NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwire – Jan 31, 2012) – LiveIntent, the platform for buying and selling email ad inventory exactly like display, today announced it has integrated its services with advertising technology from Convertro, the leader in providing advertisers enhanced transparency into the effectiveness of their online marketing channels and optimization. This integration provides advertisers with a better understanding of the value of LiveIntent’s inventory within their overall digital media footprint.

Previous constraints in the email space only made it possible to track last click conversions or direct consumer behaviors back to email, but Convertro’s Multi-Attribution service allows advertisers access into every marketing touch that led to a conversion without limits on the number of touch points, cookie windows and other constraints. By partnering with Convertro, LiveIntent can now attribute an action back to an email ad placement, even if the consumer decides to shop around before converting into purchase.

“This integration was driven by our goal to provide advertisers with more knowledge and transparency into the impact of our email advertising offerings,” said Jason Oates, President LiveIntent. “With Convertro’s unique attribution service, we can now prove to advertisers how effective their email advertising campaigns are by identifying how they impact the top (awareness) and bottom (conversion) of the sales funnel. This is important to brand and direct advertisers.”

“By tapping into Convertro’s technology, LiveIntent will now be able to prove to advertisers accurate contribution of email marketing efforts to best optimize their revenue from email ads,” said Jeff Zwelling, CEO and Co-Founder, Convertro. “Convertro strives to provide advertisers with transparency and in turn, give our customers the attribution they deserve.”

This integration is one of many strategic initiatives from LiveIntent, including new product offerings to its portfolio and personnel additions to accommodate the company’s rapid growth.

About LiveIntent

LiveIntent is the only company with a real-time display ad platform for email. LiveIntent works with advertisers, publishers and agencies to provide ad optimization, DSP / trading desk and exchanges capabilities. The company is venture-backed by Shasta Ventures, Battery Ventures, First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures and Grape Arbor VC. LiveIntent was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in NYC. For more information and a demonstration of the company’s technology in your own inbox, visit www.liveintent.com.

“Convertro’s advanced user tracking methods combined with ex post facto analytics capabilities generates the richest possible data set with infinite flexibility. For many marketers, television represents the most significant portion of advertising spend. By leveraging Convertro’s technology and applying advanced statistical modeling, we will be able to accurately predict the contribution of each marketing channel and advise clients on how to best maximize their revenue and profit, said Avedissian. “My goal is to empower clients with marketing intelligence and optimization that to date has been available to only a select few companies that have spent millions of dollars developing in-house solutions.”

Prior to Convertro, Avedissian was Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) of MyLife, where his media mix planning and optimization skills more than doubled revenues in a short period of time while lowering the cost per acquisition. Prior to MyLife.com, he led eHarmony through a period of exponential growth using similar methods.

“Avedissians’ contributions and achievements at MyLife and eHarmony helped scale both companies into the highly profitable, well known brands that they are today by leveraging the power of television combined with quantitative analytics. He has proven success in managing and optimizing direct response media campaigns,” said Jeff Zwelling, Chief Executive Officer of Convertro. “By combining his skills with our leading media attribution technology, we will provide clients with a holistic attribution approach to calculating ROI and optimization for all marketing channels, making this available for the first time as a SaaS model. Convertro gives our clients access to a best-of-breed marketing intelligence and optimization platform with no upfront cost or tax on internal resources.”

About Convertro
Convertro provides advertisers enhanced transparency into the effectiveness of their marketing mix by tracking media channels and their resulting conversions. The Convertro platform’s ex post facto design empowers marketers with infinite flexibility to add or tweak attribution models and apply optimizations, thereby providing them a better understanding of the actions that are actually driving sales and the data to make informed marketing decisions and beyond. Convertro is headquartered in Santa Monica, California with an office in Ra’anana, Israel and is backed by Bessemer Venture Partners.

Convertro is excited to wrap up a strong year that brought lots of excitement to the market for mature analytics tools. In spite of doing practically no outbound marketing, we’ve gained a ton of new customers, with many large clients inbounding to request information based mainly on word of mouth.

In online marketing, some of the most common metrics employed are a performance measurement looking back over a thirty day cookie window and crediting the last click. Although marketers are moving away from last click measurement and attribution techniques, the thirty day cookie window continues to be the most predominant timeframe used in analytics tools. Here we consider whether this is a valid model and whether it skews the metrics used for decisionmaking.

Let us take Convertro data across twenty-plus clients to examine this. The conversion data across these clients runs into millions of conversions, however, for purposes of simplification, and also to see if data skews differently based on purchase amount (which might influence consideration/sales funnel length)we sliced the data into strata based on the conversion value.

Although it appears that conversions peak a day after initial visit, followed by a tapering off, it’s important to note that the first thirty days account for only about 72% of conversions; 28% happen thirty or more days after the initial visit. This occurs across all customer pricepoints[[stratas]], although, as expected, it is more pronounced for businesses with long sales cycles. The clear conclusion here is that by limiting the cookie window to thirty days, companies can wind up misattributing 28% of sales, resulting in suboptimal allocation of your marketing dollars.When we examine this same data for number of sources preceding conversion, we see something similar. There are very few purchases which occur after a single visit to the site. More often, there are several visits before a purchase, even if the purchase happened within the first thirty days of initial visit.

 

A slightly different way of looking at the same data is to combine the number of events (left axis) and number of sources (right axis) with number of days to conversion (x axis). The long tail of conversions emerges clearly in the graph below.

 

 

So, then why has analytics relied on a thirty day cookie window for this long?  Let me compare this with an interesting story (from a redditpost) about how certain beliefs and practices become mainstream and how they are never challenged:

At Convertro, we constantly challenge the status quo of how things are done by introducing a no-limits approach to data collection and analysis, empowering marketers with data on every single marketing source no matter how long ago it took place. We make this data readily available via the dashboard and multiple advanced reports, giving marketers the ability to analyze quickly and take action.  For more information on our products and solutions, please visit us at www.convertro.com.

1. Figure out where your visitors are coming from and have a complete list of all marketing sources, both online and offline that they were exposed to
2. Once they are on your web site, understand their browsing patterns and product views
3. Understand their product likes and dislikes by providing them an easy way to create wish lists, buy-later cart options, reviews, question and answer modules etc for them to reveal their purchase consideration.
4. Figure out where they are leaving your site, so you can understand the reason for drop off better and fix it for better conversion rates.
5. Track these visitors offline in the stores, phone order systems, etc., so you can tie their purchase patters back to the advertising they were exposed to and calculate an accurate ROAS for your marketing mix.

The complexity of tracking marketing performance offline is well-known, but even in the supposedly most measurable medium of online marketing, it is not easy to track a visitor accurately. The most common way for analytics companies to track users is by using cookies, but there are several problems with the usage of cookies.

• Cookies are often deleted by users themselves or by automatic security features provided by anti-virus software. A comscore study shows that on average 33% of visitors delete their cookies every 30 days
• Cookies do not tranfer across browsers unless they are flash cookies which are currently under attack by privacy hawks
• Cookies cannot track offline behavior, nor cross-device usage, such as multiple PC’s, hand-held devices such as phones etc.,

Typically buyers go through the following four distinct phases before making the purchase according to a study conducted by Harvard business school.

• Research – This is the first stage after a prospect identifies/becomes aware of his need for a product/service.
• Consider – Prospects are aware of your products but does not know much beyond it, and it is in your best interests to educate them about the it proactively.
• Trial – Prospects are close to decision making, and are trying to understand your product better vis-a-vis competing products.
• Buy – The final conversion

The length of the buying cycle depends on the product being considered and can vary vastly from a few days to few months or even years. For example, retail falls on the short buying cycle spectrum, where as big ticket items such as automotive/luxury fall into the long buying cycle spectrum. The longer the buying cycle, the more important it is for you to invest in a solution that provides you with accurate, robust visitor tracking across long periods of time. Unfortunately though, very few analytics companies spend the effort exploring technologies that allow them to track users more robustly. However, for analytics and attribution to work effectively, accurate visitor tracking is a must. So, try to understand what the limitations of your current visitor tracking is and how to overcome these effectively.

Convertro uses sophisticated technologies to track users across cookie deletions, cross-browser, cross-device interactions and also has an effective means of tying offline and online visitor behavior and transactions. To learn more about Convertro’s visitor tracking technology, please schedule your demo today.

Why do conversion pages need extra tags?
Extra tags on conversion pages serve to let our system know a conversion occurred so it can be logged appropriately in our database.  Depending on the nature of your business and your objectives, we can include extra fields in the conversion tag, allowing us to collect and track data such as the order number, the amount of the sale, and even customer-supplied demographic data.  We use conversion data in conjunction with marketing referral information to create estimates of the value of visitors from specific sources; some clients use exports from Convertro to determine which keywords their online pay-per-click bid management systems should bid on and how much those bids should be.

Will Convertro bring my site down or delay page loading?
Our tracking module is served from Amazon’s low-latency, highly available CloudFront CDN, which routes all requests to geographically local data centers to ensure fast load-times. Subsequent Convertro components are loaded asynchronously within a non-blocking dynamic IFRAME for minimal impact upon page load performance and end-user experience. Convertro also employs internal monitoring and failover systems to shield your site from potential Convertro outages.  The total content payload of all Convertro components is less than 10k gzipped (15k uncompressed).  All components are thoroughly tested for compatibility and performance on all major browser platforms.

How long will it take to load Convertro’s tags?
Convertro’s tags have both synchronous and asynchronous components.  The asynchronous component does not affect page load or render time (since it loads independently from your other page content).  The synchronous component typically loads in under 100 milliseconds. The asynchronous components typically load in 200 to 300 milliseconds.

The Convertro tag container is a snippet of JavaScript that you place on your website that allows for easy deployment and management of both Convertro and 3rd party tags and pixels. When the tag container code is loaded, it calls back to Convertro’s servers and receives a response indicating what marketing tags and pixels should fire on the page, according to the business rules you specify. The Convertro tag container has three main benefits: 1) It makes it faster and easier to add, change, and remove marketing tags on your web site, 2) It gives you control over which tags fire on which pages of your site, and under what conditions, and 3) By not firing unnecessary pixels and by timing out those that are hanging, the tag container can help improve page load time.

What are the main benefits of the tag container?
1) Convenience. With many marketing programs, a significant hurdle to implementation is the need to allocate engineering time for adding tracking tags to the site and waiting for this work to be completed and released. One goal of the tag container is to decrease the hassle and inconvenience of constantly modifying web pages in order to add, remove, or change marketing tags and pixels. With the Convertro tag container, all management of tags and pixels across your site can be done from one place, without ever touching the actual web pages.

2) Control. The Convertro tag container allows for the creation of business rules that govern which tags should fire on which pages of your site, and under what conditions. Commonly, not all marketing pixels available should fire on every page, or for every user, or at all times. Through the creation of business logic around tag firing, marketers can ensure that they are remarketing, tracking, or counting conversions in a planned, consistent manner across all technology platforms they’re using – helping to minimize implementation errors and prevent double counting of conversions, among other things. Business rules can make use of any information available on the page, such as on-page variables or referrer URL information, in order to determine which tags/pixels to fire and when. You can also specify sunrise and sunset dates for different tags or code blocks, or specify that certain tags should only load after other tags, or the rest of the page, have finished loading.

3) Speed. While adding any additional calls to your website has the potential to add to your page load time, the tag container can actually help improve page speed by enabling the automatic timing out of 3rd party pixels that are hanging. Tags inside the container are subject to configurable latency limits that define how long the tag container should wait for a particular tag to load before timing it out. Additionally, after the initial call to pc.js, all code inside the tag container is executed asynchronously for minimal impact upon page load performance and end-user experience. The Convertro tag container module itself is served from Amazon’s low-latency, highly available CloudFront CDN, which routes all requests to geographically local data centers to ensure fast load-times.

Tag Your Landing Page URLs

Tagging your landing page URLs properly is a key step in gaining real value out of Convertro right out the gate. Convertro uses information collected by the Convertro tag to decide which marketing channel drove the visit, and a key piece of this information is the parameters included in the landing page URL and referrer URL. While you cannot control the format of referrer URLs that send visits to your site, Convertro can use high quality landing page URL information to most accurately group your sources of traffic into manageable and understandable segments.

Each time you set up an advertising campaign, you need provide your publishers with links to your website. In order to ensure the highest level of accuracy in your Convertro analytics, you’ll want to be sure that each link is “tagged” with the most precise URL parameters possible. In many cases, this simply means appending certain text to the end of your landing page URLs.

Example:
A landing page URL tagged with parameters indicating which email campaign drove the visit.

Some advertising systems allow you to append placeholders to your landing page URLs that are dynamically populated when a user clicks on a Pay-per-click (PPC) ad.  For example, Google AdWords allows you to specify that you would like to include the keyword, match type, network, and several other bits of information in your landing page URL when the ad is clicked. This reduces the workload of tagging the landing page URLs of each ad separately. Once a user arrives on your site, the Convertro tags read the parameters appended to the URL. Convertro can then use this data to, for example, assign the proper revenue to a specific keyword if that user later converts.

Example:
A properly tagged landing page as set up in Google AdWords. This page directs the user to www.bluewidgets.com.

When the ad is clicked on, the landing page URL might look something like this. Convertro recognizes common parameters such as “keyword=” and “network=”, among others, and uses this information to classify traffic to your site.

Without proper landing page URL tagging, it is sometimes not possible to identify the traffic source that drove a given visit. Adding as precise tagging as is possible to all landing page URLs will greatly improve your ability to analyze marketing channels on a lower level.

The areas in which it is most important to ensure proper tagging of landing page URLs are PPC, email, and display advertising. While it is, of course, ideal to tag all landing page URLs you are using in marketing campaigns, these three sources tend to be the most susceptible to miscategorization within analytics tools. Pay-per-click traffic can be difficult to distinguish from organic traffic without proper tagging due to the fact that both organic and PPC traffic comes from search engine referring URLs, such as “google.com”. Without further information about what ad a user clicked on, analytics tools tend to have trouble discerning whether the user was driven by an organic search or by a PPC ad. Additionally, landing page URLs in emails you sent out should be tagged with pertinent information such as the email category (i.e. retention, acquisition) or indication of the email contents. Otherwise, while Convertro will recognize visits from this source as email-driven traffic, visibility into which emails are working and which are not will be hard to attain. Finally, because traffic from display ads is often redirected through several domains and thus difficult to categorize based on referring URLs, it is especially important to tag landing page URLs properly when running this kind of marketing.

One of the many benefits of Convertro is that as long as you have some form of tagging in place on your landing page URLs, Convertro can read and map these parameters to any channels and sources you wish in your dashboard. This means that you won’t need to re-tag anything to start getting value out of Convertro immediately. And, as you change your tagging or add new sources, you can automatically re-classify these sources from your dashboard and provide new mapping logic by which to classify sources.

Implementation Checklist

1. Implement Convertro tags on your website. Convertro will provide you with snippets of JavaScript to place on your website and with specific implementation recommendations.
2. Tag landing page URLs for all marketing campaigns properly. As you’re implementing, be sure to check that the ads in your marketing campaigns are using landing page URLs that are properly tagged (see ) in order to immediately get the most value out of Convertro.
3. Log in and start analyzing!

An Atlas study conducted in 2009, shows that “When marketers supplement search with display impressions, they get a significant lift in conversions. Unfortunately, most advertisers that run both search and display are unaware of this…” The study demonstrated that “users exposed to both search and display ads convert at a higher rate: an average of 22 percent better than search alone and 400 percent better than display only.”

Similarly a study conducted at Yahoo! discovered that “the sales impact of an integrated search and display advertising campaign was significantly stronger than either channel used in isolation, even when looking at sales that occurred outside of the advertiser’s websites”

When you measure performance on a last click basis, you are essentially ignoring these type of assists entirely. As a way of an analogy take a look at this fabulous assist by Beckham that resulted in a goal by Ronaldo for Real Madrid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qLUwtBeRK8

If you ignored Beckham’s assist in favor of crediting Ronaldo for the goal entirely, you know you would be making a hige mistake.

Similarly, if you made marketing spend allocations based on these flawed last-click wins always metrics, then you might be tempted to over-budget some channels while essentially starving others that might work often in the assist position.

At Convertro, we classify channels into 3 categories, Introducer, Influencer and Closer. In the last click model, only “Closers” are given attribution credit. Although marketers intuitively know that this is flawed, the inability of early analytics systems to accurately track users across all touch points, browsers, devices, etc lead to the overuse of last click attribution for marketing measurement. With the emergence of more sophisticated analytics tools such as Convertro, marketers now have the ability to get a complete picture of how their marketing mix performs.

For more information, please set up your Convertro demo today!

Imagine being able to get a 5% incremental lift on the billion dollar marketing budget you have to spend across both online and offline marketing. This hope of improving results by optimizing the marketing mix while essentially spending the same amount of money on marketing is the reason why there is so much interest in trying to come up with statistically significant and applicable marketing mix models.

Traditionally, market research methodologies such as matched markets, regression analysis, telephone tracking were used to understand the marketing mix modeling. But, these methodologies fall short in the online world due to several inherent complexities. Intuitively almost everyone agrees that it is important to measure the effectiveness of marketing, but in the absence of tools to measure cross-channel impact, it is not easy for most everyone to measure it.

Going over the list of challenges, first and foremost is the challenge of collecting data across channels and tying them together to get a complete picture. Most traditional analytics systems are built in a siloed fashion and don’t have an easy way to share data across. In addition the metrics collected and analyzed by them are some what disparate leading to difficulties in tying interactions across channels back to a single visitor/buyer.

The second major challenge is that there is not a whole lot of overlap between the type of marketers and the channels they use. As you see in the graphic below, traditional brand marketers rely exclusively on mass advertising and measure the brand impact across offline channels, direct marketers tend to cross offline and online to a certain extent, but online marketers again are solely focused on online to online impact. And the gaps across the media are alarming, and ignoring the lift due to cross channel lift results in precisely inaccurate metrics causing misallocation of marketing budgets.

It is essential to cross the data and marketer insight chasm before we can tackle other challenges in bridge the gap between measuring lift from online and offline interactions. Let us consider the special case of a online visitor to your website eventually completing the purchase in a retail store offline. The typical steps in trying to analyze their purchase data would involve the following.

1. Accurate and robust visitor tracking online – capture all marketing touchpoints that a visitor was exposed to online
2.  Encourage online visitors to register – identify them more effectively by providing them coupons, wishlists, etc., that will make transition from online product viewing to offline purchase seamless.
3. Encourage visitors who chose to go offline to complete their purchase to re-register using a unique customer code.
4. Tie the data from online and offline CRM/Analytics systems together using the unique customer code – integrate the data residing in online and offline data warehouse silos
5. Feed the data into a data warehouse to get complete the visitor profile
6. Run analytics/regression on this data to predictively understand the probability of conversion and likely venue (online/offline) for conversion.

As you can see it requires a big push towards integration of the disparate systems that collect data in the online and offline world.

Convertro was synthesised into a product by savvy marketers who were specifically trying to solve problems in this area. Their ecommerce business had 40% of the sales coming through the offline channels in spite of the fact that almost all marketing was being done online. Since then, Convertro has evolved into a much more robust system for measuring offline and online impact on sales and cross channel lift. Our client services team works with clients on a regular basis to setup custom market research tests, and devise ways to measure cross-channel lift.

Please setup a demo today to learn more about how Convertro can help you derive higher ROI on your marketing.

First, the primary means of measuring digital advertising performance is a cookie based tracking.  A legacy from the early days of the Internet, the cookies are a) subject to deletion, b) can only be read by one domain and c) don’t really provide depth into users beyond clicks.

There’s a plethora of advertising technology companies offering a ton of new solutions but understanding who they are dealing with depends entirely on these cookies.

Here’s an example:

Data providers such as BlueKai, Exelate, Rapleaf, Targus and Acxiom all purport to provide buyers of advertising better users to target.  For instance, if the advertiser wishes to display impressions to a “in-market” auto consumer, any of the data providers above can provide a 1000 users for approximately $.75.  The advertiser would then look for these people to show up on miscellaneous exchanges such as invite media, right media, AdExn.  If a publisher who offered their inventory to one of thos exchanges saw one of these users on their site, they could in real-time provide the advertiser the opportunity to put an advertisement in front of that user.

This entire work-flow is based on cookies.  The data providers are actually resellers of these users/cookies.  These companies establish business relationships with publishers, toolbar companies and domain squatters to “drop” a cookie on certain users browsers who visited a website or did a search that would indicate that they are in-market for a auto.  The cookie is then essentially auctioned off to the highest bidder on the real-time display exchanges and if and when that user/cookie shows up on a participating publishers website, the advertisers banner ad is displayed.

Upon display, another cookie is dropped on the users browser and if the user subsequently converts on the advertisers site, the advertiser will correlate that success with the purchase of the data providers cookie and the subsequent display.

However, if at anytime, the users cookies are deleted, then the whole system falls apart.  Depending when the cookie delete occurs, the user might never be seen again, the advertising doesn’t ever show a conversion and or the assumption about these user is no longer reliable.

If industry forecasts are to be believed [need cite], then this single point of failure is going to be a signficiant problem vis-a-vis making this work for advertisers.