Tracked Performance is a basic attribution set that lets us see when someone comes to the site and converts. It’s what finance teams typically care about. True Performance helps us factor in things like customer lifetime value (CLV), search performance, and app downloads. It enables us to make long-term strategic decisions about what’s working well from a marketing perspective.
True Performance helps us identify valuable customer interactions, and then optimize media, assets, and messaging against those. For example, if we know people who book via our app have higher CLV, then we can use this insight to fuel our marketing campaigns and reach people who are more likely to download the app. This doesn’t always mean conversion, of course, but when someone has downloaded the app, we have the opportunity to nurture them.
The most significant benefit of True Performance is that it doesn’t measure last-click attribution. Prior to introducing this metric, we were misattributing a significant amount of our clicks. Now, we’re heading toward data-driven attribution, which helps us understand the intent, interactions, and signals that are driving long-term growth.
3. Don’t hoard your data
To make the best decisions about and for your customers you need to know what they’re doing today — not three months ago. Thanks to technology, it’s now possible to have dynamic conversations with customers in real time. By identifying customer behavior signals (through your website, app, or other channels) you can start to get a clear understanding of what kind of behaviors correlate with likeliness to convert, either now or in the future. This information should drive your bidding decisions and creative strategy.
At HomeAway, all our segmentation is now based on real-time behaviors. If someone comes to our site, for example, we can say, “that person behaves exactly like someone who is going to convert in two weeks’ time.” We then know what types of content and messaging might be useful for this person so we can keep them engaged until they’re ready to buy.
To do this, we’re leaning into automation and machine learning. It would be impossible to segment and reach our audiences effectively without this technology.
