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The beauty of online and digital advertising and marketing is that most of your efforts can be tracked, monitored, analysed and assessed in some form, with varying degrees of data and insight depending on the channel, deployment technology and reporting solution employed.

There is a problem; most CMOs and digital management teams are getting their digital channel activity reports, analysis and operational intelligence in siloed environments.

There is no notion a unified online/digital space in the tracking and analysis - so any performance relationship between the channels and view of a linear chronological view of consumers touch points with your marketing communications is non-existent.

This fragmented outlook, looking at each channel in isolation, means many CMOs and digital marketing teams are not really seeing what their digital activity is doing?

You may be experiencing the same issue? Ask your self these simple questions:-

1. What's the average number of searches to purchase ratio? At 30 days? At 90 days? At 365 days?
2. What's the mix of paid and organic search in a conversion?

3. What type of keywords are found at the top of the conversion path (or are you just seeing last-touch keyword attribution?)
4. What broad and generic keywords lead to brand searches (awareness) and conversion?
5. Is there a relationship between display advertising and the volume of brand searches?
6. How many display ads does my average customer see prior to clicking on a search link?
7. Can I boost search activity and awareness using display and what frequency of display ad impressions is required to generate a conversion with search?

8. Do consumers already subscribed to my mailing list often use search to reach the website & make a purchase?
9. How long does the average search occur after a mailer?

10. Do the email subscribers search for product promoted in your mailers?
11. Are my affiliates helping my other marketing channels?
12. How long is my customers' online purchase decision cycle?

If the answer to these questions is "I don't know" then you may want to think about moving your digital marketing communications into a multi-channel multi-touch attribution environment.

The main question you need to ask is:-

What is the real cost-per-acquisition (CPA)?

We'll be discussing the mechanics of multi-channel multi-touch attribution and looking at a range of user journeys and how they interact with your marketing communications in the next post.