Big Data – How Sky Have Used Attribution To Understand Customer Journeys

How attribution data has informed the affiliate channel

I recently met Helen Southgate, Online Marketing Controller for Strategy & Planning at Sky, presenting their approach to media channel attribution and how it informed their understanding of the affiliate channel in context with other online activity. With that in mind she kindly agreed to this interview where I asked about how BSkyB manage their affiliate marketing. You may also find her presentation interesting for reference:

1. You have been talking attribution for some time at Sky. How did you begin the process?

Yes, I have been talking about it for some time and to be honest it’s still in progress. It’s a massive project and one that is forever changing given the dynamic nature of online. I began the process by looking at what data we had access to and where it was being captured. Since then I’ve focused in on the paid marketing side of attribution, what I’d term “natural” attribution will be a phase 2, so we still have some way to go.

2. How did you decide upon which technology to use?

If I’m going to be completely honest, this was inherited but I don’t think the platform is the challenge. The challenge is firstly ensuring all of your activity is tracking and you are comparing apples with apples. The next challenge is actually what you do with all of the data.

3. Once you have the data how do you begin to interpret it?

Good question, this I think is the trickiest part of attribution. Most people think it’s getting the data but in my opinion it’s what you do with it.

At the moment we’re looking at data on a campaign basis, so say over 4-6 weeks. The key thing is to start basic then drill down into more granular detail.

4. What for you are the biggest arguments in favour of attribution?

I look at attribution as understanding the customer journey better and the role our marketing communications play within that journey. I can’t see why this would ever be a disadvantage and surely is what everyone should be doing, to truly understand not only the impact of your marketing spend, but to fully understand the journey your customers make before assisting your product or service.

The output of this could be more effective use of marketing spend, identification of new opportunities or improvements to the customer journey, all massive wins for any marketer.

5. What have you found to be the greatest challenges?

Time and Resource – it takes a lot of people to get this right and it takes a lot of time to interpret the data into something that is both insightful and useful.

6. Can you give examples of some of the practical changes to your marketing activity you have made as a result of your work on attribution?

Attribution data has enabled us to look at the wider value, beyond last click, for our affiliates. In affiliates it has enabled us to see the wider value that our affiliates are driving for us, specifically around what we’d term the “middle” of the funnel where customers are researching. This has brought a greater confidence within the business for the channel with better visibility and understanding of the role different affiliates play. This has led to greater investment, not just from a sales acquisition budget but also brand.

7. Working with the amount of data you have at Sky and the number of stakeholders, how did you cope with different departments’ agendas? How much of a challenge was it to look at the data impartially?

My role sits outside of any specific media channel so I’m in a unique position to be able to look at this agnostically. This is really important; as it is very easy to have a bias, when I worked across paid search and affiliates I would undoubtedly have had a bias to those channels, it’s human nature!

It is also really important to go into this with no preconceptions about what the data will tell you or what question you want it to answer. You can make data do anything so by going into a project without an open mind and no agenda you will bias the outcome.