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Last-Click Attribution? Come On Marketers, You Can Do Better Than That!

Attribution theory in marketing is basically about which marketing technique should take credit for the final conversion. Last-click attribution does not always represent the whole picture of which marketing techniques contribute to the conversion because the customer might be exposed to other marketing techniques before placing an order with the last click.

Not only that brands need to find out which channel brings the most conversion, but they also have other more in-depth needs such as allocating recourses and budget accordingly to optimize the whole marketing process. In that case, measuring only the final touchpoint or click that gives attribution to only the last channel fails to take the whole customer journey into account. It is simple to use last-click attribution to decide what is working and what is not. But the company will eventually miss out on many valuable customer behavior data and opportunities to better target consumers and allocate marketing budget for the campaigns.

Here is an example, there are three different female consumers, Angela, Beth, and Cathy. Each of them purchased Estee Lauder’s newly launched face cream last night. However, their decision-making journeys were quite different.

·      Angela saw an ad for the face cream on Facebook yesterday morning, so she clicked on the ad and spent some time looking through product details on Estee Launder’s website and wanted to try it out. However, she was late for class, so she did not place the order right away. After class, she was browsing online doing some research for her assignment. Then she saw a display ad for that face cream, so she clicked on the ad and made the purchase.

·      Beth is a big fan of this beauty influencer Zoe on Instagram. She loves the pictures and videos Zoe posts and believes in what she promotes and often buys the products endorsed by her. Yesterday, Beth saw Zoe posting about this new Estee Launder face cream, showcasing the beautiful package as well as the natural formula and organic ingredients. Beth was very interested in what Zoe said about the face cream and there was a promote code ZOE15 for 15% off in her post. Instead of clicking on the link in Zoe’s profile directly, Beth went to Estee Launder’s Instagram account to check out more information about the product then placed an order with Zoe’s promote code at checkout on Estee Lauder’s Instagram page.

·      Cathy knows Estee Lauder has recently launched a face cream since she has been seeing so many ads on social media, from the influencer she follows, with YouTube Pre-rolls and website display ads. After Cathy received this email from Estee Launder saying that her points for the loyalty program are about to expire, she clicked on the email and purchased that new face cream she’s been seeing a lot.

You can have thousands of different customers having distinct decision-making journeys. As the above examples suggest, the last click may not be the main reason that contributes to making the purchasing decision. In Beth’s case, she used the promote code ZOE15 at checkout. If the brand only takes the last click into account, then Estee Lauder’s Instagram design will be taking all the credit for this transaction while the influencer effect is actually the real reason behind it. It’s not that all the website building and social media page design do not matter but when multiple marketing techniques are used in a campaign, last-click attribution is not enough for precise analysis or a comprehensive result.

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What if Siri is the messenger of your ads?

Voice assistants on smart devices are changing people’s daily lives by enhancing personalization and emphasizing conversation. People learn from Siri what is the best restaurant nearby and ask Alexa to replenish their refrigerator of grocery. Now imagine what if Siri replies with your restaurant and Alexa places an order on the website of your grocery store right away. Advertising directly on voice assistants, sounds pretty good, right?

At this point, the major voice assistant players only allow a limited amount of indirect advertising on their platforms such as brand sponsorships. I was thinking what if someday we could advertise directly on Siri or other voice assistants with results that are targeted precisely and personalized enough that customers will be happy to get the ads instead of being annoyed. In that case, the ads should first be screened by the ad service providers to be authentic before getting put out on voice assistants, because the performance of the ads will be tied closely to the level of customer satisfaction as well as user experience of the voice assistants.

This idea is surely made for direct response: adopting AI to make Siri your personal assistant for shopping. When Siri gives you the result, you can ask for more information according to the product, the company will provide the data and info and Apple will make it compatible with Siri. For example, you want to book a night at a hotel in Miami, so you ask Siri looking for a hotel that has a private beach. Siri gives you the promoted result, Four Season Miami Beach. Then you can easily ask Siri to tell you what kind of rooms you can get on next Saturday, and how much for each, what kind of other services comes with the room. Just like a conversation, and after making your decision, you can place an order with Siri and Siri of course, will follow up your trip before, during, and after, also stand by for any question possible.

On the other hand, of course, there are a lot of factors that need to be discussed and many technical issues to be dealt with, including most importantly, privacy and customer consensus of data use. Customer privacy has always been a long-term existing argument for digital marketing. Especially with this idea of advertising on voice assistants directly, in order to accomplish a personalized experience, it requires access to the information on people’s smart devices of their location, browser records, and shopping history, etc. Undoubtedly, developers will have to invest a lot of time and effort in building a database, researching for customer insights, and testing on their general acceptance of such service embedded in their personal voice assistants. However, as people spending more and more time on their smart devices and with the growing market of voice assistants, I believe it won’t be too long until the day we see a little “promoted” sign on Siri’s interface.

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5 SEO Tactics to Maximize Internal Links and Save You Money

https://moz.com/blog/maximize-internal-links

5 SEO Tactics to Maximize Internal Links — Whiteboard Friday

By Cyrus Shepard

Internal links are hyperlinks that interlink different pages on the same domain. They are usually used for website navigation and Interlinks drive the visitors from one page to another page when they are on a website. The internal links help spread ranking power from the main page to other different sub-pages across the website. Also, optimizing the use of internal links helps the webpages to be better detected by search engines.

In this article, the author Cyrus Shepard introduces five SEO tactics to maximize the internal links on a website. To begin with, Shepard indicates that internal links are a good tool to use for pursuing engagement on the website because they create more opportunities for visitors to go to other relevant pages on the website which in a way helps improve engagement. The second tip he gives is to link pages that are extremely topical relevant. Pages that are interlinked with a high topical relevance help to get the right ranking boost to the right pages. Based on a Google patent called Topical PageRank, the more topically relevant the links are, the more value the pass. The third tip given by the author is to add context to the internal links instead of just simply adding a link to a piece of relevant text right after finding it. Links with text or images added around are more likely to draw people’s attention and help get detected by Google as relevant links in order to pass more value.

The next advice the author gives is what I found interesting that using natural words to make every link unique. I have always assumed that links that stick to the same anchor text are more likely to be detected by search engines to improve SEO. However, Shepard clarifies that Google actually creates a process to detect this kind of over-optimization with exact match anchor text and regard it as ranking manipulation. Thus, he suggests creating unique internal links using natural words to avoid that.

Getting rid of the links with less value is the last tip. Because with a certain amount of PageRank a page has, adding more links on a page will diminish the value passed through each link. Links that are not engaging or relevant enough and with limited clicks are the low-value links that should be eliminated.

The above five tactics are given by Cyrus Shepard to optimize the potentials of internal links on a website. I found this article interesting to read and also have learned something new.

Additional reference: https://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link 

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How come some people NEVER respond to email surveys?

Here is a transactional email I received from Expedia.com where I booked my roundtrip flights from New York to Miami last Thanksgiving. It was a survey email asking me to rate my flights with American Airlines. To be honest, I am the kind of person who does not enjoy taking long surveys that much. Most of the time, I only respond to short text surveys where I only need to type in a “5” for “I am satisfied with the service”. Not because I was born lazy but most of the surveys I clicked on from my inbox before were just either asking irrelevant questions or were 10 pages long and expected me to fill in with a 3-paragraph answer or the worst-case scenario, the survey was not compatible with a smartphone browser. Personally, I just don’t feel that any situation I mentioned above is a good way to follow up with an order or after-sales service.

Let’s get back to the Expedia email. The email layout was designed to make the process look simple and easy I assume, because it looks like the only thing I have to do is to click on a smiley face or a frown face to express my feelings (good or bad) towards this trip. That’s what I thought at the first glance, so I clicked on the happy face. Then unsurprisingly, nothing stops just at clicking on a smiley face; it directed me to a webpage to take the whole survey. When the page was loading, I was thinking that whatever, I had a great time, it won’t hurt to answer some questions. 

A few seconds later when the loading was finished, the whole page fit in a smartphone screen pretty good at first. Then I noticed this “show us your human side”. Huh, well… Then I also noticed on the top of the page that I could open this webpage in the Expedia App, so I clicked on that. Well again, it failed to open this page in the App. After these two little episodes, I just didn’t feel like taking the survey anymore and just closed up all the tabs.

From my point of view, companies have to simplify the process of email surveys, from the email layout to the loading time of the landing page and login process and the survey itself (which I did not even get to in this Expedia case).  Learning about consumer behaviors of taking surveys and optimizing the whole process for them based on customer insights would increase CTR and the level of survey completeness as well as the accuracy of the survey results.

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Two social media platforms a brand MUST know before entering the Chinese market

WeChat, the NO.1 social media platform in China, has the largest group of users of all ages across the country. WeChat is such an all in one platform that you can almost do everything with it. What is interesting about WeChat is that it originally started as a closed social platform that was basically about you and the people you friended, then it evolved to be this all-around app that now works as your smart wallet, where you get your daily dose of news and where you do your shopping, and almost any other things you can think of in life, you can get it done on WeChat. In my opinion, it is the social media platform where consumers have all 5 motivations (bridging, bonding, communicating, discovering, and taking action) to use.

So, how can marketers play with WeChat and utilize its features? Here are some things you can do as a brand. First, open an official account for the brand. A brand can operate its official WeChat account like most other social media but with more fun elements to leverage in terms of content and design. I will dig into this with an example of the Italian fashion brand PINKO which I am currently working with. After people follow PINKO on WeChat, they will receive post notifications from PINKO and get access to other information about the brand such as a retail store locator and an online store. (see the picture below for details)

Other than creating a great UI for the main page, the posts are another essential thing that marketers can play with to improve brand awareness, build up a stronger customer relationship, and eventually drive conversion rate. When I said “play with” the posts earlier, I meant it because there are just so many different things you can do with the WeChat posts in terms of both content and design. On WeChat, posts are no longer so standard and boring as only having the audience swipe left and right to see product pictures and videos, they are “one-paged” articles that come with various interactive design formats.

(Here are some examples of PINKO WeChat posts with different design styles if you are interested. Posts were originally optimized for visual presentation on mobile devices, scan the QR code on the right to view the post on your phone.)

Lucia Heffernan collaboration post in landscape orientation design format: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/It6Auk5A3DZgy-3q5n-6Ng

Chinese Valentine’s Day post with a click-and-show SVG effect and a lucky draw event: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/FUvTRLoamrV4B-wbZH2KAg

Marina collection post with a swipe-left effect on the model looks: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/D34SKQwWpKNA0SVVvI7yUA

For PINKO, our posts are mostly made for showcasing a new collection and latest in-store arrivals, announcing exhibitions and events, warming up for the upcoming promotion period, etc. We have also embedded our content with hot social topics to better draw audiences’ attention as well as with lucky draw events with incentives such as coupons and gifts to encourage engagement and build up a closer relationship with the target audience. Other than putting tags on the product pictures in the posts to direct readers to our WeChat online store, we can also drive traffic for other e-commerce platforms such as JD.com and T-mall during major promotion events to boost sales. Apart from owned media, brands can also get paid media on WeChat of product placement in posts from other popular accounts and advertisements such as display ads in Moments and banner ads in posts. (see the picture below for examples)

Enough about WeChat, next let’s talk about RED. As the rising star of social media among young generations in China, RED, different from other established public platforms, is known for its tonality of recommendations and guides. RED is like a friend you would turn to for some advice every time before buying something, but instead of getting one piece of advice from one person, you are getting thousands from all users across the platform. The posts on Red are called notes and the majority of them are UGC and the rest are from brands. While users from other social platforms love reading from the official accounts, things are quite opposite on RED that people prefer digging into notes created by other regular people, which seem to be more genuine and relatable. You can find everything from outfit recommendation, makeup tutorials, workout tips to even Cancun travel guides. If you ever wanted some answers to anything about everyday life, RED would be your go-to app.

Marketers can utilize the special characteristics of RED by maintaining a brand account as well as collaborating with KOLs(key opinion leaders) and KOCs(key opinion customers). There are no traditional ads like banner ads or display ads on RED, instead what marketers usually do is to produce celebrity/KOL/KOC product seeding content to improve brand awareness and optimize search on related keywords to increase the exposure of brand-related notes. (see the picture below for details)

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Here is an ad I got when I was scrolling down my Instagram feeds. It’s a video ad from Wendy’s showcasing their breakfast menu. The ad was a short video of around 10 seconds. I felt like it’s more of a GIF ad than a typical video ad because, during the 10-second video, the only things that changed or moved were the words in the back and the color of the background. The background changed from black to orange and red to visualize the sunrise to remind people to have breakfast at Wendy’s. It is straightforward and reasonable why they did that, but they did not make this video ad attractive enough to me.

In my opinion, one of the advantages of video ads is that they show movements and multiple frames that are created to tell a story. This Wendy’s ad did not utilize that feature of videos at all since there is no movement or changes involved with the most important thing in the frame, the honey butter chicken biscuit. I think this ad can do much more than just notifying or reminding the audience that the honey butter chicken biscuit is on the breakfast menu if a video was used.

If I were to make this video ad more effective, I would focus on the products more. For example, the video can show the honey butter chicken biscuit, seasoned potatoes, and coffee all these different breakfast items, on rotation or adopt a sliding-in effect to have the product images speak to the audience directly instead of just putting words in the background because Instagram users are heavy consumers of visual presentation in a way that images are more attractive to them than words. Other than simply making a product presentation to the audience, the video can also be about why the breakfast menu at Wendy’s is different from other places. For instance, the ad can show what’s special about the honey butter chicken biscuit such as the maple honey butter flavor, the seasoned chicken fillet or how does the biscuit taste like. Any of the different features of the product or even price can or should be emphasized in the video ad to draw the audience’s attention and tell them what’s the benefits of having breakfast at Wendy’s.

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Location-based Marketing

Location-based marketing is a strategy of mobile marketing by targeting specific users based on their location and it is now applied widely thanks to the significantly increasing use of mobile over recent years. The rise of location-based marketing is largely due to the portability of mobile devices as well as the internet and GPS use through these devices. Nowadays people carry their smartphones with them everywhere they go, and this can be used by advertisers to target the right customers in a time and location sensitive way. Generally, the application of location-based marketing only involves collection of anonymizing data using beacons and GPS technology which means only non-personally identifiable information (Non-PII) such as IP address and device IDs that cannot be used to identify any individual will be collected. By leveraging the location information through the users’ mobile devices, companies can send out regionally relevant offerings to customers to achieve campaign goals.

One of the techniques of location-based marketing is geofencing. Geofencing, defined by Techopedia, is “A technology that defines a virtual boundary around a real-world geographical area.” The way companies implement a geofencing strategy is that they set up a virtual geofence around an offline store. When a potential customer walks into the fenced area, the system will receive the GPS signal from the customer’s smartphone and trigger the automatic response to send out a related in-store promotion message or a notification push to draw this customer’s attention.

Another location-based marketing technique is called geo-conquesting, which is similar to geofencing but instead of creating a fence around your own stores, you fence a competitor place. In that way when a potential customer walks into the competition fenced area, the ad response service would be triggered to send out related promotion messages or notification of your store to attract the customer away from your competitor.

There are a lot of examples of companies applying location-based marketing strategies in their campaigns. One of them would be when the supermarket chain Whole Foods once partnered with Thinknear to place geofences around several Whole Foods store locations and competitor stores nearby. Whole Foods sent out promotion ads and special offers to targeted customers who passed by the stores to improve brand awareness of new store openings and to drive traffic into these stores. They also used geo-conquesting to target customers around competitor store areas with promotion ads to attract them away from the competing grocery stores by incentivizing them to shop at a Whole Foods store nearby for better deals. The two techniques were implemented mostly during weekends when most people shop for groceries for Whole Foods to not only maintain a great relationship with existing customers but also reach a potential customer base from the competitors at the right time and the right place. By integrating both geo-fencing and geo-conquesting into the campaign, Whole Foods achieved a 4.69% post-click conversion rate which was three times higher than the national average of 1.43%.

As far as I am concerned, retail businesses can utilize location-based marketing strategies to build up a better customer relationship and also to engage with the competitor’s customers and have the chance to win over potential customers by advertising to them at the right place and the right time.

Works Cited

Blair, Ian. “What is Geofencing” https://buildfire.com/what-is-geofencing/.

Chamberlain, Lauryn. “GeoMarketing 101: What Is Geoconquesting?” GeoMarketing, Yext, 4 Apr. 2016, http://www.geomarketing.com/geomarketing-101-what-is-geoconquesting.

Girish, Devika. “Location-based marketing examples: 4 brands that are winning” Beaconstac, 5, Dec. 2019, https://blog.beaconstac.com/2016/04/4-brands-that-are-winning-at-location-based-marketing-and-how/

https://www.marketingevolution.com/knowledge-center/topic/marketing-essentials/location-based-marketing

https://www.toolbox.com/marketing/customer-data/articles/what-is-customer-data/

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UI/UX - Sephora

The other day when I was doing research for a case study, I saw this display ad. It was an ad from Sephora, showcasing different beauty products such as foundation, lipstick and powder, etc. When I clicked on the ad, it took me to the product page of this FENTY foundation.

As you can see the web page is well designed for customers to shop. It has all the details about the product from the ad that I clicked on. There are a variety of colors and shades available, and you can see how different shades work on the skin from the model look. It also has this Shade Finder feature to help customers find the right shade for them. You can add the product to basket or save it to loves. You can have the product shipped to you or easily reserve online and pick it up at a store near you. Plus, you can get free shipping on your order with a promo code at checkout.  You can pay in full price for $35 or in 4 interest-free payments of $8.75 provided by Klarna. There is a customer review section when you scroll down the page, which would also help making the purchasing decision. If you are not interested in this specific product which the ad lands on, you can go to the menu bar to see products from other categories or simply type in a brand or a product name in the search bar on the top of this page.

The ad is basically showcasing the products from Sephora. The UI of the landing page is clear and very informative and helps with that purpose. The elements on the web page are clearly and reasonably displayed and together they deliver a nice overall user experience. However, since there is no deals or discount involved, I think the call to action is relatively weak.

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NIKE “You Can’t Stop Us”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA4dDs0T7sM 

As the third film launched by NIKE in its “You Can’t Stop Us” Campaign, this commercial features a split screen stitching together footages of a total 53 athletes from different races with 24 sports represented. This ad also includes scenes of empty stadiums and cancelled events due to the COVID-19 pandemic, protest events from BlackLivesMatter Movement and the narrator, American soccer player Megan Rapinoe concludes in the end that “No matter how bad it gets, we will always come back stronger, because nothing can stop what we can do together ”. NIKE released this ad to coincide with the return of NBA games and sent out an inspiring message that adversity is not stopping sports or any athletes in the world.

What NIKE does in this commercial, as also in their previous commercials, is that they always combine their content with both famous athletes from major sports events such as LeBron James, Naomi Osaka, Serena Williams and Colin Kaepernick and regular people from everyday life scenarios. Personally, I find this approach to be more inspiring and also more relatable to the general audience compared to commercials only showcasing just celebrities or regular people alone. That also aligns with NIKE’s value and their mission “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world. *If you have a body, you are an athlete.”

However, there is also controversy about this ad. There is one footage in this ad that features a Muslim lady in Niqab on a skateboard while the narrative says, “If we don’t fit the sport, we’ll change the sport”. A lot of people found this inappropriate and offensive that NIKE, as a company claiming to promote sports and equality in any kind, is actually indicating that some people with religious beliefs don’t fit a sport. This led to a lot of backfires on the internet and some people even said that they would boycott the brand.

On one hand, I would say that it is definitely a successful ad in figures since it has created a great social buzz (both positive and negative) after its release on July 30 and already reached over 58 million views on YouTube. On the other hand, I don’t think that there could be any excuses for NIKE to be this insensitive to release an ad like this, given the fact that they are the largest sportswear company in the world and own a global customer base. I just feel like when companies want to advocate something, especially when it comes to this kind of subjects that they might not be so familiar with, they have to be extremely careful and make sure to get the full picture and to be educated about the subject matter before putting out anything public. Ignorance can sure offend and hurt people and lead to bad outcomes, not to mention if you are a company that runs business globally.

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Digital Marketing, is it better for branding or for direct response?

In my opinion, Digital marketing is a great approach for both branding and direct response. Consumers are exposed to abundant information about different brands and products every day from digital channels like TV, broadcast, and social media. Because of that, companies nowadays have put a lot of money and effort into digital branding to improve brand awareness. These digital channels are also the go-to places when customers are trying to learn and know more about a specific product or brand. The use of digital marketing helps a brand to showcase not only its products but also its brand value as well as build up a consistent brand image through various digital media channels.

On the other hand, direct response is also another feature that digital marketing can utilize better compared to traditional marketing when it comes to product review and consumer interaction. Many consumers rely on product reviews from other customers during the decision- making process, and even the brand’s response to those reviews can influence their purchasing decision. Moreover, interaction with consumers on these platforms is essential to build up a deeper connection with them and to further increase the conversion rate.

Take the client I am currently working with as an example; PINKO as a fashion brand focuses on delivering branding content across different digital media platforms such as their official website, social media pages, and E-commerce websites. At the same time, they also pay attention to the interaction with customers across these platforms, including responding to customers’ inquiries, reacting to fans’ comments on social media, and replying to customers’ product reviews. Existing customers would be more satisfied with the product and customer services after getting a response directly from the brand while potential customers would also see the effort the brand makes to communicate with its consumers, which can also be seen as another way of branding. Thus, I believe that a company should take both branding and direct response into consideration when developing its digital marketing strategy.