We welcomed in the new year at Web Analytics Wednesday with a further exploration of one of the toughest topics around, attribution. In spite of the cold temperatures, the crowd gave Chris Kerr and Rick Otten from Clarivoy a warm welcome — and were rewarded with a wide array of information both about attribution in general and the challenges of marketing in the automobile space.

Chris picked up from where Jason Packer left off at our November event with a further discussion of the need to move past single-point attribution models to multi-touch. Chris also discussed the some of the details of the user journey in the car purchase process and stepped through some real-world examples with data.

Knowing the effectiveness of your different marketing channels is always a good idea — and car dealerships show some great examples of why this is so important. Many dealerships spend significant amounts in a wide variety of different channels to reach a buyer for a “high consideration” product that is bought offline — so these issues that we all face can be magnified in challenging ways.

Rick then took to the stage to present his 3 “W”s to WAW:

1. Who is using the site?
2. Where did they come from?
3. What are they doing on the site?

Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Bot.
Bot who?
Bot you thought it was a person!#cbuswaw

— Tim Wilson (@tgwilson) January 18, 2018

Knock-knock jokes aside, Rick hit us with a lot of specifics of how tracking can work from the legit and well-established (you know, cookies) — to the scarily sketchy (hidden auto-completes, etc.).  Then took us through some analyst catnip with a few interesting data visualizations, including a crowd favorite dandelion chart crated by Gephi.

Video courtesy of Mixt Media.

We also welcomed two new sponsors for 2018. Continuing sponsors Clarivoy and TeamBuilder Search were joined by the Wittenberg University M.S. in Analytics Program and Search Discovery.

Please join us next month when we will do some segmentation experiments on the group itself!