Attribution Model and Actionable Metrics Challenge on the iMedia Online Retail Summit

What have I gotten myself into? ;-) My keynote at the iMedia Online Retail Summit in 2013 is called "Analyzing Your Marketing Mix Through Actionable Metrics Within A Fair Attribution Model". Well, I am excited to talk about this big challenge for online marketeers these days which has given us at StyleTread some headaches too... "We love to learn and grow" is one of our cultural values at StyleTread, so here we go...

Funny story about LinkedIn going viral on me

I would consider myself a relatively sophisticated internet user and also knowledgeable about APIs, social plugins and onsite usability, but what happened to me a few weeks ago came as a big surprise... My mum, who just turned 70 connected with me on LinkedIn. Say what? Unreal? What happened to her? Did she finally figure out the secrets of the web and was planning to launch a new career...? Then another weird thing happened: I received an email from LinkedIn with the subject line "Bjorn, congratulations! You have one of the top 1% most viewed LinkedIn profiles for 2012!". Something was going on... Then I remembered that I connected my new gmail with LinkedIn the other day...

The LinkedIn read something like this:

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LinkedIn is requesting permission to:

• View basic information about your account

• View your email address

• Manage your contacts

• Perform these operations when I'm not using the application

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Dear LinkedIn team, please tell me, that you have not send a contact-request to the hundreds of contacts in my corporate gmail accounts??? Now, I am pretty sure, I did not click on any "Send Invitations" button as it would be nuts with thousands of contacts...

Interestingly enough there are no settings to disable that authorisation on LinkedIn...

 In case you have granted LinkedIn access to your gmail account, you can revoke that token in your gmail account here: https://accounts.google.com/b/0/IssuedAuthSubTokens?hl=en

After several emails with the linkedIn customer service, I realised that they are not aware that the LinkedIn feature was using an instant login with an active gmail session, since they kept referring back to "we are not storing your password"... Of course not, I never entered it...

Google explains it better than me: https://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=112802

Here are some screenshots of what I think is not an ideal solution.

Linked in bugs with google signin from Björn Behrendt

Insert Marketing is the clever way of distributing flyers

I recently helped launch ParcelPush.com.au - the new insert marketing specialist for Australia, not only because I like the people who run it, but also because I am a strong believer that it actually is the best and most clever way to distribute flyers or really any type of marketing collateral, such as samples, vouchers or invitations for the following reasons:

1. Inserts, especially into ecommerce shipments, ensure that your marketing reaches a highly relevant target audience that is already online, in possession of a credit card  or paypal account plus has a high income most likely.
2. Inserts are national and can be distributed in high volumes during a short time frame
3. Inserts reach the customer in a positively loaded moment: When they open up their newly shopped product. Yay!
4. Different inserts for different products e.g. can have different call-to-actions, which make them nicely trackable and comparable plus the ParcelPush team can leverage the data in the best interest of the advertiser to fine-tune the targeting of campaigns for the best conversion rates.

Luckily enough the ParcelPush business model is a proven one and some good friends and former eBay-colleagues have successfully launched and expanded PaketPlus in Germany e.g. into the UK, where they call themselves Packvertise. Good on ya, guys! The real inventor of this business has been Amazon though... of course. With their endless numbers of verticals they not only offer numerous ways of targeting in endless numbers of categories in high volumes, but also a clever IT infrastructure to manage it. I am sure ParcelPush will get there in Australia as well. Good luck guys!