Leveraging data for display attribution and partner procurement

Finding the right partners needs a data-driven approach

Finding a marketing partner who aligns with your business objectives is harder than ever. A strategic marketing partner creates efficiencies for advertisers while increasing the ROI of their activities. But how can advertisers put science behind these decisions?

The answer is Marketing Intelligence.

Marketing Intelligence lets advertisers connect analytics to media activation and inform marketing decisions. It provides a strategic framework within which advertisers can make media partner procurement decisions.

Many technology vendors offer data-driven marketing solutions. But what are the factors you should look for when deciding which partners can really drive more outcomes for your business?

Performing a head-to-head comparison is an important way to determine which marketing partner is best equipped to efficiently drive revenue. We use advertisers’ Google Analytics attribution data across all running partners to help them gauge the efficiency of partners to formulate strategies for best distributing media budget.

Marketing Intelligence lets advertisers determine how different partners can connect with each other, and shows where there’s performance overlap between them. This means advertisers can work out the best individual suppliers and, more importantly, work out the right mix to get what they need.

What does it look like in action?

A major media agency partnered with us to carry out an analysis by giving MiQ access to their entire DCM attribution data for one of their advertisers across all display partners.

Below are the analyses that MiQ conducted in partnership with the agency. There were several themes and insights that emerged. Let’s look at a few of these exercises to understand how they let advertisers gauge each partners’ performance.

Conversion and revenue distribution

In this table, we see the average order value (AOV) and the conversion volume for each of the display partners. This type of analysis identifies partners who drive higher user quality, leading to more revenue in addition to increasing the conversion volume each partner contributes.

Suppliers’ interaction analysis

This illustrates the interactions a partner had with converted users. Unique interactions are instances when unique converters were touched by a partner’s media. Total interactions are the total number of times converters were touched by a partner’s impressions. Such an analysis determines each partner’s impression frequency and identifies less desirable prospecting partners.

Successive interaction time lag analysis

The above analysis further validates a partner’s retargeting efficiencies, established by the time lag between two successive interactions with a user. This can help explain if the retargeting activity of a partner is efficient. It can also be used to determine prospecting partners who might reach the same users with excess frequency.

Interaction frequency analysis

Interaction frequency analysis looks at the number of interactions a user has with an ad before converting. This helps determine the optimal interaction frequency that is the most efficient in getting a user to convert. This analysis can further be drilled down to various partners to determine the frequency with which they are targeting users and if that frequency is optimal.

Supplier overlap analysis

The supplier overlap analysis looks at the level of overlap a partner has with other partners in terms of conversions and revenue. Here we also looked at isolated conversions that each partner drove, ie conversions where a given partner was the sole interaction. These conversions couldn’t have been driven by any other partner. This helps evaluate the incremental value that each partner creates for the advertiser.

Interaction pathway analysis

This analysis looks at common pathways of interactions with a user for various partners. This helps determine which partners fuel conversions for other partners. It also determines the conversions lost and won from retargeting partners or other channels like search and social. In short, this analysis determines which partner drove the conversion and which partner should be attributed to the conversion.

Only work with the highest-value partners

There are powerful insights that come out of conducting the analyses above that inform marketing partner procurement analysis. Partner procurement should be a data-driven exercise with outputs that help determine the best partner stack to develop.

We’ve recently started providing this service to advertisers and it’s already making an impact on how our clients allocate their budgets.

For more information on how Marketing Intelligence can be used to inform marketing partner procurement, please reach out to info-gl@miqdigital.com.