Yesterday (or today) I wrote about Spending time with Social Media on Thanksgiving – Does Social Media act as a “co-enzyme” or precursor to action? and I’ve been noticing that I really need to interact more with comments, feeds, etc -  and I did, especially yesterday and today.

But then I came across an excellent post by Kevin Hillstrom on his MindThatData blog titled Measuring Paid Search, E-Mail, And Social Media Influence Via Matchbacks Kevin makes an excellent and very true point that….

” ….we don’t attribute orders to the emerging channels — we simply don’t have business rules to do this, so we attribute orders to the most established channels. But if we focus on influenced sales, we notice that channels like e-mail and paid search and social media play a bigger role, helping cause an order to happen.”

Got it – that’s one of the problems we have to overcome – we simply don’t have the Business Rules set up for MatchBack Attribution where Online Activity, perhaps, precursors (or Co-Enzyme’s according to me) are given credit – because the Business Rules aren’t yet developed to measure those things and assign a value to it.

If you follow the examples in Kevin’s post – and use attribution that he applies in this example – what we get is this:

Each quarter, we produce a table that illustrates, for each channel, direct attributed sales, and influenced sales.

Influenced sales make a huge difference in viewing a “mutlichannel strategy”. In the illustration above, e-mail, paid search and social media are key influencers. They do not get direct ROI attribution, but are clearly used by the customer as part of the purchase process. From a strategic standpoint, these channels should receive strategic attention. Or maybe catalog marketing should not receive direct credit for all orders!

	Direct Sales	Influenced Sales	Index
Catalog Marketing	$10,000,000	$1,200,000	0.12
E-Mail Marketing	$1,000,000	$4,000,000	4.00
Paid Search	$2,000,000	$4,000,000	2.00
Other Online Marketing	$1,000,000	$1,000,000	1.00
Social Media	$100,000	$3,000,000	30.00
Mobile Marketing	$100,000	$1,000,000	10.00