schuh, the leading footwear brand, works with Metageni to measure the true return on investment (ROI) of their PPC and Affiliate marketing, to help optimise campaigns. In recent months schuh has been experimenting with increased Social and Display marketing through Meta, YouTube and TikTok, but have struggled to accurately measure the impact of these channels on online sales using conventional attribution.
Using Metageni, they were able to measure the additional returns from social and display campaigns, revealing that over 90% of sales attributed to these campaigns are through impression effects, rather than purely through click effects.
By having a more accurate view of their digital marketing, schuh are now able to make more informed decisions about their marketing budget, adjusting spend throughout the marketing funnel to optimise ROI and make the best use of the overall marketing budget.
Metageni’s custom attribution platform has proven to be a valuable tool for schuh, allowing them to get the most out of their digital marketing campaigns.
“Working with Metageni has been a game changer for our digital marketing. We’ve been able to better understand how our social and display marketing works together with our other channels to drive sales.
We know that our audience are avid social media and YouTube users, however using last click attribution we weren’t able to see the true value of these channels. By factoring in impressions we get a more rounded view of the role of each channel and its position in the customer’s path to purchase, allowing us to optimise our digital spend for greater efficiency and ROI.”
The custom attribution platform provided by Metageni thus not only enabled schuh to optimise their digital spend for greater efficiency and ROI in PPC and other performance channels, but it also allowed them to measure the effectiveness of their social and display campaigns including the all important impression effects.
Measuring impression effects in digital marketing is one of the most challenging problems of marketing measurement and attribution. Online brands are increasingly using these channels to drive brand awareness and consideration and so measuring the performance of these ads based on clicks misses most of the true value.
Post impression or ‘view-through’ measurement offered by the major ad platforms is unreliable as it assumes that every exposure contributes to a sale, and is typically blind to the other platforms that your customers use. For example, Facebook attribution reports will ignore the fact that a customer may have interacted with paid search and affiliate campaigns before they were exposed to any social media activity. In recent times even this type of measurement has become unreliable due to browser based cookie blocking, most notably on the IOS browsers used on iPhones. As a result, advertisers have been flying blind, spending large sums of these channels without any guarantee of return.
To address this challenge for a more accurate view on Social and Display, schuh worked with custom attribution experts at Metageni to incorporate impression effects into their marketing analytics. Metageni data scientists use econometric techniques to complement a custom machine learning attribution model which is developed for each client based on their marketing approach and unique data.
Applying this approach for schuh has allowed them to gain a detailed understanding of how Social, Video and Display marketing works together with PPC, Affiliate and Organic channels to drive sales. This technique is used to make adjustments to performance click-led sales reflecting modelled impression effects and including ‘carry-over’ effects from one period to the next, allowing the measurement to pick up hidden responses to Social and Display campaigns which otherwise would get attributed to Direct, Organic and Brand Search.
The results have been impressive, allowing a comparison between ‘click only’ and ‘impression driven’ attribution, with the combined effects attributing almost 25 times more sales than the clicks alone. Social Prospecting and Video in particular have much greater attributed sales and revenue, with a reduction in sales attributed to Brand Search, Direct and Organic Search traffic, of around 20%. With Video, the fact that so few users click on ads is a challenge for attribution, where it is clear that an increase in Video views driving a statistically measurable increase in site visitors who convert. Social Prospecting meanwhile gets the best of both worlds, with roughly 50% of visitors buying from clicks to the ads and another passive 50% coming to buy just after seeing ads but not clicking.
Metageni have provided schuh with a detailed understanding of how their social and display marketing works together with other channels to drive sales. schuh continues to explore how to incorporate Social, Display and Video into the online marketing mix.
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