To trust or not to trust? Your campaign attribution data
Hi there, the topic we are getting into today is about if you should trust the data who indicates you the campaign that seem to attribute the most?
Sometimes people see the data shows their email campaign brings the most amount of purchase, and then they decide that in next season, email should be invested more money into. The question comes: Is that a wise decision to make?
Here I want to tell you an ancient Chinese story called "Three people make a tiger"
Long time ago, there were four guys living in a beautiful village and a mountain couple miles away. The mountain was deep and dark. Rarely people went there.
One day, one guy told another, "Hey, do you know someone claimed that he saw a tiger in the mountain. It probably will come down to the village and eat people!"
He replied, "Oh, that is ridiculous. I don’t believe that."
One day later, a second guy told that same person, "Hey, do you know someone claimed that he saw a tiger in the mountain. It probably will come down to the village and eat people!"
He replied, "Hmm...That sounds scary but I don’t believe that."
One day later, a third guy told the same person, "Hey, do you know someone claimed that he saw a tiger in the mountain. It probably will come down to the village and eat people!"
He shouted, "Wow! It really could be a tiger in the mountain and it might come down to the village. We must tell other people and protect ourselves!"
The end of the story is that there was no tiger at all. But what truly I want to take away from this story is that the three story tellers all contributed to convince the other that there was a tiger in the mountain. Could you define which one contributed more? It is hard to say. It is the order that confuses you and makes you think that probably the last one is the most persuasive, but it might be wrong. When you start to feel full while eating the eighth cheese burger, would you say that you can skip the former seven ones, get directly to the eighth and it will still make you full?
The same principle applies to your advertisement campaign too. Probably you are doing campaigns on TV, subway, SEM, and emails. Even in data, it shows that in most cases people complete a purchase after reading your emails, it doesn’t mean that the former three guys didn’t do their jobs. Probably it is because the audience are in the subway without signal, or their laptops are not with them when they are watching TV, or they are really in the middle of something when seeing you advertisement on search engine but they decide to come back later. If your email campaign is a good team player who can talk, he would tell you that all other buddies have played important roles in your campaigns like the other seven cheese burgers.
It is said that your customers need to be reached 6 times before they make actions about your products. All the 6 times matter, and please do not treat the last one as your youngest daughter like Beckham ;)