Many marketers today face an old and familiar problem: proving results to the executive team to garner support and budget for marketing activities. Fortunately, the advent of marketing attribution has brought us closer to fulfilling this quest, providing marketers with a lot more control, infinitely more data, and the ability to deliver far more accountability for marketing dollars.

But while many marketers have embraced attribution as an essential tool in their toolkit, others have been slower to adopt attribution technology due to a perception that it can be difficult to implement and maintain. While attribution does require a shift in your approach, there are three important steps you can take to help navigate the organizational and logistical changes needed to adopt and operationalize attribution:

Change the way you think about—and reward—marketing success.

Today, many marketing organizations operate in silos that are split across products, brands and/or channels. These individuals or teams typically work independently and with their own set of metrics that they use to report on conversions and return on ad spend to senior management. Often, their objectives—and therefore their incentives/compensation—are also tied to these same independent metrics.

Marketing attribution breaks down these organizational silos, taking into account all marketing channels and how they relate to each other. Because of the increased accountability and measurability that attribution delivers, some aspects of your marketing mix (and the appropriate teams responsible) that haven’t been working well may be uncovered, as well as areas that have been working better than perceived. Preparing your organization for attribution means shifting the focus away from individual or channel goals and instead towards the overall goals of your marketing ecosystem. It also means rewarding those that manage it based on overall success, rather than individual success.

Walk before you run.

Unlike traditional measurement techniques, attribution relies on all available data to determine how much credit each marketing touchpoint in each channel deserves for each conversion. The more data you have, the better the insights, which lead to better campaigns and more conversions. Yet organizations are often paralyzed into thinking they need perfect data in order to yield great returns from an attribution solution.

In reality, most organizations have more data ready and available than they realize. When implementing attribution, start with those channels that have easily accessible data and the most spend. Search and display are good places to start since these channels typically meet the data accessibility as well as spend criteria, and the two channels significantly influence one another. Once some initial results have been realized, those early successes can be used to build a data strategy and roadmap for expansion into additional channels where data may not be so easily available.

Find a guide for your journey.

Marketing attribution processes all sorts of marketing performance data whose results must be analyzed and interpreted correctly in order to be acted on effectively. If you have the capability in-house, assign responsibility for attribution to someone that has practical expertise applying the insights derived from advanced analytics, like a marketing analyst or data scientist. If you don’t have the capability in-house, make sure the attribution technology partner you hire is capable of helping you navigate the changes needed to operationalize attribution. These experts should work with your team and, if applicable, your agency to drive alignment around operational and logistical issues like team structure, workflows, compensation tied to performance, and training.

It’s a new era in marketing measurement. By embracing these three important steps, you’ll be better prepared to harness the potential of marketing attribution—and the significant competitive advantage it offers.

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This 30-minute on-demand video, available to view at your convenience, is a recording of a presentation at the JUMP Conference held in London, UK. It features Visual IQ Executive Director Adit Abhyankar and Facebook EMEA Measurement Lead, Mark Bulling exploring current best practices on how to approach social attribution to deliver advertising success on Facebook, and how it fits in with a broader cross channel marketing measurement and optimization strategy.

Needham, Mass. – November 25, 2013 - Visual IQ, the leading cross channel marketing attribution software provider, today announced the formal launch of Vision^™, its certified partnership program. The program enables brands and agencies to leverage a variety of omni-channel marketing technology and service solutions that have a structured integration with, and/or have a proven skillset in using, Visual IQ’s IQ Intelligence Suite.

Brands are increasingly using data to inform a personalized, contextually relevant experience for each customer, across both online and offline channels, as well as across devices. To realize this omni-channel strategy, brands and their agencies go through a continuous cycle of buying, tracking, reporting, analyzing and optimizing media purchases they put back in market. An entire ecosystem of advertising technology and service providers exists to support various pieces of this cycle. It’s comprised of hundreds of players in a dozen or so different categories, such as: tag management, web analytics, real time buying, data management platforms and more.

Attribution plays a central role in every omni-channel strategy, as it ingests data from many of the platforms that make up this ecosystem, quantifies the true impact of every marketing touchpoint across the entire purchase funnel on producing a conversion, and then transmits attributed data back to the media buying solutions within the ecosystem to deploy optimized buys. So marketing attribution effectively enables, or is enabled by, all the partner solutions that make up this ecosystem.

Visual IQ has formalized its Vision partnership program to carefully vet advertising technology and service providers, ensuring they have met a strict set of standards for integrating their solutions with Visual IQ’s, as well as have demonstrated a proficiency at utilizing Visual IQ’s products. For marketers, this means smoother, more efficient and more accurate execution of their omni-channel marketing tactics and strategies.

“We are seeing an explosion in the number of brands and agencies developing omni-channel marketing strategies, and we’re pleased to introduce Vision, our partnership program that formalizes the integration of our industry leading marketing attribution products with a broad variety of advertising technology and services providers, many of whom they already use,” said Manu Mathew, Visual IQ CEO and co-founder. “This initiative will help our clients navigate and succeed in an omni-channel world by providing access to the best-of-the-best technologies and services in concert with their attribution platform."

To learn more about Visual IQ’s partner program or to inquire about becoming a partner, please email partners@visualiq.com.

About Visual IQ

Visual IQ produces the world’s most powerful cross channel marketing attribution software products. As a pioneer in the space, the company has been offering products since 2006. Its SaaS-based IQ Intelligence Suite reveals cross channel performance insights hidden deep within companies’ marketing data, providing actionable recommendations and optimized media plans to improve marketing effectiveness. These recommendations enable marketers and agencies to adjust their advertising strategies and tactics to significantly increase marketing ROI across their entire marketing mix – both online and offline. The functionality behind these products combines a powerful, user-friendly interface with multi-dimensional fractional attribution science and predictive analytics that clearly and accurately show marketers where opportunities exist for improvement.

Visual IQ was named a leader in both interactive attribution and cross channel attribution by a leading market research firm in 2012, a finalist in the Best Sales & Marketing Intelligence Software category of the 2013 CODiE Awards, and a finalist in the Most Influential Agency/Vendor category of the 2013 Digital Analytics Association Excellence Awards. The company is a member of the Advertising Technology, Data, Public Policy and CFO Councils of the IAB, as well as on the Standards Committee of the Digital Analytics Association.

Visual IQ is a sponsor.

Visual IQ is a sponsor.

Visual IQ is a sponsor.

Visual IQ is a sponsor.

Visual IQ is a sponsor.

Visual IQ is a sponsor.

Despite the widespread use of email, quantifying its impact is still perplexing for many marketers. Most often, the value of email is determined by opens and clicks. However, if an email influences a prospective customer to later search for and make a purchase, shouldn’t it be considered a success and be given some of the credit?

Just because a consumer saw an email in their inbox but didn’t open or click it doesn’t mean it wasn’t influential in terms of building awareness and consideration. Taking email beyond opens and clicks to understanding its true value means you need visibility into the impact that email has on other marketing channels and on the success of your overall marketing mix.

Uncovering Email’s Hidden Power

A recent study published by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) illustrates the value of email beyond the click, uncovering that email marketing can be a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal. The study, conducted over an 11-month period, compared average daily revenue from all marketing channels on days when emails were sent, to average daily revenue from all marketing channels on days on which no emails were sent. If email didn’t influence (or wasn’t influenced by) other marketing channels, the average daily revenue would be the same. However, the study showed an average revenue increase of 21.5% on days with email.

Avoid Overlooking & Undervaluing

So how can you make sure email gets the true credit it deserves? Advanced attribution can provide you with insight not only into how your email campaigns have historically performed individually, but also their ROI efficacy in relation to other online channels, such as search and display, and even offline channels such as television and print. Here are a few important practices to follow when putting attribution to work for your email campaigns:

1. Define your objectives. Attribution can help to answer many marketing questions, so it’s essential to understand what’s important to you and your particular business KPIs so you can define and measure your email marketing goals accordingly. For instance, do you want your email program to generate brand impressions and influence purchase decisions, or do you want it to directly generate new leads and sales?
2. Stop thinking in silos. Most marketers recognize that today's consumers are jumping from one channel to another to browse and buy, so to silo the measurement of email marketing effectiveness would mean missing the influence that’s exerted between these channels. Attribution not only gives you a more precise measurement of how your email campaigns performed individually, but also within the context of your multi-channel ecosystem, so you can easily identify opportunities for optimization both within individual email campaigns and across your entire marketing mix.
3. Find the right sequence. Rudimentary metrics like opens and clicks fail to capture the whole picture. Email isn’t always the “closer” in the consumer conversion funnel — it can also be an “opener” or “advancer” within that process. Advanced attribution enables marketers to not only understand the function that email plays in the sales funnel, but in which sequence emails and other tactics should be executed in order to maximize performance.
4. Test early and often. For email to have its intended impact requires combining effective creative with intelligent messaging. Fortunately, email marketing provides the opportunity to test a wide range of creative and messaging variants relatively inexpensively. The multi-dimensional nature of the analysis that attribution provides — and the granular nature of the insights it delivers — enable you to easily identify which variations of messaging, call to action, offer, creative, etc., will have the greatest impact toward your specific ecosystem-wide goals.

For more successful email marketing, it’s time to move away from flawed metrics like opens and clicks. With advanced attribution, you benefit from actionable insights that not only maximize the effectiveness of your email marketing programs, but your overall marketing mix.

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Needham, Mass. – December 18, 2013 - Visual IQ, the leading cross channel marketing attribution software provider and BlueKai, the only independent SaaS solution for marketing data management, analysis and activation, today announced that the companies have formalized their long-standing partnership to provide more robust, actionable data on the reach and effectiveness of a brand’s marketing efforts. As part of the company’s respective partner programs, BlueKai’s Data Management Platform will integrate with Visual IQ’s IQ Intelligence Suite to provide their shared customers with a richer understanding of the specific audiences and respective tactics that will be most effective in exceeding marketing goals. The combined solution will also provide a deeper level of audience intelligence required to realize the omni-channel vision of delivering personalized, contextually relevant customer experiences across multiple channels and devices.

Brands and agencies can seamlessly unite first and third-party audience intelligence from the BlueKai Data Management Platform, such as purchase intent, behavioral, demographic and site or media conversion information, with algorithmically attributed performance metrics within the Audience IQ product of the IQ Intelligence Suite. This results in a clearer understanding of the characteristics of the audiences with the highest propensity to convert as well as those with the highest lifetime value, and the optimal combination of marketing tactics to produce the greatest performance. Furthermore, the joint offering enables marketers to take action on their attribution analysis and feed it real-time back to the BlueKai DMP to power more informed media targeting, site optimization and beyond. Armed with this information, marketers can then optimize audience strategies and programs on an ongoing basis to ensure optimal marketing ROI.

“Aligning demographic, behavioral and other audience data with cross channel performance insights creates a closed loop process that allows marketers to replicate the strategies that are delivering optimal results and eliminate or refine those that aren’t,” said Manu Mathew, CEO and co-founder of Visual IQ. “It’s a natural synergy among both companies’ technologies, and after vetting the benefits of a joint offering with several clients already, we are happy to formally certify BlueKai as a partner so that even more of our joint customers can reap the full benefits of the vigorous audience insights and actionable data they provide.”

The solution is already providing value to shared Visual IQ-BlueKai customers in the financial services and travel and hospitality sectors. Brands and agencies who currently deploy Visual IQ’s IQ Intelligence Suite or the BlueKai Data Management platform can easily upgrade to the joint offering to better understand which audiences drive the highest ROI and then leverage optimized audience targeting, media and creative to do more of what works.

“BlueKai is dedicated to making data marketing meaningful and actionable everywhere – a crucial part of this is the ability to attribute success to audiences that convert so marketers can do more of what works,” said John Sedlak, SVP of Global Sales at BlueKai. “We know from experience that attribution helps unlock the true potential of the audience data and our partnership with Visual IQ is a major strategic step toward providing the action-based insights necessary to deploy effective omni-channel data-driven strategies.”

About Visual IQ

Visual IQ produces the world’s most powerful cross channel marketing attribution software products. As a pioneer in the space, the company has been offering products since 2006. Its SaaS-based IQ Intelligence Suite reveals cross channel performance insights hidden deep within companies’ marketing data, providing actionable recommendations and optimized media plans to improve marketing effectiveness. These recommendations enable marketers and agencies to adjust their advertising strategies and tactics to significantly increase marketing ROI across their entire marketing mix – both online and offline. The functionality behind these products combines a powerful, user-friendly interface with multi-dimensional fractional attribution science and predictive analytics that clearly and accurately show marketers where opportunities exist for improvement.

Visual IQ was named a leader in both interactive attribution and cross channel attribution by a leading market research firm in 2012, a finalist in the Best Sales & Marketing Intelligence Software category of the 2013 and 2014 CODiE Awards, and a finalist in the Most Influential Agency/Vendor category of the 2013 Digital Analytics Association Excellence Awards. The company is a member of the Advertising Technology, Data, Public Policy and CFO Councils of the IAB, as well as on the Standards Committee of the Digital Analytics Association.

About BlueKai

BlueKai is Big Data for Marketing. The BlueKai Data Activation System enables marketers and publishers to use what they know to power what they do, turning insights into action, and driving higher efficiency & performance in their marketing. Through data activation, our enterprise-level SaaS solution unites fragmented data sources to drive omni-channel data aggregation and targeting. BlueKai's customers use data to analyze, advertise, optimize and monetize their audiences in ways that were previously unavailable to them and with BlueKai's "data unchained" methodology, your customized data segmentation can be leveraged anywhere and is not restricted to any single channel. BlueKai has been delivering big data-driven marketing solutions since 2008 to many Fortune 500 brands.