Marketing Attribution for Sport & Fitness Brands

By its very nature, the sport and fitness industry is competitive.

Customers want to find the right items to help them achieve their goals and you need to be right there when they go searching or you’ll lose the race.

With customers moving from desktop to laptop; browser to app and even in-store to online – tracking the impact of your marketing efforts on sales can be an uphill struggle.

How can you understand what you need to be doing more of and where to cut budget?

It’s time to give your marketing measurement a workout.

Are your marketing reports making you sweat?

It can be easy to get blinded by tools that shout about all the (dum)bells and whistles, but does it do the heavy lifting you need for accurate reporting?

Accurate insights come from fixing the underlying data before applying an attribution model on top.

Off-the-shelf attribution tools that use rules-based models apply credit to interactions in the customer journey before they happen.

And they use cookies to track users, meaning you can’t really understand what’s working and what isn’t across your marketing mix.

Keeping pace with issues of bias in your AdTech reporting

One of the biggest challenges for sports and fitness brands right now is getting a clear picture on the effectiveness of their spend on the big AdTech channels.

In fact, our own research points to the fact that 80% of retail marketers are concerned about bias in their AdTech reporting.

The crux of the issue is the differing approaches to attribution that AdTech players are applying in terms of reporting which means that reconciling the competing reporting data in terms of revenue attribution is problematic.

For example, while Facebook can connect simply viewing an ad to revenue (without a click through to purchase), Google will give full credit to the last touchpoint on the journey.

So why is this happening?

The first reason is the disparity that respective players apply to their revenue reporting.

The issue is best illustrated using a practical example:

• While browsing on Facebook a prospect sees an advert for your brand
• They click through the ad, visit your website but decide not to buy right away
• A week or so later they see a display ad for your brand
• This prompts them to do an organic search for a piece of fitness equipment they first saw on your site a week back
• As they are browsing they see a PPC ad for the same piece of equipment and click to buy

If you look at Google Analytics then full credit for the sale is going to go to the bottom end of the funnel – and the PPC ad – based on Last Click attribution.

However, Facebook – which is interested only in single platform ad impact within its 28 day window – will give full credit to the Facebook ad and ignore the other touchpoints.

So, attribution metrics matter.

But it is also worth pointing out that the raw, cookie-based analytics data that Facebook and Google rely on to track user journeys is also highly inaccurate. Due to the particularly poor job that cookies do of effectively tracking complex, multi-device user journeys.

Corvidae: an attribution solution that places you ahead of the pack

Corvidae enables sports and fitness brands to remove the AdTech bias from their reporting and works to an average of +95% predictive accuracy.

It is the only cookieless attribution platform on the market that uses a unique and patented combination of Machine Learning and AI which enables marketers to:

• Understand true marketing performance – right across the customer journey by stitching together all of the data from cross-channel, cross device touchpoints.
• Rebuild your broken AdTech data – by rebuilding all of your marketing data from the ground up and breaking down data silos.
• Optimise your performance – by making informed decisions about budget reallocation to drive ROAS up and CPAs down.

Driving down CPAs for a high street golf retailer

We worked with a retail client, using Corvidae’s AI technology to rebuild their attributable data, allowing them to effectively move spend and reduce CPAs in Paid Search.

The first challenge was to understand the accuracy of their existing data.

To do this, we used Corvidae’s patented session stitching technology to take account of the impact of all touchpoints and identify influential touchpoints far earlier in the journey.

This provided the insight that enabled the client to confidently move budget away from under-performing campaigns.

And reallocate it to generate greater ROAS and significantly reduce CPAs.

Key results included:

• +£41k revenue per month post-optimisation
• -16% CPA per month post-optimisation
• +34% events available for Google Ads optimisation

Get your marketing into better shape

When it comes to finding effective attribution, there is a quick way to shape up.

Try attribution the Corvidae way.

Download our eBook below to find out more, or get in touch here.