[ Allocation ]

The Order Allocation Conundrum

Online ads, offline ads, affiliates, social media posts, emails, catalogs, direct mail, SEO, SMO, remarketing and more, there are numerous advertising options vying for a slice of your marketing budget. Optimizing your budget with the optimal mix of options is a challenge, but not impossible. Clearly not all of the choices are equally productive and not all of them cost the same per contact. Some new customer inquiries convert to customers better than others and some become long term loyal customers better than others. How does a marketer sort it all out?

In a typical scenario you might look at 100 new to file customer and find claims for having provided them to be something like this:

  • 18 - Affiliate program
  • 22 - Remarketing efforts
  • 35 - SEO program
  • 20 - Email response
  • 42 - Catalog response
  • 16 - Social media
  • 12 - Online ads

In total the credits claimed add up to 160, but you only have 100 new names. Something doesn't add up.

Accurately attributing new customer leads and first time buyers to the correct marketing initiatives is critical information for a marketing manager to know in order to plan future spending. At CLI we are passionate about providing solutions for the order source conundrum. Not determining the true impact of each of your marketing efforts is like spreading your marketing budget around to all the available options and hoping it works out. Having a long history working with the tools of measured marketing, we at CLI are not comfortable with that approach.

Accurately matching inquiries and new orders back to the correct source(s) will provide the blue print for optimizing your future marketing spending. With Basic Matchback, MatchXL, and Match360 we offer three solutions.

  1. Basic Matchback starts with source information that is captured at the time the order was received and makes adjustments based on the timing of various campaigns.
  2. MatchXL adds Google Analytics to the input mix and allows for a more nuanced and broader range of inputs.
  3. Match360 utilizes refined statistical processes to build algorithms that generate the possibility of proportional allocation of credit.

Getting Started

Our experts in matchback systems can help you determine which approach is right for you based on your unique usage of the marketing options and the type of response information you collect. We would like to hear from you.