How To Make Sales Attribution Work
by Amol Waishampayan, CPO
Every business wants to understand sales attribution. Traditional AdTech has always looked at individual identifiers to track attribution. Unfortunately, individual identifiers don’t work in most circumstances.
Why Do Individual Identifiers Not Work for Sales Attribution?
For many industries and verticals, there will be two or more people in a household helping to make the purchasing decision. For example, buying a car or selecting a home improvement company for a new garage door or roof will take several decision-makers.
Products and services can be purchased under anyone’s name. Emails are not always accurate either. If a couple is looking to buy a home, it could be under either of their names and/or email addresses.
If it’s a purchase that requires a credit score, such as buying a mattress, there might be two credits attached. Or a parent buying a car for their child and placing the title and insurance under their name instead of their 16-year-old child’s.
Not to mention, the deprecation of third-party cookies will make acquiring third-party data much more difficult.
Traditional AdTech has always looked at individual identifiers outside of the grouping of a household, whereas most decisions are a combined decision.
So, how do you tie these purchases back to sales attribution? Or a cookie? Or an individual identifier?
You simply can’t. Not unless you use a household approach.
The Household Approach
To really make sales attribution work for you and your business, the most consistent way to measure it is with a household address. When you have an address, you can collate data around it as a singular profile.
An encrypted household address should be used as your primary key.
There is an incredible power that comes from looking at attribution through a household and open address. When you look at the buyer's propensity to buy through a household lens, you can track all devices within the household researching, clicking, interacting, and buying from a business.
The Household Approach works for both targeting and measurement.
Targeting
After resolving the household address, you can send targeted advertisements to all devices within that address.
It is important to understand that a unique device is different from a unique visitor. Most consumers these days own multiple devices. They might start their research on their cell phone and resume on their tablet or laptop later in the day.
There likely are multiple devices for multiple people in the household. It is important to reach each user across all household devices to truly immerse them in your brand.
Measurement
The most consistent way to measure sales is by tying them back to a household. When you have multiple influencers and decision-makers, the sale can be placed in any of their names. However, if you’ve resolved the household address, you can measure attributions down to the household level.
You can also see which campaigns are working the best. How many devices are interacting with your ads and strategic messages?
Implementing a household approach is highly innovative and proves crucial in delivering incrementality.
“Innovation--any new idea--by definition will not be accepted at first. It takes repeated attempts, endless demonstrations, monotonous rehearsals before innovation can be accepted and internalized by an organization. This requires courageous patience.”
The Key Verticals Typically Successful With a Household Approach
The Household Approach works for most industries and verticals. In particular, this method works best for businesses that have goods or services that have a long decision-making timeline.
Verticals can include:
- Home improvement
- Solar
- Higher education
- Senior care communities
- Real estate
- Law firms
- Health Care
- Automotive
- Travel industry
- Furniture and home goods
For these industries, most purchases will be a household decision, with multiple influencers to the buyer. These purchases also require extensive research to ensure they are selecting the best company for their needs. Due to the time factor, strategically make use of it to immerse the household with meaningful, targeted messaging to show them why your brand is the best one for them.
fullthrottle.aiTM and Household Resolution
fullthrottle.ai’s platform offers Immersive Household® managed advertising. This means that after a household is identified with the support of our privacy-complaint patented technology, our platform automatically sends meaningful messages to the entire household on all devices. Channels include email, direct mail, social media, display, streaming TV, streaming audio, linear tv, and broadcast radio.
We have created an activation ecosystem through partnerships to reach your shoppers strategically. These are unique to fullthrottle.aiTM and have never been seen before in the AdTech industry.
Based on these activations, our platform successfully measures sales attribution down to the household level.
To discover how fullthrottle.aiTM can help show clear sales attribution, schedule your demo here.
