A look at the Wednesday Card – Marketing Attribution in Distil’s Shopify App
What’s special about Wednesday? Not much. It means half the working week is over. (Or for those in tech, a reminder there’s only half the week left.) It’s never a holiday. But whether you call it Beersday, Burger Day, or Hump Day, there’s a new reason to like the middle of the week: distil.ai’s Wednesday Card for Shopify, focusing on marketing attribution!
It’s one of the daily “cards” Shopify users can see with our free App for the e-commerce platform – in sync with our principle that while data can be complex, the insights it gives don’t have to be. Our metaphor of a card for each day of the week helps you organise your thinking and focus your attention on specific tasks. Our Wednesday Card gives you the inside track on a key sales segment: new customers, those who’ve entered your funnel for the first time this month. Here’s how it works.
Let’s recap: the concept of cards
Our Shopify Analytics Cards put a friendlier and more useful – face on raw data, by presenting a curated view of key performance indicators. The cards aren’t 100-page reports – and that’s deliberate. Each day of the working week, you’ll find one waiting for you: Briefing Monday, Segmentation Tuesday, Product Thursday, Wrap-up Friday. And Marketing Wednesday.
This Wednesday Card is based on a simple metaphor: the cohort. It’s a snapshot of a group that’ll interest marketers the most: customers who joined you this month, buying from you for the first time. Updated every Wednesday as the month progresses. If Wednesday is the 22nd, then the card shows the cohort at 21 days old. If we believe Peter Drucker’s old maxim – that all of business is about acquiring and retaining a customer – this approach lets you check how well you’re doing that.
See what the new intake is taking away
First up the card shows you revenue. Not from your sales as a whole, but from these new customers, because each month your cohort of newbies represents fresh opportunities for the future. The figure looks straightforward – and it is – but there’s a surprising amount of data driving it. (All of it beautifully wrangled by distil.ai.)
Next up, the card shows you the marketing attributions. Yes, this is the blame game – in a good way. What percentage of those sales came down to Marketing, and which didn’t – such as people coming to your site by typing in a URL.
Credit where credit’s due: what Marketing did …
Here’s the the clever part. Attribution to “marketing” isn’t just people clicking on your ad. It includes everything that can reasonably be laid at Marketing’s door: campaigns, affiliate activity, even SMS and display advertising where there’s no direct clickthrough to your store. As a side note, discover why great marketing needs great data.
Next up is what those lovely people purchased – and there’s gold in these conclusions, too. The Wednesday Card notes what they bought first, so you can see what’s attracting them front and centre, and then what they added on or bought later.
(You’ll see figures for total number of orders this cohort made – and total number in the cohort, too, so you can check how they compare with the previous month. If you’re suffering a summer dip, it may be normal – but if it’s not what usually happens, this signals you need some additional activity to drive those numbers back up.)
… and what Marketing did next
Next the card gets granular, splitting your marketing attribution into separate channels. Paid search, paid social, affiliate, email, and SMS marketing; display advertising, organic search (the kind you do in the Google box), referrals, and other social. There’s also a category for “other”. (You know it was marketing’s win, but you’re not sure how.)
Such data tells you what you know and hints at what you don’t. And it gets (even) cleverer from there. The table breaks down channels by the sales they generated and the percentage of total sales that represents, so you can judge where your marketing spend is most effective. (If 90% of your budget’s going on Facebook Ads but they’re only responsible for 10% of sales, a rethink is a good idea.)
Guesstimating each customer’s lifetime value … from data
Business is about forward planning – and the LTV figures help you do it. Not the single purchase a new customer makes in his first visit, but the lifetime value you’ll enjoy if you treat him right. Remember, a first purchase is a big deal: it sets you up for a years-long profitable relationship. Good business is repeat business.
This is the real value of connecting different data sources together and applying intelligence to the whole bucket. A new customer making a £10 buy? Not exciting. (OK, OK – it’s a little exciting.) But a data-backed insight that each such customer will spend £2,500 in the next three years? Now that’s something to jump up and down waving your hands about.
A sales funnel with a few extra bits
All this comes together on the main funnel view: a chart you’ll recognise from Marketing 101. You’ll see how different channels come into play at different stages of the customer’s journey toward you, which helps you define what to do with each channel. Drive awareness, interest, desire, action, or just keep on nurturing? With all this marketing attribution info you can decide.
It’s backed up by your total sales, total number of customers, whether they went on to make a second purchase (gold!) or stopped at one. Complete with all the metrics you love: purchase value, time to second purchase, and even third. After all, a basic success factor in online commerce is knowing who’s ready to buy again … and again … and again. So you can give them the right nudge at the right time.
In our time-poor world, drowning in data and maddened by metrics, the Wednesday Card (like our other Analytics Cards) is your crib sheet for getting through the day. It gives you a snapshot of your marketing success, right here, right now, with a view of the data not always obvious from a big-kahuna dashboard.
In conclusion: Don’t go feature-heavy, go benefits-heavy
We don’t mind admitting: our Analytics Cards are not feature-heavy applications. They’re minimalist and focussed on what really matters, the right tool for the job.
Because while everyone loves Shopify, not everyone (ahem) loves Shopify’s inbuilt analytics. The Wednesday Card, all things Shopify marketing attribution swings in connected datasheets and artificial intelligence to sort the gems from the rocks and show you what you most need to know.
Ready to improve your Wednesdays? Install the FREE Distil for Shopify here. Or if you’re already in the game to go further – why not talk to us directly and see what else distil.ai can do?
