Listen To Fairing On The Honest Ecommerce Podcast
We recently dropped in on Chase
Clymer 's ecommerce
podcast, Honest
Ecommerce
, to chat all things attribution and media diversification.
A few of the discussion points we tapped:
In this conversation, Chase and I discuss:
- Life before Fairing
- What is attribution? Why is it important?
- How do post-purchase surveys help online store owners?
- Interesting data points
- An upcoming Fairing report on attribution
- DIY post-purchase surveys vs Fairing
- Fairing’s response clarification features
- Incentivizing users to complete a survey
- Diversifying your media
If you’re not already subscribed to Honest Ecommerce, be sure to give
this episode a listen
here
.
Key Takeaways
Life Before Fairing
1:01
Thanks chase for having me. Yeah, just to go a little bit into my
background, I guess I've been in Ecommerce for about 10 years, the first
three of which had a small consultancy, and then I actually was an early
employee at a headphone company here in New York called Master and
dynamic, where I kind of ran a bunch of things there, everything from
DTC, P&L to logistics to digital marketing, was there for about three
years, and then left in 2016, to found a startup in the same day
delivery space, essentially, was just going on the coattails of Uber,
Rush, and Postmates, and was really excited about that vertical, never
really found product-market fit with that.
And then about a year and a half ago, we pivoted into Enquire [now
Fairing] one of those customers was having trouble with their
top-of-funnel attribution. Long story short, all of their last click
conversions in GA were direct or branded search and really didn't have
any insight into where their customers were coming from. We told them to
go implement a post-purchase survey and just ask and found out there was
no attribution survey or just survey platform in general that was built
for Ecommerce. So been scaling that for the past year and a half, have
about 450 Shopify customers, and investing in the product today.
What Is Attribution? Why Is It Important?
2:12
So attribution has a lot of ways to look at it. But this more
simplistic way is really just giving credit to what channels drove
sales. So in a very simplistic sense, what we're doing is just
productizing, this question, “how did you hear about us?” which is your
top-of-funnel attribution.
I think in a space today, everyone's kind of convoluted the problem,
there's a bunch of ways that you can look at attribution, whether that's
just looking at last-click, which is essentially just giving full credit
to that last source that drove the sale. If you're a bit more complex,
you can use multi-touch attribution, which starts to weight every single
touchpoint on the path to the purchase, which definitely gets quite
complex as you dive into it.
And what we're doing at [Fairing] is just simplifying that problem.
So taking this qualitative approach, which essentially allows you what
we say just measure the
unmeasurable
it's very difficult to give weights to heard from a friend or saw from
a billboard or even heard from a
podcast
if they're not using a discount code. So that's pretty much
attribution, in a nutshell, is really just helping you allocate your
budget to the channels that are performing best.
How Do Post-Purchase Surveys Help Online Store Owners?
3:30
If people aren't jumping across devices, and they're just clicking on
ads to find your products. Like, that's pretty much a pretty linear path
to purchase.
But once you start advertising at events, you start going into channels
that are offline, and measuring how those things are working becomes
very difficult. For a Shopify merchant, for example, like how do
you measure your word of
mouth ? So
obviously, word of mouth is one of the best channels, can create
virality with your product. And it's just very difficult to measure
through just pixels and cookies just because people are searching for
your brand on Google or just going to your site directly.
So the way in which using an attribution
survey
works, it helps you to uncover all of those channels that aren't
necessarily measurable through your typical kind of pixel and cookie
tracking.
It's like, oh, I didn't even know this YouTube ad was working, because
people were just going to Google and typing our product in. But now we
have this whole new data set we didn't have before. It's essentially
direct engagement from the customer that's allowing us to really
understand the effectiveness of these channels.
Interesting Data Points
5:41
I think the most interesting thing is just really … being able to
measure the channels that are just kind of gaining popularity from a
marketing perspective now. So we've served about 10 million surveys in
the last 12 months. We get about 60% response rates, so it's about 6
million survey responses around attribution.
And kind of I guess the first thing to know is like everyone is still
very highly leveraged on Facebook, and Instagram, which is a little bit
concerning, just given the fact that CPMs are increasing and tactical
nature of making those channels ROI positive is just getting very
complex. So that's definitely something we're seeing. And part of our
call it mission, or just strategy in 2020, is to continue iterating on
the product to allow people to expand into new channels.
So one of kind of the stories that we tell is, it's quite difficult to
kind of jump into podcast advertising or out of home unless you have
much larger budgets. It's very easy just to put in your credit card and
start spending on Facebook and Google. And what we're trying to do is …
allow our customers to just diversify their spend in a more comfortable
nature. So that's kind of one of the things that we're looking at is
like, how leveraged are people on these channels that are getting more
expensive?
And then the second point, I guess, to really answer your question is
some of the interesting learnings is just like seeing TikTok and a few
other channels just slowly rise in popularity over the last 12 months,
going from okay, we get maybe 10 responses a day that are TikTok, and
now we're getting about 2000. So it's really just escalating, and we
have the insight … [and] … data to show that.
So yeah, what we're going to be doing is just starting to surface that
to our customers, so they can more effectively kind of allocate their
spend and not be so reliant on Facebook and Instagram.
An Upcoming Fairing Report On Attribution
7:37
One of the things we've kind of been talking about that a lot
internally, and we work with probably about two dozen brands that are
quite large, call it over 100 million, and we work with a bunch of
brands who are just doing between maybe one and 10 million and of one of
the things with that report, and we are working on it is trying not to
kind of uncover the tactical nature of the larger brands … because their
media mix is going to be very different.
So what we're most likely going to do is kind of what I alluded to
before with tick tock is like, just have a TikTok report, like kind of
go channel by channel and just show how these are increasing. Just to
give just a general scope of how acquisition is changing over the next
couple of years.
DIY Post-Purchase Surveys vs Fairing
11:20
With [Fairing] if you're just a merchant starting out, you can
install us we [have an affordable starting
subscription ]. So it's very
cost-effective. And we priced it in a way that will beat any kind of
build versus buy argument in that regard.
But just starting out, yeah, it takes about two seconds on Shopify to
install, [Fairing]. And right now we live solely on the order
confirmation page. So that's very much on purpose. We actually can't
take a survey response without other data points, so you'll never get a
response that says Facebook, and you don't know who the customer is that
that's attached to it or what they bought, or how much they spent. And
what that allows us to do is kind of model against that.
But yeah, if you're just getting started, like, I think if you asked me
that question five years ago, I'd probably say just like buy Facebook
ads and enjoy the ride. But kind of in the current 2020 market, I would
look to start diversifying early, obviously, start on Facebook, but at
least kind of start to build this model and standardize this process
internally for measuring outcomes for anything you try.
Fairing's Response Clarification Features
12:53
We're really focused on … going deep on attribution, so it is single
question. We are actually rolling out … we're rolling out response
clarification
this month, which would allow you to drill down on a response.
So if someone selects podcasts, you could then list which podcast
you're advertising on and then a user can click on that. But for the
most part, I'd say for at least Q1, Q2, and probably at least most of
Q3, we're really just focused on this kind of single question or kind of
one two-step question in regards to attribution.
Incentivizing Users To Complete A Survey
13:29
It's not right now. So we haven't done too much on kind of increasing
the response rate yet. And that's really just because the average
response rate across all of our customers is just over 60%.
So the response rate, I'd argue, is already pretty great. We have a few
customers who are incentivizing, like offering 15% off if you complete
the survey, and they definitely have response rates of 75 to 80%. But
for us, we're collecting a lot of data on like how fast the survey
loads, how fast the user is submitting the response.
And I think there's still a lot of opportunity for us to more or less
increase the response rate coming from maybe like the back of house
versus enforcing someone to provide a code or provide some kind of
incentive.
Diversifying Your Media
14:54
Don't get so caught up in kind of quantitative marketing analytics,
because oftentimes, it's very easy to forget how important the
qualitative side is. And that's kind of just the message that we're
sending is diversify or media be comfortable doing so and just find ways
in which to measure it.
And we obviously think that attribution surveys are the best way to do
that.