channels, so it needs to reflect the business goals of the company. Do you want to reach new customers? Then you will most likely attribute more value to the first touchpoint. Some tools like Google Analytics allow you to create custom attribution models and compare the results of different scenarios.
Tips and tactics about topics like acquisition channels, as well as ecommerce site optimization tools are always great subjects to discuss, and the Lengow Ecommerce Day also allowed us to exchange with great, enthusiastic professionals.
We would like to thank everyone who attended the talk and for those who couldn’t make it, maybe we will see you for next year’s edition!
|By Damien Verichon|
