Every online retailer should be using attribution to map customer journeys and measure the effectiveness of advertising programs. Those that do are able to optimize existing ad spend and find more customers to ultimately boost revenue.

Attribution is the holy grail for marketers when it comes to understanding buyer behaviour. It allows marketers to analyze which string of touchpoints influences buyers to make purchases.

When you’re starting out with attribution for your online store, it’s important to gather enough data to be statistically significant. Exactly how much this means is different for every store, but in general, choose a period of time during which about 10% of your monthly customers will show up. This usually gives enough information that you’ll be able to see how each individual behaved as well as gather important insights from the aggregated group.

When you’ve mapped the entire customer journey for buyers, it’ll be easy to determine which string of touchpoints makes it most likely for leads to pull out their wallet to spend big, and, which will likely return to your shop for years to come.

When you know how your most profitable customers behave, you can start to take action to help all leads follow a similar journey.

Two ways to increase E-Commerce revenue

Attribution will help drive more revenue in two ways:

1. Find more customers

Create a more streamlined user experience by eliminating friction points, and review all inbound touchpoints. Eliminate unnecessary marketing content that isn’t influencing buyers but might in fact be getting in their way.

This will maximize the chance that individuals who enter the top of the funnel make it all the way to the bottom. You’ll lose fewer leads through cracks in the funnel, so you’ll end up with more customers generating more revenue.

2. Reallocate existing ad spend

Shift advertising budget to programs that deliver the highest paying customers and away from non-performing touchpoints. There’s no need to increase your budget at this stage; let’s just re-use what we have in a better way.

Optimizing ad-spend this way will create the most favourable ROI. You’ll be able to fill up your funnel with more leads while keeping your ad budget identical, generating more revenue.

The value of following individual customers from the moment they click an ad all the way down to the purchase becomes clear in this LeadsRx E-Commerce Case Study. Perhaps counter intuitively, the advertising platform with the lowest cost per acquisition should not always receive the bulk of your ad budget.

Some ad platforms deliver customers that spend more. When the increased absolute customer spend per order outweighs the higher absolute cost per acquisition on the more expensive ad platform, ROAS can go up when you opt for the “more expensive” option.

Start increasing your E-Commerce revenue now

Every online retailer should be using attribution to monitor their sales on an on-going basis. LeadsRx offers a new AdSpend Monitor attribution application for Shopify stores in particular. It installs instantly and produces results in a matter of days.