White Paper | Authors: Catherine Candano Google, June Cheung Oracle Advertising and CX, Rupesh Kumar Carat Media, Tara Crosby Twitch, Vidyarth Eluppai Srivatsan The Coca-Cola Company
TYPICAL CHALLENGES WITH DATA DRIVEN ATTRIBUTION BETWEEN FMCG BRAND AND ECOMMERCE
Wow, after an exhilarating evening at the BLACKPINK event, Josh and Jessica head off to a bar while they wait for the crowd to dissipate before making their way home. As they debrief on the live music event and their dance moves they thought it would also be good to chat a little shop, about the challenges and differences in data available to them as marketers: Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) for Josh vs eCommerce for Jessica.
Curious about what they chatted about? Tune in below:
So Josh, what are some of your challenges when collecting consumer interactions with your FMCG brands?
Well, the biggest challenge is the lack of sales conversion data. Typically, we influence and drive brand awareness via topline activity – YouTube, OTT, traditional broadcast and social. However, most people buy soft drinks offline at their local supermarket.
And Jessica, what are some of your challenges when collecting consumer interactions from an eCommerce perspective?
We capture all consumer interactions across our websites and apps but our biggest challenge is that we are limited to our own ecosystem.
From our websites and apps we capture every user interaction from when they land on our assets right through to purchase. This gives us a comprehensive view of our customers and their purchases.
One of our challenges is regarding new or unsigned-in customers. It has become more difficult to understand consumers’ touchpoints in these journeys given most web browsers are moving away from third-party cookies.
Josh, what are the typical media touch points you have with your FMCG consumers?
The most common touchpoints with our consumers are online media and publishers, but there’s limited data that is shared with us. We’ve also tried to build a one-to-one connection with our consumers through offline events where they share their email or mobile when they interact with our brand.
Jessica, what are the typical media touch points you have with your eCommerce consumers?
We use a mix of online and offline media to reach our consumers namely: search, social and programmatic across a wide range of devices computers, phones, tablets and smart TVs. From an offline perspective, we focus on television and radio.
From an online perspective there are lots of data points we capture to measure impact. We know that our attribution strategy of last click and last view is foundational; currently we have moved to using multi-touch attribution (MTA) and we aim to roll out marketing mix modelling (MMM) next year.
Our challenge lies in attributing the value of our offline spends such as radio and TV. While we assume it plays an important role in our marketing mix, it is much more difficult to quantify when compared with our digital activity.
Josh, what sales data does a FMCG brand capture?
That’s one of our biggest challenges as our product is stocked on our retailer shelves, so getting actual sales data from the end consumer is difficult. We have at times partnered with our retailers to share this data, but there’s no one-to-one attribution of media touchpoint to sale. Overall, I would say we are very reliant on offline sales data to feed our attribution models.
Jessica, what sales data is made available to you?
We are lucky compared to other more traditional FMCG brands as we are a pure online business which means we have a simpler job in connecting online media to online sales
Jessica, so what’s next, how do you plan to implement MTA or MMM?
A struggle we have when we analyse the success of our media investments is which channel should be attributed to the online sales? Search, Social or Programmatic. If we look at a basic last click perspective, we see a heavy skew towards search, which fits in the bottom end of the funnel, but we are very much aware that activity towards the upper funnel is important to drive consideration. That’s why we’ve seen the value of multi-touch attribution. I’m working on the overall strategy and will have a playbook ready next quarter. I’ll be sure to shoot it over for you to have a read.
Josh, what’s next for you?
Given 99% of my sales are offline, I’m leaning towards a focus on MMM to help understand the effectiveness of our media investment. Same as you, I’m going to put together a playbook to help explain this strategy in more detail. We’ll share it with our internal stakeholders and our external agency partners so we are in sync on the data that’s required and also measurement of success. Let’s keep chatting and exchange our playbooks as I’m confident there’s an opportunity for us to continue to learn from our journeys.
Stay tuned for upcoming playbooks from Josh at FMCG and Jessica at eCommerce on how they tackle MTA and MMM given the differences in data accessible to them as a FMCG brand vs eCommerce.