There should be a way to capture all the campaign tactics involved with a conversion and give users the ability to slice and dice that data.
There are capabilities such as Cross-Visit Participation that allow for capturing each campaign tracking code in a sequence to see the string of events that lead to a conversion. The problem is that is based on grabbing a parameter out of the query string and creating a temporary cookie. A better way to do this is through a backend rule that tracks each visitorID and the campaign codes associated with that visitor and correlate to a conversion. Additionally, by having as a backend rule you could incorporate things that don't have campaign tracking codes in the string such as SEO, ad impressions, etc
Besides capturing the tactics involved, other elements should be captured too:
- date stamp - to allow for understanding lag between tactics
- Visit Number
Benefits from this:
- Would allow marketers to see what kinds of patterns visitors exhibit before a conversion. Do they start with upper-funnel tactics like non-brand search?
- Would allow marketers to re-evaluate campaign attribution and visually see campaign overlap.
- What is the lag between a campaign tactic and a conversion
As a bonus:
It would be great if Omniture would develop a way to plug ad spending into a model based on understanding the multi-touches to recommend ad spending levels for each type of tactic. The tool would understand how tactics work together to generate conversions and would take that knowledge in conjunction with the spend to determine optimal spend. It would be huge!
