When one of the most innovative digital marketing firms needed to help a top 10 global automotive company improve its national online marketing and advertising campaigns, it knew where to turn. Understanding that proper measurement is the key to improving any online marketing campaign, the agency tapped some of the most advanced attribution technologies on the market to help.

1. Automotive A Leader in Forrester’s
Interactive Attribution
CASE STUDY Wave™ 2Q 2012
Ditching ‘Last-click’ for Advanced Attribution
Helps Leading Auto Company Drive Digital
Marketing Performance Improvements
When one of the most innovative digital marketing firms needed to help a top 10
BACKGROUND global automotive company improve its national online marketing and advertising
campaigns, it knew where to turn. Understanding that proper measurement is the key
One of the world’s largest automakers is to improving any online marketing campaign, the agency tapped some of the most
using advanced attribution to increase advanced attribution technologies on the market to help.
the number of converted users by over
40% in its national advertising campaign. Do different car models perform differently on different sites?
This digital marketing agency needed a way to comprehensively measure the
ADOMETRY PRODUCT performance of the automaker’s different national display and paid search
AND SERVICE USED campaigns. Not only did this include coming up with a method to objectively and
accurately determine the individual contributions that paid search and display
• Adometry Attribute™ advertising made to their online campaigns, it also incorporated measuring the
performance of different ad attributes within each channel such as various car
models, ad sizes, media types, placements and combinations thereof. In addition,
the agency wanted to find out the additional lift that display campaigns had on search
“Adometry Attribute uses conversions. Finally, the agency needed a reliable way to optimize in-flight online
marketing campaigns to maximize ad dollars each month.
objective, data-driven analysis
to help us pinpoint the right
campaign combinations that Using Data-Driven Attribution to Find the Answers:
drive maximum conversions for
• How can our automotive client more intelligently allocate its online display
our clients. It’s by far the most spend across websites and placements?
powerful and robust solution of • What is the optimum number of impressions per user that balances cost
its kind in the marketplace. ” against response rates?
- Director, Performance Analytics • What are the impacts of ad size, rich media, placement, frequency, recency
and publisher?
• How can we be more analytic savvy, generating more conversions for our
client and more revenue for us?

2. Last click attribution falls short Using the data to drive maximum conversions
The agency previously used ‘last click’ data collected from an In just the first four months, the agency was able to help the
ad server to make decisions about how paid search and display automaker achieve its goals of improving and optimizing its cross-
campaigns interacted and drove conversions. But knowing that the channel digital ad spend. The main benefits they achieved included:
last click measurement approach is unreliable and inaccurate for
• Understood how paid search and display interact to drive
determining advertising credit, the agency searched for a better
conversions. Adometry Attribute provided the appropriate
solution. With access to the automaker’s online ad campaign log
credit to display campaigns that was previously attributed to the
files, the agency had the necessary building blocks (e.g., display
last click. Each month there was a significant lift in the visitor
impression data, click data, etc.) required to accurately measure
conversion rate when search was preceded by a display ad. The
cross-channel campaign interactions.
attribution analysis demonstrated that the visitor conversion rate
was 23% when search was not preceded by display. Whereas,
the display-assisted conversion rate was 38% - a 65% increase!
Analyzing cross-channel campaign data
This confirmed the value of the client’s display campaigns,
yields new insights
which was previously hidden by last click attribution. As a result,
To help the automaker properly analyze online marketing campaign
the client had a way to justify its current display budget and feel
log files, the agency implemented Adometry Attribute – one of the
confident about investing more in future campaigns.
market’s leading attribution platforms. Using Adometry Attribute,
the agency analyzed the cross-channel campaign data that • Gleaned detailed insights into how to best optimize their
included generating reports and discovering insights on different campaigns based on varying Key Performance Indicators
display and search campaign dimensions. and different client scenarios. Based on a range of strict
business constraints, optimization recommendations by Attribute
In addition, the agency used Adometry Attribute’s automated yielded a 30%-to-42% increase in converted visitors without any
optimization capabilities to implement on-the-fly changes to in-flight net increase in ad spend.
campaigns in order to effectively re-allocate ad spends. This was • Provided deep insights that helped the client eliminate
especially useful because the agency had client approval to move wasted ad spend, such as: detecting high-spend sites with
at most $25k of budget between line items within each department low exclusive reach or specific overlap with other sites, and
and tactic combination. The agency was also able to leverage discovering sites with longer time to conversion than others. In
Attribute’s capabilities to develop different what-if scenarios addition, sites were identified with excessive user frequency;
for each channel so it could determine how to best optimize specific recommendations for daily frequency caps yielded 20%
investments in search and display campaigns for the automaker. cost savings.
The latitude to make multiple tradeoffs up to the level of constraint
and the flexibility to develop different strategies allowed the agency
to hit client targets and improve overall performance.
About Adometry
Founded in 2005, Adometry, Inc. provides ad verification and cross-channel attribution intelligence, plus auditing and
scoring metrics, to optimize results for the world’s leading online advertisers, publishers, and ad networks. Through
its SaaS-based advanced analytics, Adometry processes and analyzes tens-of-billions of impressions and advertising
Adometry, Inc.
transactions per month to identify the true consumer purchase-decision journey and to maximize marketing ROI.
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Adometry combines a scientifically proven methodology with a flexible and easy to implement solution to generate
Building A, Ste. 100
results in as little as two weeks. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Adometry is privately held and backed by Sierra
Austin, TX 78746
Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. For more information, visit www.adometry.com
1-866-512-5425 Copyright 2012. Adometry and Click Forensics are registered trademarks of Adometry, Inc. Adometry Attribute, Adometry Validate, and TagScan are
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