I think Paul's painted a very nice picture around attribution and moving away from that last click, giving you guys that visibility of which channels work together, which channels outperform the others. Which ones are starting engagement, which ones are really getting across the products or service that you're offering.
The next stage, as we've sort of been speaking about in this seminar, is to overlay what you know about your customers from either an agency or your CRM system and to put that over the top of it. So, with segmentation, you can split that into two groups here. So let's say, new and existing customers as one type of segmentation. I think everyone knows the difference between the two, but then the next group - so, if you've had the ability to put your customers into certain groups or segments, you'll maybe understand who's a frequent buyer, at the very least, or who comes to the site in certain age groups or genders. So that's what we're talking about here, when we're talking about segmentation.
In terms of attribution, the cross-channel performance, looking beyond that last click, knowing which channel, platform or device mix is bringing people to the site, generally knowing what works well together and knowing which channels are bringing you the most money. So, that attribution piece is the value given to touch-points and the logic that sits behind it that powers and drives an attribution model. It's not very funky or exciting - it's just numbers, you get used to the way you report, it doesn't change your world - as someone who enjoys marketing, you want to be able to say "Right, I want to go out and target the right people. I've got some really good products here, I've got some good service - let's not waste money throwing it absolutely everywhere. Let's understand who I need to talk to, and go and get them."
When you look at those two together - you've got the attributed data, you understand which channels work, now you can start to overlay your sales data with your different customer segmentations. From that, you can start to build your own bespoke solutions, so let's start to optimise: Do you want to start to optimise your PPC accounts? If you're doing PPC in-house or with an agency, do you want them to begin optimising to certain keywords that suits your drive to get new customers to your business or to get your old customers back? Do you want to start sending different email campaigns, specifically talking to your existing customers that buy higher value items? Do you want to use social media segmentation to go and get those customers?
It's overlaying segmentation with advanced data, with a big customer history and understanding the user journey, that really is the interesting piece, or at least we feel is the direction that the more advanced businesses are taking.
