Multiple Campaign Tracking with a Single Customer

How to attribute revenue to multiple campaigns

[Trodda]

What is the standard benchmark for tracking revenue from multiple campaign sources. Should you keep the original campaign as the permanent source? Should you expire the original campaign after a certain period? should each new campaign that a customer encounters, simply replace the previous campaign?

For instance, if a visitor arrives on your site from a PPC ad and then makes a purchase, you will attribute this revenue to the original campaign. But what if you then send him a trackable email and he buys again. Do you credit the original campaign, the email campaign, or both?

Been trying to figure this one out for a while. Any feedback or suggestions on how people are doing this would be great.

[cgrantski]

Then there's the question of giving credit to the campaign that produced the visit where that visitor first signed up for email.

If I had the technology, I'd give 15% to the campaign for the very first visit, 10% to the campaign for the email signup, and 75% to the campaign for the current (purchasing) visit. Other campaigns get no credit.

For the first two, I'd have expirations of 6 months but I think the standards are either 90 days or never expiring.

It's a rare analytics program that allows proportional credit like this. Most want to give full credit to the original AND full credit to the current campaign, resulting in hard-to-interpret, inflated numbers. Trodda, are you using a program that allows flexibility?

[Trodda]

Yes cgrantski, since its our own proprietary system we could code it to proportion the revenue as you suggest, but just difficult to know what's the best way of doing it. Right now we have a never expiring campaign policy which is particularly misleading for follow up retention campaigns which end up crediting the original acquisition campaign when a repeat purchase occurs.