Attribution Week: Your Website and Paid Search

Take a good, hard look at the "All Other Online Demand" row in this table.


Which column has the best performance for the online channel?


The website is pulled in two opposite directions.

1. Catalogs cause website demand to happen.
2. Emails significantly cannibalize website demand.

Pure website demand is the most elastic of any channel.  Some forms of marketing drive a customer to a website, while other forms of marketing drive the customer away from the website.

It is easy to understand the impact of Catalogs and Email Marketing on website demand.  All we have to do is execute mail/holdout tests.

In Paid Search, it's important to geo-target.  You see, we want to measure the impact that Paid Search has on all other channels.  To this point, we've described the impact that Catalogs and Email Marketing have on Paid Search.

You can set up a brief test ... geo-target specific areas, then execute normal Paid Search activities vs. minimal Paid Search spend, and overlay this with Email mail/holdout test results.

This will clearly tell you how important Paid Search is to all other channels.

Ok, given what you've learned this week (and it is a lot), answer these questions.

1. Do you currently have this level of business intelligence at your company?
2. If the answer is "no", are you willing to execute the tests necessary to answer these questions?
3. If the answer to both questions is "no", please describe in the comments section why you don't think you need to answer these questions?  Go!!