Last week at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose, I sat down with Adam Goldberg, the Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at ClearSaleing, Inc., a technology provider of advertising analytics. Adam started ClearSaleing after working at Google for 3 years, where he started their Inside Sales organization. In our discussion, Adam gave me a thorough run down of ClearSaleing's technology, check out our chat below:

[Manoj]: Please provide us with a quick background on ClearSaleing and the benefits of your product?

[Adam Goldberg]: Founded in 2006, ClearSaleing, Inc. provides advertising portfolio management technology that helps marketers identify ways to more effectively and profitably allocate ad spend across a complex mix of online advertising investments.

ClearSaleing’s platform enables true attribution management through our patent-pending Purchase Path technology. Purchase Path accurately attributes profit and ROI across the multiple marketing touch points that contribute to and influence a sale.

In addition, ClearSaleing is a thought leader in the growing scientific field of attribution management and founder of the Attribution Management Forum, the profession’s e-community for interactive marketers.

ClearSaleing’s unique ability to give marketers telescopic insight into their online ad investment is attracting major brand customers, such as American Greetings and Nationwide Insurance.

[Manoj]: Can you discuss Attribution and the lack of attribution reporting in most marketers' strategies?

[Adam Goldberg]: Due to a lack of tracking technology that shows online marketers the entire Purchase Path (chronological sequencing of ad clicks, ad impressions, organic visits, and direct visits to a site that led to conversion or abandonment) online marketers have been forced to credit conversions to the last ad click because that is all they have been able to see. This technology problem has caused online marketers to significantly over-value the last ad clicked and to completely ignore all of the other ads in the Purchase Path that help to earn the conversion.

ClearSaleing solves the technology issue with its attribution management platform which enables marketers to view the entire Purchase Path. After we reveal the Purchase Path we then can attribute credit for the conversion across all of the ads involved in the conversion. At ClearSaleing we attribute the profit and revenue on each conversion to the ads involved. There are several levels of attribution.

• Last Click – give all the credit to the last ad clicked
• Even – divide the profit and revenue evenly over all of the ads involved in conversion
• Even with Exclusions – divide profit evenly across all ads but exclude giving credit to certain ads. One example is excluding credit to brand keywords that occur at the end of a Purchase Path because these types of terms at the end of a path are almost always used for navigation. Some call these terms ‘order takers.’ Would eliminate this sentence.
• Rules Based – This is where you set weights based on the type of path used. For example if a consumer used two search ads to convert you may give that a 50/50 split, but if a consumer saw a banner impression then did a search and converted you may have a different weighting for that scenario
• Mathematical – This is the most sophisticated attribution model. This uses high-end statistical analysis to determine the best weighting of ads in a path. This takes into account things such as the influence potential of different ad vehicles and the decay rate of different ad vehicles just to name a few of the elements involved.

[Manoj]: How do you differentiate yourselves from bid management solutions?

[Adam Goldberg]: ClearSaleing is very unique because we have built an automated bid management system on top of our attribution management platform, thereby providing the most accurate valuation of ads regardless of where they appear in the buying cycle. This platform then allows our customers to optimize their campaigns based on any business objective they have. Our automated, attribution based bid management system lets marketers optimize their bids by:

• Collecting the most accurate data possible using true profit and attribution
• Integrating conversion information from back-end data feeds to the decision-making process
• Using data on conversion latency, the cycle of time from first to last click along a purchase path
• Predicting conversion latencies day-by-day to make the best bids possible

[Manoj]: Clearsaleing requires an analytics code insertion, please explain the need for this and the reasons why this method provides more insight

[Adam Goldberg]: Only companies who use their own tracking can perform real attribution analysis. ClearSaleing is able to keep track of visitors no matter what search engine they come from and eliminate any double counting caused by relying on the tracking pixels of the ad servers. ClearSaleing can also keep track of the sequence of ads for each individual conversion and tracks very detailed information about conversions, down to the products sold, so that detailed analysis of the data can be performed. Without our own tracking, we would not have the level of data needed to do the in depth analysis we are capable of.

[Manoj]: ClearSaleing allows you to intelligently determine the keywords and landing pages which contribute to your bottom line profit - please expand on this.

[Adam Goldberg]: ClearSaleing tracks the search phrase a consumer types into a search engine in addition to the keyword that gets triggered from that search. In many cases what the consumer searches for is not exactly the same as the keyword that gets triggered due to the use of phrase, broad, and advanced match options on keywords. When we identify a search phrase that is different from the keyword triggered and that resulted in a profitable conversion we then recommend our clients add that search phrase to their keyword list as a exact term. This addition of profitable search terms can be done automatically through the use of APIs in ClearSaleing. This is a great way to build a keyword list based on recommendations that have proven to produce profit at least once.

When it comes to measuring landing pages we use the same metric to determine profit. Many companies test new landing pages and believe success may mean more time spent on the page or more conversions etc. The best measure of a landing page's effectiveness is the profit it is able to generate. We allow our clients to test many variations of their landing pages at a time by rotating them. We measure the amount of profit each page generates so our clients can choose the page that is best for their bottom line.

[Manoj]: What are the costs of ClearSaleing?

[Adam Goldberg]: ClearSaleing uses a percentage of ad spend model for our pricing. We only charge for ad spend tracked on our platform. For additional features such as phone tracking, back office integration, display/banner impression tracking, and point of sale (POS) system tracking there are one-time set up fees.

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