The Last Click Wins
With so many online marketing channels available, consumers are frequently driven to the same website many times during the research and buying process. These customers will usually arrive at the site from a different channel on each occasion. Traditionally online marketers have attributed the entire value of a sale to the last click the customer made. This is not a truly accurate measurement as all other clicks in the buying process are not credited for their assistance in driving the sale.
Yahoo and a small selection of price comparison sites already track and record “assists” to help marketers better understand how their campaigns are helping with the conversion process.
In the future, it is expected all tracking will become more advanced and will allow marketers to see exactly how many times each customer visited the site, the order of visits and which channel drove each visit. This will then allow more accurate reporting as marketers will be able to allocate a portion of the sale to each click in the buying process.
The two examples below show two very different methods of attributing the value of each click in the customer journey. In each example, all clicks were made by the same customer and the total order value was £50.
Example 1 – The most recent click:
This example assumes the most recent click is key to driving the sale and attributes the last click with the highest sales value.
| Channel generating the click | Percentage allocation | Value allocation |
| 1st click – banner ad | 10% | £5 |
| 2nd click – PPC ad | 20% | £10 |
| 3rd click – SEO link | 30% | £15 |
| 4th click – price comparison site | 40% | £20 |
Example 2 – The first click
This example assumes the first click is key to driving the sale and attributes the first click with the highest sales value.
| Channel generating the click | Percentage allocation | Value allocation |
| 1st click – banner ad | 40% | £20 |
| 2nd click – PPC ad | 30% | £15 |
| 3rd click – SEO link | 20% | £10 |
| 4th click – price comparison site | 10% | £5 |
At the time of writing there is no best practice or set way of working out the percentage allocation based on each click. It is very much up to organisation to use the allocation which they feel best fits their market and online activity. As long as the same allocation is always used, results will be comparable over time.
This data will be an extremely powerful tool and has the potential to change the way we view online marketing reports and ROI. It will also change the way budget is allocated and allow channels to be optimised in a more efficient way to generate a sales uplift. Ultimately it will ensure you are advertising in the correct channels at every step of the customer journey which will improve ROI and the customer’s experience.