Caitlin: I think it’s time to get started. What do you all think?
James: Let’s rock and roll.
Peter: Good.
Caitlin: All right.
James: Right.
Caitlin: So welcome again. We are here to talk about measuring the impact of your ads with ease and we have a great panelist here with us today. Panel of marketing and attribution folks, industry experts. We have Peter from Foursquare, James from Alembic, and Aslam from Mediahub. We also, if you see on your screen, have Katie in the background here from Yelp who’s going to be helping coordinate along the way. And before I turn it over to these amazing industry experts to tell us more about themselves and to share all of their secrets with us, I want to just do a quick introduction of myself. I’m Caitlin Erickson, I’ve been here at Yelp for over 10 years now. I’m our senior manager of enterprise marketing, so I oversee everything from content marketing and webinars to email campaigns, pre-sales development for our multi-location segment and that includes attribution, making sure that we are measuring the impact of our advertising.
So again, we have Peter from Foursquare, we have Aslam from Mediahub and we have James from Alembic. I’m going to go ahead and turn it over to them to give us a little bit more information about themselves. So James, why don’t you kick us off, tell us a little bit more about yourself?
James: Sure. So my name’s James Lerner. I’m currently the Director of Demand and Engagement at Alembic. I’ve been at the company for about seven months now. Previously, I was the performance marketer at Sam’s Club at Walmart Inc., doing everything from paid surge, programmatic and affiliate marketing. Prior to that I have a ton of other client side retail experience and agency experience. Attribution was kind of the one thing that I was always trying to get my brain around. The reason why I moved from Walmart Sam’s Club was exactly to tackle this problem of attribution. Our company basically does business intelligence. We’re able to ingest Google Analytics, Adobe data, line that up with your social media, any TV, radio podcasts, stuff that you’re doing and try to clean some fun insights out of that data for you, so that’s my intro.
Caitlin: Excellent. Thanks, James. Peter, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Peter: Sure. So I’m Peter Greb. I’m the Vice President of Partner Solutions here at Foursquare. I have a team of about 15 people who support all of the media partners and platforms for whom we do measurement and targeting across all of the different campaigns that we work on. I’ve been here about six years, although I started at Placed in Seattle about six years ago before Placed joined with Foursquare. Prior to that, I actually have an agency background. I spent many years at Razorfish doing all forms of digital marketing over the years, but I’ve had a lot of fun being here at Foursquare, really leading into the attribution space and understanding measurement and all the interesting things that go about that.
Caitlin: Excellent. Aslam, can you round us out and tell us a little bit about yourself?
Aslam: Right. Hi guys, Aslam Yousuf, senior vice president of the Media Data Sciences group at Mediahub. I handle analytics, partnerships and data visualization over here. I’m technically a boomerang to Mediahub. I used to work for them from 2010 to 2018 and in between I joined LiveRamp. So I mean I got introduced into the world of attribution during my agency days, but I got more experience in a lot of solid hands-on work while I was at LiveRamp. So I was the lead data science scientist for the advanced TV measurement product and did a lot of fun stuff relating to linear TV and CTV measurement. A lot of focus was around TV, like video investment measurement. So that’s my background and now I’m back here at Mediahub.
Caitlin: Love that. Excellent. Well again, thank you all for joining us today. We’re going to start here with Peter this time. Peter, tell us a little bit how important you feel attribution is to marketing?
Peter: Sure. So I mean attribution is actually one of our biggest products. So for that reason we certainly think it’s important, but on another basis, if you measure something, the performance is going to improve and then you will get more revenue from your marketing dollars. Another aspect is marketing budgets are too big these days to not measure the business impact and to optimize those campaigns to the highest performing media placements, creative audiences, et cetera, and so from that standpoint it’s really important if you’re not taking advantage of that to make the most of your dollars. One last little thing that I’ll add here is that a lot of conversions happen organically and you want to understand which of your ads and media placements, et cetera, are actually driving lift or incremental conversions that you would not have received otherwise without showing an ad to them. And so there’s a lot of things that are important. These are three of the things that I would highlight and I’m looking forward to hearing what their other two panelists have had to say.
Caitlin: Thanks, Peter. Aslam, let’s go over to you. Tell us about how important you feel attribution is to marketing?
Aslam: Yeah. Hi, completely agree with Peter. I think it’s really important to know what your marketing channels are providing in terms of how they’re contributing to your overall goals and objectives. Not knowing what your channels and how they’re working together and how they’re contributing to your revenue or bottom line would be a grave mistake in this day and age with all the data and technology that we have. Purely speaking from a multi-touch attribution perspective, your consumer journey is not a single touch to measure channels in silo. I’m just talking about companies and businesses who are looking at marketing channels as individual silos. Again, the consumer journey doesn’t happen that way, so it’s best to mimic what the consumer journey looks like when you go get into measurement as well. So looking at a holistic picture of how different marketing channels are contributing to your overall goals and what the synergies between different touchpoints are is very important.
Caitlin: Excellent. And James, can you round us out?
James: Yeah, sure. So I totally agree with Peter and Aslam. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t already have an interest in attribution in marketing. So my big whole spiel of how important it is, it doesn’t matter how big or small your media budgets are, you want to know how you’re spending every dollar that you have, if that dollar is going to the right channels based on different touchpoints with your customer. There could be some diamonds in the rough, there could be a small direct mail piece that actually does really, really well for you. Everything from that to small social media post or even a giant brand campaign that might have some incremental lift to your business. So knowing where your dollars are going, knowing where you can place bets, and obviously replicating those same channels, that same type of mix is also super important and obviously challenging that mix as well. That’s how important attribution is to your business.
Caitlin: Excellent. Thank you for sharing, all of you. We’ll dive right into our next question and Aslam we’ll start with you this time. What are the biggest challenges you see clients face in successfully and meaningfully building an attribution model to measure the success of advertising?
Aslam: I think to begin with, it goes back to embracing change. A lot of marketers are measuring their media in a certain way and they don’t want to necessarily change how things are being measured. And I think moving away from that mindset is the first and most important thing. And then I’m trying to understand what attribution can really actually provide us and James brought up a really good point. What are those channels that are contributing above and beyond? Where is our incremental impact coming from? Which channels are yielding more incremental returns than some of the other channels? Trying to understand that is very key. And lastly, what was said and done, what goes into your model, gets spit out, right, garbage in, garbage out, making sure the implementation is right is very important. Trying to identify what the key objectives are, what our KPI should look like, what are the parameters within which we should work, all of those go into trying to successfully implement attribution.
Caitlin: Excellent. Thank you. James, let’s kick it over to you.
James: Sure. Kind of a two part answer to that question of “what are the biggest challenges that you face of introducing an attribution model?” There’s a qualitative part of that. One is obviously getting everybody involved, getting all parties, either third party vendors, internal stakeholders to really embrace an attribution model. Actively talking about it and just doing it and just, there’s always a status quo with certain organizations just doing the same thing year after year and no challenges to it, really challenging that status quo and bringing in a lot of people and obviously agreeing on some type of model or at least some type of testing framework.
And then I would say the quantitative standpoint is you’re going to have inherent biases. You’re going to look at one metric that might have dictated your marketing model already. Let’s say it’s impression based, right? There’s going to be certain channels that do really, really well with impressions, could be direct mail, display, CTVs, streaming TV for example. And then you’ve got last touch channels like paid search and affiliate, obviously, those two fight each other all the time. Having an agreement, coming to an agreement in the middle, I think is at least one way to solve those problems or solve that challenge.
Caitlin: Excellent. And Peter, tell us a little bit about some of the challenges you see clients face?
Peter: So a lot of what we hear about is getting actionable business metrics for those campaigns and then getting those metrics mid-flight before a campaign is over so you can take action on them while the campaign’s still live. A lot of different solutions don’t give you any performance metrics until after the campaign is over or even many months after those are over. And so getting that performance data mid-flight is important. We generally will provide a metric for campaigns we’re measuring within a couple of weeks after launch and then we update those metrics every day or every week depending on the campaign, so you can make improvements to those metrics.
Another thing I wanted to touch on was that some conversion types are more applicable to certain verticals. So when you’re looking at store visits, for example, for QSR visit is highly correlated to business results because when people visit a QSR, you’re generally going to buy something. For retail, for example, it’s a little less correlated because not everyone buys something when they actually go into a retailer. And that’s actually one of the reasons why we’re looking at, we’re exploring adding sales lift metrics next year into our attribution product using actual purchase data to get more actionable business metrics for our customers.
Caitlin: Excellent. Excited to hear more about that next year.
Peter: Yeah.
Caitlin: James, we’ll start with you on this one. How do you ensure attribution is accurate? Accuracy, how do you ensure that?
James: For sure. There’s actually a really simple way of doing that. One is doing an isolated test. If you’re doing geo-targeted direct mail, for example, if it’s nationwide, you can exclude a certain market or certain number of households from that drop. Obviously, in digital media it’s relatively easy to exclude or include certain markets and then figure out what the incrementality is. If there’s no media running or very little media running to that area, would you see the same sales, right? There are other ways of buying software or using a consulting company to verify whatever existing model that you have is accurate. Everything from $200 an hour to upwards to a thousand dollars an hour, the sky’s the limit. But I would say starting off a grassroots type of campaign, isolated tests, geo-targeted tests are probably one of the easiest ways to come up with some type of attribution and also try to figure out if it’s accurate or not, try to replicate that same test in different markets.
Caitlin: Excellent. Peter, over to you. How are you thinking about accuracy?
Peter: Yeah, so as an attribution provider, we think about accuracy a little differently. We are thinking about accuracy around the accuracy of the conversions we’re measuring. The accuracy of the total metrics, so your cost per numbers are accurate, then also the granularity of the data cuts. And so, one of the ways we do that is we use first party data in our products, which allows for persistent measurement in the background of users and the locations they’re going to. This allows for very accurate understanding of the visits they’re making, which provides better numbers in your metrics.
The other way we’re looking at this, like I mentioned before, from a cost per number, is that not every person or every conversion can be seen or actually noted. Our product is panel based and we normalize and scale up our metrics to full campaign exposure after we’ve done our calculations. And so you’re getting to the total numbers and cost pers that are more accurate to full campaign exposure. So if you only count the users and conversions that can be actually seen by your model, you’re going to be undervalue your performance. And so that’s some of the ways that we’re looking at accuracy.
Caitlin: Excellent. And Aslam, over to you, to round us out on accuracy.
Aslam: I think both James and Peter brought really good perspectives from a solution based and from an implementation and design based. And I think it’s very important to have both in mind. And I’d like to bring a third perspective where having the right resources, having a data scientist or an analyst that understands what goes into building an attribution model or building, creating a test design is very important. As a marketer, if you are very savvy with it, yes, great, otherwise, having somebody who could help you get these parameters set right is very important because put James’s suggestion going after doing a geo test, you need to make sure you choose the right markets that are similar in insights. What are the parameters of exposed versus unexposed, defining all those, is very important. And alternatively, if you want to go on a solution based design, something like what Foursquare offers, you need to understand what kind of solution they’re providing, what really goes into the model that they’re building, what are the data sets that you’re, they’re using.
So understanding it from a people perspective, having the right resources to help you navigate through it. And at Mediahub, we do a lot of this for our clients as well, trying to pick an attribution partner for them. And in most cases, we have at least from Mediahub perspective or an agency perspective, where we have a lot of exposure towards with different solution providers. And we’ve worked with a lot of them so we understand what are the pluses and minuses of each of the solutions. And we’ve internally built a toolkit that gives you a comparative study about different vendors in the market, somebody who could help you in that way also is a great way to make sure that things are getting accurate. So getting somebody who understands how all of this works is I think is what I would pinpoint on getting things accurate.
Caitlin: Excellent. Accuracy is always top of mind when we’re thinking about numbers, so appreciate all of the perspectives. Thank you. Jumping into the next question, Peter, let’s start with you on this one. What are some of the creative solutions you’ve tried in building of an attribution model? What’s worked, what hasn’t?
Peter: Yeah. One of the more interesting things that I’ve really seen here, after being here is that, you can measure your media placements, you can measure your creative, but where I’ve seen a lot of interesting things is actually measuring your audience performance and breaking your audience into different cohorts. For example, retargeting your best customers is a very common tactic and while that may get a lot of visible conversions and have a high conversion rate, depending on the messaging, it’s actually very hard to get lift and drive incremental conversions from those customers who visit your store the most. And many of those conversions would’ve happened anyway without that advertising. Another thing that we’ve seen is that in many cases, depending on the messages purposely targeting your low frequency customers or people who are not current customers can actually drive more incremental visits and new customers into your store.
Caitlin: Incrementality, one of my favorites. Excellent. Aslam, over to you. What are some of the creative solutions you’ve tried?
Aslam: All right, I think I mentioned this a little earlier in the conversation where during my time at LiveRamp, I did a lot of hands on data science stuff for the TV measurement, advanced TV measurement solutions. So during my time there, we built out a solution for CPG. Basically, CPG is a very tough vertical, there are different types of products. You have your off the shelf products that you use on a weekly basis. You buy stuff from your grocery or retail outlets, I mean grocery outlet, mainly food and beverage, your cereals, think about it, those get replenished almost every other week or biweekly or once in a month you buy those. And then there’s product like OTC drugs that get bought once the expiry is done or probably, if it’s a more regular drug that you keep replenishing the stock. It’s more like from an OTC perspective, it’s more like once or twice a year.
So the purchase frequency of these products are really different. And when it comes, I’m going to get into nuances of how you set up an attribution model. One of the key things when talking about attribution model is establishing an attribution window. And with products with such different purchase cycles and purchase frequency, how do you establish a standard one size fits all type of solution? It’s not possible, and the results would tell you something completely different and you need to be aware of those kind of nuances when you’re thinking about building a model.
So in this case, the way we learned was through trial and error. Fortunately, there were multiple brands that we were working with around the same time and we had the opportunity to test an experiment. So based on what we learned and based on the different product types and the purchase frequency and purchase behavior, we were able to categorize them into three tiers and establish attribution windows based on those tiers. And there’s multiple creative ways we’ve built measurement solutions for this, but this is one of the things that we recently I worked on during my time at LiveRamp.
Caitlin: Awesome. Excellent. Thank you. And James, over to you.
James: Sure. So I’ll have kind of two answers to that. What to do and what not to do. So what to do is, if you have some type of loyalty program or you want to start a loyalty program, every loyalty program is going to have some type of membership ID or a loyalty ID, there’s a lot of different vendors that are able to ingest that information, obviously, encrypt it like LiveRamp. The stuff that I was doing at Sam’s Club was very similar to that. So taking your loyal loyalty ID, running it against a different bunch of different publishers, could be a Google from a last click perspective, could be a Cretio from a display perspective, doing retargeting and then trying to figure out is there incremental lift from doing that type of media.
I’ll get into what not to do is don’t make fake numbers. My previous experience at Sears Holding Corporation, which is I guess now insolvent because we were using some fake numbers was, we had this idea or the marketing executive staff had this idea of where if somebody was using our mobile app, which was linked to Shop Your Way, which was a loyalty program that Sears was running, you do a lot of research on your mobile app doing comparison shopping for let’s say a Samsung refrigerator you would convert later on either in store or on the desktop website. So we would apply an artificial multiplier to that mobile traffic or to that mobile revenue. And we would spend into that. We would try to get as much mobile traffic as we possibly could. Obviously, that model did not work and that is an example of what you shouldn’t do is make up fake numbers.
Caitlin: Excellent. Thanks, James.
James: Yeah, no problem.
Caitlin: All right, so this time we’ll start off with you, Aslam. What are your top tips to clients who are just starting to think about implementing or improving attribution for their advertising campaigns?
Aslam: I think number one tip is get started. We have this whole philosophy at our agency where whenever we are onboarding a new client, we try to start small. Building a testing agenda on what you want to learn, what are the kind of things that need to be addressed and what you want to learn, and identifying those is very important. Building a test agenda on things that can be achieved within a short span of time, medium span of time, and a long term. So having identifying those and having those written down is really important from my perspective. And like I said, our notion is around crawl, walk, run, and grow as you learn more things. Start really small, it could be anything from a simple AB test to understand what type of creative stimuli or what type of media stimuli is driving the better result, what kind of landing page is better at driving the desired outcome, trying to understand those.
And from there, moving on into attribution. It could be single channel attribution where you’re just trying to look at attribution across just a single channel, like working with social walled gardens, they provide their own sort of incremental studies where you could look at social as a standalone channel and what kind of incremental impact it’s being bringing to your bottom line revenue. Those are studies conducted by those social wall gardens. But on the other end, you could do a similar thing with the setup that you have trying to isolate certain channels and trying to understand what your incremental impact for those channels are and where the incremental revenue is driven. Identifying your baselines, those are the basics if you get those set up and understood. And then it’s time to move onto the more complex stuff when you’re very looking at media mix models, multi-tech attribution and optimizing based on the results from the models and stuff like that. I think that’s my tip in terms of getting started, but do get started.
Caitlin: Just do it.
Aslam: Just do it.
Caitlin: Excellent. James, over to you. What are some of your top tips?
James: You got to start somewhere, I totally agree with Aslam on that. Even just creating a baseline, if it’s just equal weight, like a linear attribution model, you got to start somewhere. If you’ve got four different marketing channels, including an organic channel, for example, 25% weight across all of them.
Aslam: If I may interject there?
James: Sure.
Aslam: Pretty straightforward and you think about starting small. You know, tools like Google Analytics, kind of provide that off the shelf, like the models that James is talking about, those are available off the shelf. So if you wanted to get started on attribution, that’s perfectly the right place to start looking at it and then you can go onto the complex models. Sorry to cut off.
James: No, no, you’re good man. Just again, there’s a lot of free tools out there, google Analytics is one of them. Obviously, if you’re an Adobe site analytics client, they have stuff out of the box from them. I wouldn’t say that they’re super, super accurate, but from a digital analytics standpoint, there are a lot of offers out there. And then again, from a Yelp standpoint, Foursquare standpoint, they do have lift models and visitation attribution as well. If you work with your tender type companies like a MasterCard or Visa, these people are more than happy to give you some type of incrementality or some type of attribution model because they’re actively tracking transactions. They obviously want you to use Visa, MasterCard, American Express, more so than the other person. So they’re more than happy to give you that type of information.
Again, I would say start somewhere. Put yourselves in the shoes of a consumer. What kind of media consumption are they doing? How do they research, how do they get to your product? There’s a journey from inception of figuring out that they want to buy your product or service all the way to purchase and then obviously post-purchase, got to start somewhere. And putting ourselves in the shoes of a consumer, a potential client, super, super important.
Caitlin: Excellent. Peter, can you round us out with some of your top tips?
Peter: Yeah so once you’ve gotten started and once you start leaning into it, we’ve talked a lot about incrementality, but where you can, if you have feasibility and enough data, make incremental metrics your primary KPI versus just the total metrics? At Foursquare, we have benchmarks for all the campaigns we measure and less than half of campaigns, there’s that old famous quote, but in reality, less than half of the campaigns we measure is closer to 40% actually have lift at the all up campaign level. But don’t let that frustrate you if you don’t have lift at on your all-up campaign because there’s almost always lift somewhere if you look more granularly into the metrics, looking at either the creative message, the media placements, the audience cohorts, geo cuts, age, gender, et cetera, there’s always lift somewhere in these reports. And if you lean into those areas where you’re seeing the lift and start making changes to your campaigns and messaging and how you’re serving those ads, you can then start getting more incremental visits and improve your metrics overall if you lean into that.
James: Yep.
Caitlin: Please feel free to drop questions into the Q&A box as we’re transitioning into the Q&A. But before we do, I wanted to take a quick minute and just share a little bit about Yelp attribution options as well. Something that we really focus on at Yelp and a lot of our panelists have touched on is making sure you have the right tools and the right resources. And so we want to create a mutually beneficial relationship with our clients where we are creating that attribution model for you so that you are able to measure the successes and quite frankly, where things aren’t working, so that you can make better investment decisions so that we can also help guide you along the way. And we have a number of different options if you’re running an awareness campaign through Yelp audiences and you need to measure brand lift or all the way down to conversion and you want to measure on the transaction level.
We have really great visitation partners as you all know with Peter here at Foursquare. And we have first party solutions as well and we’d be honored to talk to you and answer more questions about how Yelp attribution tools can help you measure your Yelp campaigns as well. This QR code is going to allow you to schedule some time with a Yelp team member, one on one, so you can get your questions answered or if you’re ready, dive into some of the attribution tools that are available to you at Yelp. I’m going to just grab this ’cause I know Katie, oops, I know Katie is trying to get it out to everybody, but now that’s in your chat if you want to follow up with someone at Yelp.
And similarly, if you want to connect with somebody at Foursquare or learn more from Foursquare, if you go ahead and scan this QR code or again, I will drop the link into the chat for you. They’ve put together some really great information about holistic attribution options at Foursquare as well as an opportunity to connect with someone from their team. Also, Mediahub, if you check out Mediahub at mediahubww.com, you can learn more about what Mediahub can do for you or if you want to get a free demo from Alembic, getalembic.com, we’ll get you there. And with that, I’m going to move us over into our Q&A, so I know we have a couple of questions in the chat already, we’ll start with, feel free to drop some more in as well and we will just spit these over to Peter, James and Aslam for the next roughly five minutes and then we’ll wrap up at the end.
We’ll start with our first question for Peter. “Peter, you talked about leveraging first party data. What are some examples of first party data used or how effective is it to leverage data from platforms like Yelp?” The questions a little long, I’ll give it off to you, but maybe…
Peter: I think it’s a couple part question, but so what I was referring to is that Foursquare, we have our own first party data that we use in our panel. And so we have millions of people who have a Foursquare app or one of our affiliate apps downloads who have signed up and agreed for us to track their location and use them within our measurement platform. And so that’s Foursquare’s first party data and we use that same data and platform to measure Yelps campaigns as well as all the other media partners that we measure for campaign. And for example, if a brand has a full campaign of say 10 media partners, we would use that same first party data in our panel to measure all of the ad exposure across all of those 10 partners and we would put them into what we call a multi-partner report, fully de-dupe all the ad exposures and all of the visits and give you all the outputs that we would from our attribution report.
Now other question was around, I think Yelp, you have your own first party data for of Yelp users that you have some of your own measurement solutions, I can’t speak to that necessarily, I don’t know if you can Caitlin, but a lot of the media partners who have their own first party data, they have some of their own measurement solutions they can provide, but they typically only provide it for their own media exposures. They can’t apply those to other partners, obviously then it wouldn’t be their own media exposure, if that makes sense.
Caitlin: Yep, exactly. And as not the technical expert on the call, I’m going to defer all of the details of our first party solutions to our experts. And so I’d encourage anybody wanting a little bit more information on Yelp’s first party data to connect with our team to get into the nitty gritty of that. But thanks Peter. We also have a question about different verticals and I know we touched on that. I think Aslam, you touched on that a little bit earlier around different attribution windows, but based on your experience, are there better channels for certain verticals versus others in terms of the ROI that you’re seeing, home services versus restaurants where you’re seeing the best ROI? And I’ll just open that up to all three of you, whoever wants to kind of jump in first.
Aslam: I think it’s a very tricky question to answer in terms of what works for by vertical. There are certain channels like the examples that you mentioned, I would think those kind of channels are very conducive to or might work really well with a more direct response type of channels. Say for example, search or direct response display campaigns or direct response social campaigns, I would think would get a more response from an overall, if your objective is ultimately sales and revenue, that those would be the challenge that I would think of that are more effective. But again, and it depends on the type of purchase cycle and the consideration that goes into it. For example, if it’s an auto vertical, the consideration and the purchase decision is much longer. So you need to seed different types of marketing similar at different stages of their purchase journey from awareness to consideration to purchase.
But for the examples that you give from restaurants and stuff, the consideration or the decision-making process there is not very laborious or very long. Making sure it’s top of mind and creating the awareness is important, but also what pushes them towards ultimate conversion is those direct response type of messaging that can get the foot into the store. Those are the channels that might yield a better ROI. Again, it might vary by company, by brand, but just general guidelines.
Caitlin: Excellent. James, Peter, anything to add?
James: Yeah, I can, if you want to find me on LinkedIn, I can talk at nauseum about this stuff. But specifically I love the car kind of automotive example. For example, at Sam’s Club we had 90 different categories, everything from mattresses to tires to groceries. It’s going to be really dependent on what the consumer’s intent is. So for example, for tires at Sam’s Club, you would’ve never known that Sam’s Club if you weren’t a member or even in the existing member from a couple different surveys that we did internally that Sam’s Club sold tires like Costco, we rotate them, we also sold batteries as well. So knowing that fact of people just didn’t know that we sold tires, trying to basically put our brand in front of people that were either looking for tires or comparison shopping tire prices, or if somebody already knew what tires that went on their whatever, 2005 Toyota Camry, knowing specifically what size, what brand that they wanted, we could either use paid search to either show up against the tirerack.com and show off for our prices there.
Or even before they started their tire purchase journey, if they’re just trying to figure out do they want an all-season tire, do they want more of a performance tire? They’re going to go to a consumer reports type of content publisher, for example, or usranking.com type of website, either putting a placement there saying, “Hey, Sam’s Club sells tires too” or even from Yelp’s perspective, a lot of people, funny enough, are looking for a tire installer on yelp.com or using the Yelp app. We had a lot of success adding Sam’s Club placements there. A lot of people didn’t know that Sam’s Club sold tires and we got a lot of traction and I got to a point where the tire merchant at Sam’s Club nationwide was like, “whatever you’re doing, James, please stop it because I am running out of tires to sell.” So I think that was a pretty successful campaign, but at the same time as really understanding your vertical in the beginning I think is super important.
Caitlin: Awesome. Are quite a few people looking for tires on Yelp, huh?
James: Yeah.
Caitlin: Peter…
Peter: I will just add a couple things to that. So we obviously work individually with each brand that we work with and they get their learnings from that, but we also create aggregated insights and aggregated benchmarks and we have benchmarks by verticals. And those benchmarks would be something like, well, what percentage of campaigns have lift? When there is lift, what is the median lift? What is the median cost per incremental visit? Et cetera. One thing I’ll say about the questions about the restaurant vertical, so Yelp actually performs very well compared to our benchmarks, particularly in the restaurant vertical. They outperform the percentage of campaigns with lift, what is the incremental cost per visit, et cetera, Yelp actually performs quite well.
Caitlin: We’d love to hear that. Thanks. And we are already at the end of our time, which just goes by so fast. I do want to put up this last screen for anybody that didn’t get a chance to grab these before. We do have both of the links for both of these QR codes in the chat for you as well. So again, on the left, if you want to chat with somebody at Yelp about the attribution solutions for your Yelp campaigns, what makes sense, get answers to your questions, please do use that left QR code. If you want to learn more about the holistic attribution options Peter talked about, connect with Foursquare. He even mentioned some sales lift metrics coming in the new year. If you want to stay in touch with them, please use the Foursquare QR code on the right or the link in the chat. As well as, mediahubww.com to connect with Aslam and his team or getalembic.com to connect with James and his team.
I just want to say thank you again for our panelists joining us. We have some really great expert advice coming from them. Thank you all for taking some time out of your day. We will continue to have some great webinars with some future panelists in the new year and you can check out future events in our calendar at brands.yelp.com. But thank you again for joining us today and we will see you next time. Bye everyone.
