Our partners often asked us about how to measure offline campaigns. How to decide which TV channel or which particular advertisement is better in driving customers from their offline world to the website. We finally have a solution! Our data science team devised a way to calculate this influence – we called it Reach Attribution.
Connecting offline and online data is often mentioned as one of the most difficult marketing analytics problems. How to measure the effects of online actions with offline signals, and vice versa?
Many tried and still try to solve this problem – usually by matching cookies or online activities with mobile apps, Bluetooth, beacons, wifi. Google even tries to use device location. But none of these methods can base on 100% valid data. It is because you can never match 100% users. Not with beacons, nor with any other “connecting” technology.
Our data science team approached this problem from a slightly different perspective. We applied statistical methods for measuring how offline marketing activities influence online behavior. This is what we called Reach Attribution and it will soon be implemented as one of the standard reports in Blueattribution.
How it works?
Our algorithm uses time series theory to calculate the base traffic or sales and evaluates deviations from these base values shortly after marketing activities. In other words:
- We calculate what is the value of sessions or sales normal for the daily or weekly trend.
- Next we check when there were ad emissions (like TV adverts).
- All the additional traffic – that would not have normally occurred after the ad is emitted – is assigned to the ad
- If at the same time there were several ads we share the effects basing on regression
As a result we know what is the additional volume of traffic or sales just after each advert is displayed.
Using Reach Attribution for evaluating TV commercials results
The abovementioned algorithm may seem simple and straightforward, but if used correctly and at large scale it enables marketers to evaluate TV, radio and other broad campaigns with distinct emissions.
Thanks to Reach Attribution we can see what are the effects of not only each advert impression, but also of each station, advert type, display time, and any other factor that may define the commercial.
Please contact us if you are interested in Reach Attribution. We will be happy to run a demo calculation for you 😉
