Back in December, I made put forth my predictions for 2008, with #11 being “Conversion attribution will be a big bone of contention”. That’s about to happen. Only now, thanks to Microsoft, it’s called “Engagement Mapping”.
Conversion attribution and/or engagement mapping is basically this. When we buy something, it is often because we’ve been inluenced by several marketing messages from different channels. The online arena offers little measurable sense of exactly what made someone buy, but an (almost) exact sense of where someone came from (a search? a banner?). So, conversion attribution and/or engagement mapping is basically is the call for the revenue from an ecommerce transaction to be dispersed amongst the marketing channels according to some sort of formulaic attribution system of that tries to weigh the influence of each channel. In Microsoft’s version – I’ll stick with engagement mapping – only online channels are mentioned.
This seems to address a issue of real concern, but it fails to address the whole picture. As a result, we’re likely to see an upcoming battle of Titans.
The problem I have with it is that Microsoft will be trying to implement industry wide measurement metrics – more than likely specifically designed in its favor – to get inside our heads and measure the amount of influence all of these marketing channels had when we buy something. I’d rather see something like this worked out by a consortium of companies in the online advertising space.
In all honesty, the current system is a skewed. In the pay-for performance world, which is heavily slanted toward search, we never really know what factors led to that click. I’ve long believed in search, but have had a hard time thinking a small text ad worked wonders all by itself.
Controversy will rise up big time if this becomes standard because Micorsoft’s rival, Google, will stand to lose the most. And that loss could be huge. That’s because EM will be taking into account online display advertising such as banners and boxes and skyscrapers. They have been much derided with their low click thru rates, something that I’ve always have felt was unfair. To me, it’s never taken into account any branding aspects or simple enhancement of name recognition. While Microsoft obviously has a foothold in the search arena, they are players in display advertisng as well. This will be even more true if their attempts to buy Yahoo prove to be successful.
Now it will be Microsoft’s challenge to convince the ad industry to play along. Advertisers – angencies and internal marketing managers may go for EM because it could allegedly give them a more quantifiable measure of marketing ROI spend.
But this cuts right into Google’s business model. They’ll be losing money because yesterday, someone saw a banner ad for a product and today they’re on Google because they put in a industry related keyword and came up with a text ad. But there really is no telling how much weight each played in the purchase. At best, I don’t think we’re there yet.
Microsoft’s plan is short on detail. Look for a lot of headed discussion on this issue. I’ll be following it intensely.
