SANTA MONICA, CA – Convertro (www.convertro.com), which measures ad campaign effectiveness using cross-attribution of offline and online channels, today announced that it has launched the advertising industry’s first attribution solution that encompasses paid, owned and earned media and assesses the role each plays in driving sales. While fragmented analytics platforms that measure the impact of single forms of media exist today, this is the first end-to-end attribution tool that enables brands, retailers and publishers to compare and contrast how each performs against its marketing goals.
Paid media encompasses traditional display advertising, paid search, and other online advertisement buys and has always been trackable through Convertro. In addition, Convertro can now give attribution credit to Owned and Earned media. Owned media assets are third party assets owned by a brand such as their Twitter stream, YouTube channel, Facebook page and Pinterest pins. These third party sites do not support first party analytics tags. Thus, Convertro had to build a tracking mechanism to track any clicks from one third party site to another and give those clicks conversion credit.
Earned media is essentially unpaid brand promotion via viral sharing (such as on social media) as opposed to paid advertising. Advertisers include “Share” buttons on their websites to enable propagation through resharing, yielding direct and indirect conversions. Through a URL generation feature, Convertro is able to track not only the share action, but all future revenue attributed to users who have clicked through via a shared link.
“We live in a new world where brand awareness or purchase intent can be generated from a variety of ‘media’ assets. We offer the market – for the first time – a single solution to help advertisers understand the exact impact all their earned, paid and owned media assets have on conversions, and we properly attribute it,” says Jeff Zwelling, Convertro’s CEO. “Knowing and allocating revenue credit to the value of a ‘share’ action or clicks between earned media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest will change the way marketers allocate their marketing dollars.”
As an indicator of the impact of earned media, a woman placed an order for customized Christmas cards on a large etailer site. Towards the end of January, she pinned the Christmas card she personalized to Pinterest. Convertro tracked users who clicked to the site via the pin and reported the following: 6,815 visits and 65 direct sales for the etailer who produced her card.
“This shows the power of a single ‘share’ action how it can have a meaningful indirect impact on revenue” says Mr. Zwelling. “The ability for Social Media marketers to quantify the impact of owned and earned media is absolutely critical. Not being able to measure owned and earned will diminish the importance of these two channels.”
Convertro (www.convertro.com) provides advertisers and agencies valuable cross-channel analytics and actionable recommendations to attribute, optimize, monitor and adjust marketing strategies and tactics in order to significantly and efficiently grow revenue and profit across all marketing channels, both on- and offline. By capturing and analyzing all user touch-points leading to a conversion everywhere and every time, Convertro provides marketers true intelligence with scientifically-advanced attribution and predictive capabilities. The company’s proprietary and patent-pending technologies enable it to cross-attribute across online, television, radio, print, and direct mail channels with ROI maximization as the underlying driver. Convertro is based in Santa Monica and maintains a research office in Israel.
