How does your brain get into a buying state?
If I were running an e-commerce website, and I could ask buyers one survey question post-visit, I wouldn’t want to know about net promoter, customer satisfaction, repeat buying likelihood, or any of the staple questions that are frequently brought forward by digital marketing consultants. Instead, I’d ask a simple question along the lines of:
“What most motivated you to buy [product/service X] today?”
Yes, I’m talking about conversion attribution–one of the thorniest topics in online marketing. To justify my preference for the buying motivation question, I adduce the findings of a blog post I authored last year. I analyzed data and found almost no symmetry between self-reported buying motivators and the sources that got credit for the sales in the “last-click” attribution model that most web analytics tools employ. Search, in particular, saw its influence sharply downgraded in the self-reported exercise. Intuitively, this makes total sense. With search being the front door to the web, it’s easy and tempting to overstate its influence in buying decisions. But when you look at the top converting keywords on e-commerce websites, more often than not, you’ll see an assortment of branded keywords. Search in this case is a surrogate for the address bar, and it can’t possibly be ascribed credit for these conversions
But as much as I love the buying motivation question, its limitations became obvious to me this week. A friend of mine used the Canadian Red Cross website to donate to the Haiti relief effort. Before he’d finished the donation, he was prompted to indicate how he’d heard about giving to the Red Cross’ Haiti disaster relief. Instantly, a barrage of sources flooded his head. There was the reportage on CNN, the call to give that he’d seen during a FOX NFL broadcast, the re-tweets on Twitter, the links on Facebook, the ad on the radio, the appeal to donors in the newspaper, and the various encouragements he’d received from friends to open up his wallet and give. In short, there were at least 7 sources that could plausibly have received credit for his decision to give to the Red Cross’ efforts in Haiti.
Maybe that’s a bit of an extreme example, but it highlights a flaw at the heart of all attribution modeling: we simply don’t fully know what exactly gets a brain into a buying state. The brain is a pack rat–it stores and retains myriad memories, and stitches them together into a hybrid melange of inextricable images. Apply this now to a purchaser’s cognitive interaction with a brand. Why did you buy your iPhone? On the surface, it’s simple. You responded to a clear call to buy at the Apple store downtown. But if you reflect on it, you’ll see that numerous persuasion threads came together over time to form the state of mind that made you ready and willing to party with your money in exchange for an Apple product.
That type of cognitive unbundling is a difficult but necessary step in the march towards true attribution modeling. While I love the simplicity of the purchasing motivation question, I think a subtler, more layered line of questioning could unpack things a whole lot better and help web marketers figure out how a brain gets into a buying state. Website survey providers–I now challenge you to show me the way!
