Last click wins
17-11-2009
This month, I attended the Trade Doubler (TD) summit at the British Film Institute on London's South Bank. If nothing else, I can recommend the venue as a great place to stop by for lunch or a drink in their trendy "living room of the past" bar.
The TD summit attracted over 400 search and affiliate professionals from across the UK to discuss the latest developments and principles in search, but from my perspective the underlying theme was that of "last click wins". For the uninitiated, this principle states that the final click that a user makes (on a search engine, through a banner or a third party website) before a sale, a test drive, a sign-up etc. is solely responsible for that action. This is such an established issue in paid search marketing that it formed a 6-way panel discussion between industry experts. The panel consisted of:
If you don't have time to read any more about this principle, take a look at our short video which explains the Redweb Search approach on the subject. Otherwise read on...
If you don't measure all the clicks pre-sale, and assign part of the credit to all of these clicks (assuming only a reasonable number of clicks), you are not giving an accurate representation of the search journey. Invariably, the last click a user makes tends to be on a brand related term so "Trade Doubler" may be responsible for the hot lead, but maybe the user first found Trade Doubler by searching for "UK Affiliate Networks". If it was not for this first keyword, the user may not have found Trade Doubler at all, and therefore the lead may not have found its way to the Trade Doubler account manager. It could well have ended up at one of several other UK affiliate agencies. This is a very simple principle that we at Redweb Search abide by. However, I was amazed by the panel discussion where 4 of the 6 industry experts disagreed with this.
To me, it seemed the crux of the matter came down to data management. The client and/or agency were struggling to manage the data, so if a user made a purchase after being subject to several media campaigns (affiliate web site, organic search, paid search, banner campaigns, email campaigns, or even offline) or being offered various voucher codes on their travels around the web, how do they rationally attribute a sale?
Their argument seemed to be that it was easier to attribute it to the last click only (in simplified terms). This is doing a disservice to themselves in my opinion. Just because it is difficult to do, that does not mean you should bypass this principle. Redweb Search employs a data analyst for just such number crunching, but I agree that is not as simple in real life as it appears on this blog. Mark Mitchell, Head of Search and Affiliates at market leading media agency (personal opinion), OMD UK summed it up perfectly when he said...
"The reason why we are discussing it is that the solution is hard to find. We all have been struggling to find a way of accurately and fairly doing this for several years and we still have not arrived at our planned destination. We need to find the answer but until we do, we have to simplify things, and speaking from an agency perspective, we need to simplify the process to help us manage our campaigns for our clients on a daily basis" (That is pretty much what he said but possibly not word for word!)
I should add two things here. Firstly, Mark was an advocate FOR last click wins in the panel discussion. Secondly, I remember working with Mark back in 2004-5 when he was seconded to Manning Gottlieb OMD from WSPS, the original name for The Search Works, now td Search UK. Back then, we used to discuss the same problem of tracking and accountability across various adserving and tracking platforms when he was managing such accounts as the then glamorous Friends Reunited. Mark is a true expert in the field, and since leaving td Search UK, now ironically heads up OMD's interests in this area. It was strangely reassuring and at the same time alarming that there is still no solution to this problem. It was good to see the td Search UK old boy taking on his former employer, but at the same time it affirmed that we all have a long way to go to get our own house in order.
Julia Stent, Affiliate Marketing Manager at Vodafone affirmed what I consider to be the correct stance on multiple occasions. "We need to take baby steps to ensure we fix one channel at a time. Search is the first of these channels we need to lock down". (Forgive me Julia if it's not word for word. My short hand is terrible).
So, I left the conference knowing a little more than I did before. The fact that the 'last click' debate is far from over was for me, by far the most challenging. I will continue to explain how the last click principle is fundamentally wrong when I talk to our clients, so call me Geoffrey if you object (I will call you Janet, unless your name is Janet, in which case I will call you Barbara).
Dan's Redweb Search blog will return in "How the last click principle is fundamentally OK" at some point next week, and possibly followed the following week with "How the last click principle is definitely the way to go" *Sarcasm* (insert laughter here).
Written by: Dan Hills