Chris Allison is Online Sales Manager at ANZ. Here he discusses the company's relationship with Tagman, and how data insight and attribution is giving the airline brand a real understanding of the value of display's role in the purchase journey of an ANZ user.

Can you describe what your engagement with TagMan has enabled beyond the ability to improve page load times and more effective tag management?

We were interested to find out what values we could attribute to various channels that customers used on their journey to purchase. Data from TagMan allowed ANZ to understand how channels, such as display, reached users at the beginning and throughout the purchase funnel to help drive sales. With visibility into data throughout the purchase cycle, a different picture emerged as to the value of display. Analysis showed that around 9% of sales commenced with a display ad interaction.

How is the data that is collected via TagMan enabling you to see a bigger picture in terms of your marketing investment?

The customer journey element of our data analysis has been the single most effective way of tracking the marketing spend that is working the hardest for us. Just as web analytics plays an important role in understanding onsite customer behaviour, TagMan’s data collection allowed us to understand the full customer journey and the level of impact of each media channel on each journey.

With a specific focus on display, how are you able to start assessing its value contribution? How has this changed?

For each customer conversion, TagMan was able to show ANZ the precise creative, media placement and timing of an exposure to a display banner and the exact search term (whether paid or natural) used during the purchase journey.

The reporting interface combined this data to reveal both channels’ contribution to sales in the following ways:

Conversions: the number of times each channel or campaign was the last clicked event before the user converted (where credit for the entire sale is given to the last channel the customer interacted with before converting).

Assisted conversions : the number of sales that resulted from a specific channel appearing in the conversion pathway, at any stage.

Flat Attributed conversions : the number of sales that resulted from a specific channel appearing in the path to conversion, with the conversion credit divided by the total number of events in that path. Flat attribution divides credit equally between all events that appeared in that user’s journey.

TagMan also allowed ANZ to identify their customers’ “look to book” window, which showed how long it took for a customer to make a purchase, starting from the point of their initial inquiry. The window generally reduced when a display advertisement was present, showing that increased display spend may reduce the number of marketing touch points needed to drive conversions.

Have you been developing your own custom attribution models? Can you describe the methodology behind them?

For the moment we have not developed any custom attribution models but this will be part of our planning for the next financial year. The real insight we wanted to assess was the value of display which we were able to identify through a linear attribution. We have began to look to try and weight our paid, earned an owned media channels but this is very much in its infancy for us.

How does Air New Zealand ensure that methods of measurement are more 'data-driven' rather than intuition? Is
there still a role for 'gut instinct'? Is ANZ becoming more a data centric business?

The risk analysis involved in mapping out the customer’s journey and being able to take out the uncertainty in our marketing strategy has propelled us forwards in terms of being able to map out our spending in a more efficient, and essentially successful, manner. Despite the proliferation of decision-making automation tools, we know that personal experience and industry nous cannot be measured and will always continue to be a valuable tool in a marketing department’s arsenal.

What have been the results of your internal analysis? Has it led to budget redistribution? And how are you measuring the impact of this on the business as a whole?

The insights that TagMan afforded us enabled us to develop a year-round display media plan with an always-on, measureable and accountable approach to our online advertising channels. This strategy change resulted in a 15% year on year sales increase, while our return on investment increased by 20%.

Lastly, has ANZ put dedicated internal resource behind these types of projects? Where does the responsibility lie internally? Are you leveraging external agency partners to help with the analysis?

For the moment the responsibility sits with the Online Team as well as working with our commercial analysts to help build out the statistical insights that we want to gain. As we develop and build our attribution models we will work with our digital agency teams to help define and refine as we go forward.