Moving beyond attribution to omnichannel optimization

Moving beyond attribution to omnichannel optimization

Ian Thomas

Microsoft

About me

~25%1,300

12B 2.4B

• Run Marketing Operations &

Analytics team at Microsoft

• Responsible for RM Marketing

Ops for Windows, Surface,

Xbox, Bing, MSN, Microsoft

Rewards, Windows Store

• 16 years in Web Analytics, Big

Data & Digital Marketing

operations

The problem

How to maximize digital campaign effectiveness across

multiple channels?

Database Plan Deliver Analyze

Optimize

The traditional model (aka, the good old days)

Timescale: weeks

Ask for more budget

Email

Today’s world: Scaling to multiple channels

Display

Social

Timescale: days/hours

Our problems

Multichannel digital attribution is a fool’s errand

Manually optimizing over multiple channels is incredibly

time-consuming & complicated

Traditional model of plan-deliver-analyze-adjust doesn’t

scale in an omnichannel world

The solution:

Think different(ly) about digital marketing

Digital marketing as an optimization problem

Inputs

User profile

Offer

Creative

Tactic/channel

Outputs

Views/clicks

Conversions

Engagement

Revenue/GM

Constraints

Budget

Inventory

Continuous optimization

The things you need

1 A comprehensive user profile

2 Integrated delivery systems using a common creative repository

3 A set of common objectives

4 Integrated Marketing Operations function

5 An optimization engine

A/B testing vs multi-armed bandits

Looking for definitive “winner” of

a number of options

“Explore” phase precedes

separate “exploit” phase

Good for relatively stable

environments (where the winner

stays the winner)

Quicker to get to statistical

significance in results

Looking for the “best” of a

number of options

“Explore” phase overlaps “exploit”

phase

Good when the conditions that

make “best” change over time

(i.e. continuous optimization)

Minimizes traffic to poorly-

performing alternatives

Dimensions of data

Audience Data

• Product ownership

• Product Engagement

• Marketing Engagement

• Attitudes

Offer Data

• Product info

• Price range

• Purchase model

Tactics

• Channel

• Creative

• Timing

• Format

• Cost

Too many vs too few attributes

Too few:Model optimizes quickly, but with low lift

Too many:Model optimizes too slowly, or never

Single-channel, single campaign optimization

User data Matching engine Ruleset Delivery Metrics

Creative library

Data feedback

Plan

Multi-channel/multi-offer optimization

Email

Display

Social

User data Matching engine Ruleset

Creative

libraryOffer library

(“The hopper”)

Games with Gold

Experiment with offers, creative and timing

within Games with Gold email series

Also extending to in-product notifications

Goals: Increase lift, reduce effort associated

with putting this email together

In summary…

• Think of campaign optimization as a single space across channel / user / offer / creative

• Pick the crawl – walk –run that is right for your business

• Let me know how you get on so I can learn from you!

• Amplero

• Salesforce (Einstein)

• Optimove

• Kahuna

Companies in this space

Thank you

[email protected]

@ian_thomas

www.liesdamnedlies.com