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A Recent Campaign Response Attribution Success Story

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Jun 23 2009

Recently I had the opportunity to work with one of our clients on a campaign response attribution project.  The client is a hosted solution customer using a popular campaign planning and execution tool with a focus on direct mail catalog distribution across North America.  A savvy campaign management team builds complex campaigns with intricate segments at both the business and contact level. Campaign responses arrive in the database in the form of catalog orders generated by the direct mail campaign.

Attributing the orders back to the campaign was a complex design challenge.  Working closely with the client team, I developed a set of SQL allocation routines to distribute the orders across the various segments within the campaign.  This processing took care of much of the heavy lifting and opened the door to segment level campaign measurement.  Since data was aggregated at the segment level, it could also be aggregated up for campaign level analysis.

Thanks to the attribution process, it is now possible to measure campaign level performance against budgeted sales goals logged within the campaign planning tool.  This information allows for advanced budget variance calculations to track the actual campaign sales to the overall plan.  The client and I also defined a forecasting algorithm which projects campaign performance thorough the end of the campaign life cycle. 

To present the data, I built a series of aggregated reporting tables optimized for the several custom reports exposed within the campaign planning tool.  Publishing the reports within the application provides visibility to the campaign management team, circulation planners, brand managers and executives.  End users also have the ability to run reports on an ad hoc basis and toggle various input parameters used for forecast, profit, and margin calculations.

Defining a response attribution process may seem like a daunting task; however it is an important step to understand and measure campaign effectiveness.   A reasonable investment to define a methodology will lead to better decision making, cost savings, and a competitive advantage over the competition.

 

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