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Brief
Having battled unsuccessfully to reward credit and sales commissions more fairly across all of its online channels, online apparel retailer Boden turned to universal tag management
system TagMan.
Using TagMan's single-tag technology, the retailer was able to plug the tags from all its
online marketing providers into a single, universal container tag and system to gain one
source of reporting for all its digital activity.
The conversion report provided by TagMan enables the entire path-to-conversion leading
to a sale to be viewed, providing a much greater understanding of how all online
channels interact with each other throughout a user journey, and then for commissions to be spread according to a set attribution model.
With a full view of a buying customer's path to conversion, the first phase of the project was
to deduplicate between affiliate sales on a last-click model and to remove email as a
potential last-click channel, a move which on its own delivered a 10% saving. The next
phase is to design a weighted attribution model that recognizes influencing
touchpoints, as well as last click.
"TagMan has gained us: immediate savings in affiliate commissions and network overrides; a more informed view of the impact of online display; and a more informed view on exactly which search terms are contained within paths to conversion." Oliver Elliot
of Boden.
Background
Boden is an apparel retailer operating in the US, UK and Western Europe selling
womenswear, menswear, children's and babywear through its catalogue, websites and
two store outlets. Today, 75% of its sales in the US are through the web.
With the business' success so tied into its websites and, therefore, the effective targeting
of its online marketing activity, Oliver Elliott, online acquisition manager, Boden, spent
many months seeking a technological solution to a critical marketing problem - how to understand the true role different online channels play in influencing conversion and to
award the credit and commissions to those channels accordingly.
Elliott and his colleagues at Boden were aware that paying marketing partners only for
delivering the 'last click' in a path to a sale failed to help him recognize and reward any
activity that helped contribute to that last click and understand how online channels worked
together throughout the path to conversion to deliver customers.
Having worked unsuccessfully for more than a year with his web analytics provider to
develop a complete view of user journeys and to award credit and commissions more
appropriately, Elliott turned to TagMan.
Strategy
TagMan worked with Elliott's internal marketing and web development teams to
implement its universal container tag. The tag would be used to replace all the tags on its
web pages from marketing technologies such as web analytics, affiliates, display ad servers, and Google AdWords, and re-house them in the TagMan system and interface.
With all the tags and, most crucially, all the data they delivered, housed in one place,
Boden would be able to see the step-by-step precise and complete journey (including
direct-to-site and SEO) that its converting customers took through to a sale. Immediate
savings would be delivered in being able to identify which affiliate really delivered the last
click in any path and so deduplicate where more than one affiliate claimed the same sale.
TagMan research has shown that the average online business will see duplication of 13%
and, among its own clients (largely e-commerce businesses), duplication rates of
up to 80% have been seen, with an average of 25-35%.
With the full path to conversion reported, Boden would also be able to use the system to
identify the different roles that online channels play in acquiring customers. With
this insight it would be able to develop marketing attribution models to spread credit
and commission from sales across all online channels.
Implementation
The TagMan implementation for Boden had a remit for 4 international markets. It was initially rolled out to the US and UK markets, with Germany and Austria following.
The initial implementation conversation detailed the structure and scope of the implementation requirement with TagMan then creating and delivering the containers for the Boden developers to install. As the Boden developers plugged TagMan into the Boden global sites, TagMan was busy adding the tags into the containers on their behalf. The tags covered analytics (Google), retargeting, (Criteo), affiliates, search, display and more.
Once the containers were live and the testing complete, the tags were deployed to live by TagMan and removed from the page by Boden in a seamless process. This allowed the de-duplication to be switched on for the performance marketing channels so that Boden can benefit from the savings associated with the removal of duplicate commissions.
Full training on the reporting and tagging interfaces was provided so that Boden can have full access to their tags, campaign and attribution results. Moving forward, Boden will also be taking the TagMan datafeed so more rich marketing data can be fed directly
into the Boden internal CRM system.
Results
Boden uses the insight TagMan provides to understand its customers' online journeys better and act on that insight to optimize all its online campaigns. For example - a single view of customers Boden has first used TagMan as a central reporting tool to see how all its online channels are performing in one place. The path-to-conversion data shows the marketing events any converting customer was exposed to on their way to a sale - including paid and natural search and the keywords used, display ads viewed and clicked on, email campaigns, and affiliates.
This insight has transformed Boden's understanding of the role different online channels play in the user journey. It has, says Elliott, "gained us a more informed view of the impact of online display; and a more informed view on exactly which search terms are contained within paths to conversion.
Actionable insight
Acting on this data is the next step and Boden has already made great strides. First steps, says Elliott, have been to optimize paid-search campaigns. TagMan data revealed for the first time that generic terms e.g. 'women's clothing' often appear in a customer's path to buying, even though it is branded terms ('Boden') that most often deliver 'the last click'.
Knowing this, Boden now optimizes against these generic terms with full confidence that - even though they do not deliver the last click - they do drive sales.
CPA deduplication
Boden was also able to make instant savings in the commissions it pays to CPA channels such as affiliates. Elliott - using the path-toconversion reports - was able to apply a common-sense rule to the commissions he paid affiliates where his own email marketing also appeared in the conversion path.
With a traditionally strong email strategy used by Boden to target existing customers, Elliott figured that marketing interactions upstream of email clicks played little part in the buying decision, being of little value to customer retention and certainly no value to customer acquisition. Wanting to move affiliate focus to higher value new customer interactions, he set rules through TagMan to pay commission only where email did not appear in the conversion path or appeared after email.
"We were wanting to dedupe some of the overlap between affiliates. But, it wasn't really about saving money, it was about optimizing spend and performance along common-sense and well-researched paths to conversion."
"There has been very little come back from affiliates. We spent a lot of time and effort communicating our intention and explaining our rationale behind the chosen scenario. We felt the argument was an easy one to make as it clearly aligned with our business goals and, with other advertisers having already set a deduplication precedent but pushing further, also being seen as fair."
The decision has proven prescient. Deduplication against email has been around
10%, showing that affiliates have been, by and large, delivering new customers, not converting existing ones already reached by Boden through email.
Next steps
Having proven the value of TagMan, Boden is keen to explore as much as possible how it can be smarter in its online marketing using the insight it provides.
Key considerations will be using the data to better understand to what degree its new display retargeting system is delivering incremental sales and to develop a smarter attribution model that rewards all channels fairly.
Elliott concludes: "Using TagMan has gained us: immediate savings in affiliate commissions and network overrides; a more informed view of the impact of online display; and a more informed view on exactly which search terms are contained within paths to conversion, enabling optimisation on generic terms that frequently drive sales through to a branded term endpoint.
"There are still many things we are trying to crack but, in the end, it is about understanding the performance of our online channels in conjunction with each other. Most of all we want understand what the golden cross-channel co-operations are."
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