Which is preferable, being first or last?

As an industry ‘hung up’ on its levels of accountability and ability to create massive amounts of data, digital marketing, in particular, the sector originally known as affiliate marketing has been very sluggish with its ability to leave the last-click attribution model. I’m sure we first started to record interactions based on last-click referral ID’s in the late 90’s. That was pretty much 20 years ago!!!!

Why have things not really moved on? Was it because it was too hard to pin acquisition costs to a less definable metric or was it because it wouldn’t have been in certain vendor’s interests? Whatever the reason, the industry’s reluctance to do so has most definitely caused it a few problems.

The primary challenge faced by a sector which measures itself by its ability to push someone to a shopping till is that fact that when the shopper pulls out their wallet and hands a voucher to the assistant, the store will then think that whoever passed the voucher to the consumer was entirely responsible for the sale. Whilst a valuable role has clearly been paid by the media owner, what about the other entities who took the shopper into the shopping centre, informed the shopper about the location of the store, showed them the enticing shop window or guided them through the departments within the store to the till? If these entities are completely unrewarded / ignored and the shopper only mentioned the people who handed it a voucher, they will stop helping the retailer. Eventually, this will have an effect on sales.

And so for retailers, we find ourselves in 2016 when the affiliate channel has become one which gravitates around entities who have incentivised users to convert. If I haven’t made my point clear enough, this is because if you are paying publishers on a last-click basis, the publishers who are as close to the point of conversion will inevitably claim the sale.

And this is a problem we discuss with brands day in day out. Some embrace vouchercode, cashback and incentive publishers because they fit their business profile, others abhor them and are desperate to forge relationships with content and lifestyle sites. My opinion, is that these publishers account for a large amount of traffic which makes them an important element of any media schedule.

What advertisers now need to do, and to be fair, are starting to, is to start evaluating their activity on a non-last click basis. Whilst there are a plethora of actions, levels of assistance and engagements we could look at, for the purpose of this illustration, let’s keep things simple and look at tracking first clicks as well.

By looking at how the shopper found out about the shopping centre as well as who sent them to the till, we are acknowledging that other entities have added value to the process. As all sales can be measured and we know which bus company brought the shopper, we can now start to advertise to more shoppers on their way. They may also have discount vouchers with them, they may even download them on their mobile phones en route. However, by recognising the value of the bus company alongside whatever the shopper hands over at the till, we have been able to incrementally increase the volume of transactions taken. Everybody wins. The shopper has a better experience as they were told about services they may have been left to find for themselves, the bus company are able to continue to run their routes and the retailer has generated more net sales. Simple. Yet it hasn’t happened within the affiliate  / referral channel. 

I was recently told that moving away from a last-click model wouldn’t be ‘as clean’. Paying on alternative engagements may not be as straight forward, however, I would rather know that my agency was driving a significant amount of incremental sales by tracking and rewarding publishers who are interacting with customers at alternative stages of their journey and helping my clients achieve their objectives.