Multi-Touch Attribution Campaign Tracking with WebTrends

This article is a follow-up to the webinar

All web analytics platforms have some way of tracking marketing campaign performance usually out-of-the-box or with a little bit of set up. Generally they all do a pretty good job of this and provide key reports to make important business decisions about which campaigns to invest more money in, which to reduce spending on, and which to get rid of altogether. But often these decisions are made without insight into the whole picture. Why? The answer is simply because most campaign reports are set up in the industry standard way of attributing all conversions to the last or most recent campaign clicked. This is and has long been the industry standard, but it is time for a change as this method ignores the fact that people often go through multiple campaigns before converting.

So what other attribution options are there? And why wouldn’t I want to attribute conversion credit to the most recent campaign? – There are typically 3 options for campaign attribution:

1. Last Touch (Most recent campaign)
2. First Touch (Original campaign)
3. Multi-touch (All campaign touches)

Technically there are two options for multi-touch attribution. One option is to give full credit to all campaign touches and the other option is to give partial credit to each touch. For example, if 3 different campaign touches resulted in a sale of $30 you could credit each touch with $10. But for the purposes of this article we will focus on the full credit option. As for the question “why wouldn’t I want to attribute conversion credit to the most recent campaign?” – this is not really the right question to ask. The better question to ask is, “Do I have the best possible insight into the performance of my marketing campaigns?” The answer to that question is almost always “no” if you are only analyzing a single attribution method. So rather than replacing industry standard last touch reports, adding first touch and multi-touch to your arsenal of reports is the best course of action.

Fortunately for WebTrends users, there has been a great method for gaining insight into all campaign touches for quite some time although a little work up front is necessary to gain the full power of this. If you are already doing basic campaign tracking within WebTrends then the visitor history table is already turned on and with minimal effort you can set up two new custom reports which report on the first touch campaign and all campaign touches respectively. To do this you need to make use of two features of the visitor history table and create two new custom dimensions, one based on WT.vr.fc (the fc stands for “first campaign”) and another based on WT.vr.ac (the ac stands for “all campaigns”). Once you have the dimensions set up you create custom reports using those dimensions and whichever metrics you want applied. To make things easier, copy the existing campaign ID report and just change the dimension to base the report on.

The “first touch” report ends up looking nearly identical to the existing campaign ID report but the rows of data will be different since the revenue and other conversion credit is applied to the first campaign that referred the conversion as opposed to the last.

The “all touches” report is where you’ll notice more differences. You will see some or many (depending on the date range you have selected) rows of data that have multiple campaign IDs separated by semi colons. To view only the data that contains multiple campaign touches just filter the report by a semi colon.

So what do you do with this information? What does it all mean?
Spending some time with this new data will likely reveal some patterns you never had insight into before. For example, you may notice certain campaigns appear to perform poorly according to your traditional last touch reports but the same campaign’s performance as a first touch is much better, or vice versa. Since the first touch report is so similar to the out of the box campaign ID report it is fairly straightforward. The only difference is that the first touch gets the credit. The all touch reports are more complicated though. What I find most useful about this report is the ability to determine a campaign’s total reach and compare it to its absolute reach.  Take for example campaign ID 32. In the above screenshots you will notice that this campaign ID has $63,441 attributed to it as a last touch campaign, $35,839 attributed to it as a first touch campaign, and $82,036 attributed to it when you search for it in the all touches report (See fig. 4 below). What this data is telling us in this particular case is that:

• $63,441 in revenue was most recently referred by campaign 32
• Only $35,839 in revenue was initially referred by campaign 32
• But overall campaign 32 at least partially referred $82,036 in revenue

As you can see, there can be very significant differences in campaign performance depending on how you look at the data. Taking the easy way out and looking only at a single attribution method can lead to less than fully-informed decisions being made about your campaigns. What if you were relying solely on first-touch reports in this example? That could lead you to reduce your budget on campaign 32 when in reality it was performing much better than your first-touch report told you.

Ok, so all that is well and good but manually analyzing campaign IDs one at a time is a lot of work! Yes it certainly is using the methods I just provided as examples. But there is a much better way to approach this. Taking things a step further we can export each of these reports and combine them together in Excel using the campaign IDs as our key values. What we want to end up with is something like the following which will allow us to analyze first, last, and multi-touch all within a single interface.

In part two of this article I’ll show you how to set this all up in WebTrends. But for now, follow the steps discussed in this article to get these super handy reports in place so you’ll be ready for the next part.