Presentation by Bart Sharp, SVP of Marketing for the Utah Jazz, at Mastermind 2019. Bart is an experienced Senior Executive in the sports and hospitality industry with expertise in creating strong marketing, media and promotional strategies for the Utah Jazz and affiliates.
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6. Lack of understanding
Lack of companywide buy-in
Difficulties in accessing the right data
Problems with technology integration
Transparency and accuracy of reporting
29. Select a channel from
the drop-down menu.
Enter the name
of the campaign.
Enter the webpage
where customers
should land
The tool spits out a link
with all the needed
parameters
30. Using various
platforms, we
capture large
amounts of website
data, including
these URL
parameters
These platforms
combine data across
both Jazz and
Ticketmaster websites,
allowing us to track
visitors from when they
first click an ad, to when
they make a purchase
We put this website
data into our data
warehouse, where
we link it together
with marketing
spend and sales data
We then attribute spend,
traffic, orders and
revenue to the
appropriate marketing
channels and campaigns
38. Determine the overall impact of each channel relative to others
Measure and test the performance of individual campaigns
Intelligently shift advertising spend across channels
Allocate internal resources appropriately to areas of highest impact
43. Re-evaluate your current attribution methodology
Determine what you want it to do in the future
Identify what data and technology is needed
Identify who needs to be on-board to make it happen
Forecasters expect 2019 to mark a major milestone in advertising
Total digital ad spend will grow 19% to $129.34 billion
Will equate to 54.2% of estimated total US ad spending
This is great news but also presents some challenges:
Challenging in that the landscape becomes more competitive, potentially driving cost up…
But the great news is this corporate buy-in to digital advertising makes our jobs easier to measure and track ROAS
Building an attribution model for your organization can be a complicated matter
But let me remind you…
But at the end of the day, we all still have our CFO in our ear, asking us over and over, what our ROAS is.
There are many types of attribution modeling. How do we know which direction to go?
There are many types of attribution modeling. How do we know which direction to go?
Let me remind you…
We’re all probably doing something to measure our marketing efforts. Attribution modeling is an evolution
Some may be looking solely at your audience reach,
Some are diving deeper into specific campaign and looking at native analytics to measure success.
Others developing multichannel attribution models that look across all channels, assign credit for conversions and impact and are very fluid in their ability to optimize marketing spend.
Others are taking it to a whole new level.
Multichannel and Holistic attribution models provide a much more transparent view of how our marketing dollars are really working for us.
We’re not going to talk about Holistic today. We’re going to focus on multichannel attribution today and I’m going to walk you through our 2-year journey to get here.
For us, this process started 2 years ago, when I moved into my current role.
At the time, we didn’t have any type of attribution model and nobody could really tell me what was working well for us.
As someone who has believed in digital advertising for quite some time, I knew we needed to make some fundamental changes.
Traditional and digital switch
This would allow us to more accurately track success, and at the same time, be more nimble with our messaging (marketing for sports requires you to be agile in your messaging)
These changes required me to get the organizational buy-in necessary to do A LOT of testing
So, we decided to experiment with nearly every digital advertising platform we could think of.
We needed to test, measure and adjust.
Easier said than done. There are problems out there that we will encounter.
Let’s say a customer…
Clicks a Google display ad, then…
Clicks a Facebook ad, then…
Buys tickets to a game for $100
Facebook tells me one thing,
Google tells me another.
Facebook doesn’t capture Google spend, and vice-versa, so both platforms independently report $100 revenue on $5 spend
But in reality, we made $100 on $10 spend
I could follow this model and tell my bosses that my ROAS on FB and Google are through the roof! But is that really accurate?
What it’s really like….
At the beginning of the season, we have local Lakers fan that wants to get tickets to a game, so he does a Google search and clicks on a pay-per-click ad.
That takes him to utahjazz.com to look for tickets and he decides not to purchase right now.
But, look at his desktop image, he’s a die-hard Laker fan and even though I wish he was a Jazz fan, we’ll still take money from Lakers fans.
We know that he looked at Lakers tickets so we remarket to him and get him to click on an ad while he’s on ESPN.com.
That takes him back to the site but he still doesn’t convert.
By the looks of his desktop image, maybe he’s sensing the disarray going on with the team and doesn’t want to spend the dough??? I don’t know.
So now we know that he’s looked at Lakers tickets twice and hasn’t converted so this triggers an email from the Jazz for a ticket package that includes the Lakers game.
Again, he doesn’t convert.
What’s happening with this Laker fan? I mean, I guess it DOES take an average of 6.9 touchpoints per conversion?
Finally, we serve him a Facebook ad for this same Lakers game, he gets redirected back to the site, searches for tickets, and ends up buying $700 tickets…to the Golden State Warriors game.
But apparently he’s been a fan of theirs since day 1?!
With an average of 6.9 touchpoints per conversion, who gets the credit, but more importantly, what is REALLY working?
If you looked solely at Last-Click, you would say “FB gets all the credit”
If you looked at First-click only, you would say “Paid search is performing really well for us”
If you looked at each of the individual platform metrics, they would all take credit for the sale.
This is a problem and we needed to fix this.
Since each of these ads had some level of impact on the buyer’s conversion and the individual platforms don’t consider all channels under the digital marketing umbrella,
we needed to build something that would.
We needed to build something that would provide transparency in determining what is really working for our organization
So, where do we start?
First, we needed to set our target for ROAS…Right? But this is where most folks make their biggest mistakes.
They try to determine an industry average
Or Finance gives them a target number
And they set the number and then work towards it
Let me share my philosophy…The ROAS number means NOTHING. Build a radically transparent attribution model, determine your baseline numbers, and then measure yourself off the trajectory and growth of those numbers. Your trend line will determine your success.
Start with the concept of radical transparency. Get your data RIGHT.
In order to get your data right, try these three steps:
You’ll need a well-thought out tracking management plan
Then, mix in A LOT of science,
And add a smattering of art
Let’s start with a tracking plan…
Now, if you’re built anything like us, you have several different folks that need to be able to add tracking…and you need consistency.
So we built a shared tool that allowed our marketing staff to easily generate these parameters in a consistent format.
Regardless of whether it is on paid channels or free channels, it gets tagged properly.
This ensures that our analytics team can correctly identify the channel, platform, and campaign of every ad.
So, let’s get a little more technical for a minute
With this set-up, we are prepared to track everything.
For us, Science happens at the conversion level.
We want to know what channels are our best channels for converting costumers.
So, as part of our Marketing Scorecard, and because it makes sense for our business objectives, we look closely at last-click attribution.
I can look closely at this portion of the Scorecard and get the facts. I can view:
YOY Sales #’s
Traffic
ROAS
And a variety of other things.
I know how well each of my channels are performing at the conversion level.
I can even drill down into individual EMAIL campaigns if I want to dive deeper, or…
I can look at a specific social media channel, like Facebook or Instagram, and see how it is performing.
But the path to conversion is rarely a straight line.
I still need to place value on higher-funnel ad channels. If I don’t, if I just cut those off because they are not converting well, my pool of customers may dry out. (losing the assist to conversion)
So, this is where we add some art to model.
Some folks may find it more valuable to build out complex algorithms or build time-decay models that allocate impact points. That may be best for company. It is not currently necessary for our organization.
This is where we begin to measure a channel’s performance based on the amount of traffic it drives to our site.
Looking at the total number of orders per channel, will sometimes tell me something different than the revenue numbers on their own.
We may look at the average order size by channel and determine that a specific channel is perfect for upper bowl ticket messaging.
We even include in our Scorecard a conversion ROAS based on a de-duped view-through and click-through model,
To determine what upper funnel channels are LEADING to conversion
We want to measure our reach in the market, so might look at digital impressions combined with traditional media impressions
As we blend the art and science of multichannel attribution we are able to make data-driven decisions.
We can:
Through the first half of the season…
And for a moment…the Utah Jazz marketing department gets to feel as cool as Donovan Mitchell