Many of the tools used to analyze online marketing campaigns focus on the “last ad” that a user clicked. Often, these tools are blind to activity not directly leading to, or occurring on, a company’s website.

Measuring ROI Beyond the Last Ad, a recent study by the Atlas Institute states, “Although real-time performance metrics for online campaigns deliver insight at unprecedented levels of granularity, those same reporting systems fail to capture the complexity of the campaigns. As a result, publishers are held to reporting standards that ignore all but the last digital marketing ad or click before a conversion. Known as the ‘last-ad’ reporting standard, this model gives 100% credit for a conversion to the last ad seen or clicked on by a consumer.”

Are you missing information?

To demonstrate the type of information we may be missing if we fall into the “last ad trap,” let me share my own recent experience purchasing a digital camera online. Over the last few months:

* I searched for “digital cameras” and read up on important features.

* I read on-line reviews of different cameras.

* I received a circular in the mail from a national electronics retailer promoting a sale.

* I searched online for the same electronics retailer using Google and, subsequently, purchased the digital camera directly from the electronic retailer’s website.

In the case of my digital camera search, if the national electronics retailer was relying solely on tools that focused on the “last ad” a user clicked, they would have attributed the sale to a search on Google for the company’s name, and not to any of my other actions.

Furthermore, if they took these results at face value and focused their marketing investments on that “last ad,” over time, their sales results would diminish without the support of other marketing activities.

Specific B2B challenges

Brian Makas, Manager of Business Intelligence for ThomasNet, observes that “Business-to-business (B2B) purchases are even more difficult to track than business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions. In many cases, B2B purchases involve multiple decision makers and the buying cycle may take months, or even years, to complete. For example, an engineer in charge of product development will often be the one looking for suppliers. However, their corporate policies may require that the purchasing department negotiate the purchase.”

To this point, the Atlas Institute report states, “Media plans today are increasingly dominated by search, affiliate deals, and a handful of networks. This may be a strategy preferred by direct response advertisers, but for many marketers our research shows that vertical content buys have a greater role to play in today’s media plans. Advertisers with a highly considered purchase or a long sales cycle will experience particularly pernicious exposure to the last-ad bias.”

What can you do to eliminate the “last ad bias”?

1. Rather than asking your customers how they found you, be specific and ask how/where they first found you.

2. If you are using technology that automatically attributes sales to clicks, look into this data carefully. If the tool attributes sales to searches, such as your company name or your company’s specific product numbers, ask yourself what happened before that last search that may have influenced the sale.

3. For each of your marketing endeavors, when possible, obtain a list of companies that were exposed to your marketing message. Then, compare that list with your own customer data. You may be surprised by the results. Customers you thought were referred to you by one source may have actually found out about your company from a different source.

4. Once you’ve identified the marketing efforts that brought you a new customer, make sure you permanently associate those efforts with the company and track their lifetime value (LTV). A customer’s LTV is equal to their average purchase multiplied by the number of purchases you expect to receive from that customer over a period of time.

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