Custom goals and campaign attribution

Blueshift provides end-to-end reporting on Campaigns, enabling you to track conversions (standard events and custom goal events) attributable to a campaign.

Custom Goals

Standard campaign metrics like opens and clicks might not be sufficient to measure how a marketing campaign is actually impacting your business goals, for example, your topline. At Blueshift, you can add events that represent your topline as custom goals. For example, purchase (metric = revenue), content views (metric = number or duration of content views) and so on. Blueshift allows you to attribute these goal events to campaigns which might have triggered these events. You can then track how your campaigns impact these business goals through campaign performance reports.

Examples:

• "Wishlist" for eCommerce: An abandoned cart campaign may result in purchases or drive users to add the item to wishlist. Custom campaign goals can help track the number of users that "Wishlisted" an item based on a campaign message.
• "Course signup" for e-learning business: An e-learning business may have a custom goal of number of users who signed up for a particular course as a result of a personalized marketing campaign.

Set up custom goals

To view the settings for an event, go to Customer Data > Events in the left navigation and click the event name on the "click-stream" event page. You can see the Event Type and check if the event is a Goal Event.

To set an event as a goal event or custom goal, contact support@blueshift.com. When Blueshift receives these events, it will try to attribute the event (custom goal) to a campaign message based on the attribution settings.

Campaign Attribution

Campaign attribution is a way to analyze the impact of a marketing campaign and channels on a certain campaign goal. Blueshift's campaign attribution is built-in and does not need any additional changes on your website or mobile apps other than including Blueshift's Javascript pixel or tag manager, such as Segment.com. You can set up any downstream conversion event as a custom goal and get campaign performance reporting against it.

Blueshift's attribution can report campaign performance against any custom goals you may have resulting from Blueshift campaigns only.

Note:

• Campaign attribution is intended to provide quick insights into downstream conversions resulting from your marketing efforts. It does not consider other marketing programs such as customer acquisition and is not intended as a replacement of your overall attribution analytics tool across all your marketing initiatives.
• If you’re looking for a more comprehensive and scientific way to measure lift from your marketing efforts, we recommend using our holdout reporting feature.

The following steps explain how Blueshift’s attribution works:

1. Each time a standard event or custom goal event occurs, Blueshift's attribution engine looks for a campaign driven open / click action completed by the user (based on the selected attribution model), within the period of time specified.
2. The attribution engine sorts all the click actions by time and picks the user's last session as a result of a click that had UTM parameters.
3. If this click originated from a Blueshift initiated campaign, the standard event or custom goal event is attributed to the campaign and reporting counts are updated.

Attribution Models

Blueshift currently supports the following attribution models. You can select any one of the attribution models when you set up your account. However, we recommend using Last Click, as it is the most conservative and widely used model.

The following attribution models are supported in Blueshift:

• Any view
• Any click
• Last click
• Any engagement

Example 1:

In the following example, we consider a “purchase” event that is configured as a custom goal. The same behavior applies to any other custom goal event that you set up in your account.

Any View	If a user viewed a Blueshift campaign at any point during the purchase cycle (as defined in attribution days), regardless of other campaigns, it would receive 100% of the credit for the sale.
Any Click	If a user clicked on a Blueshift campaign at any point during the purchase cycle (as defined in attribution days), regardless of other campaigns, it would receive 100% of the credit for the sale.
Last Click	If the last touchpoint (click) before a purchase came from a Blueshift campaign, it would receive 100% of the credit for the sale.
Any Engagement	Our platform attributes a goal event to a campaign based on any engagement activity we observe. For the email channel, the Blueshift platform attributes a goal event if it observes an open or a click. For the mobile channels (push, SMS and in-app), our platform attributes a goal event if it observes any click. (Blueshift does not track opens for mobile channels).

Example 2:

The following table reflects all Blueshift and non Blueshift activities (Paid media platforms like Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, etc.) a customer could have engaged in over the last few weeks.

• In this example, the customer purchase occurs on Feb 26, immediately after the customer lands on your site after clicking a link on a paid media platform.
• If the attribution model is set as Any Click, only Blueshift clicks are considered for attribution. Hence this purchase is attributed (credited) to Blueshift Campaign 3 even though the Last Click came from Paid media platform 1.
• If the attribution model is set as Last Click, Paid media platform 1 is credited for this purchase. No Blueshift campaigns are credited.

	Customer Activity	Click	Purchase	Any click	Last click
Feb 22	Blueshift Campaign 1	x		No	No
Feb 23	Blueshift Campaign 2
Feb 24	Blueshift Campaign 3	x		Attribute	No
Feb 25	Blueshift Campaign 4
Feb 26	Paid media platform 1	x	x		Attribute
Feb 27	Blueshift Campaign 6
Feb 28	Blueshift Campaign 7	x
Mar 1	Paid media platform 2	x

Select attribution model

To set the attribution type, go to Account Settings > Other Settings > Attribution Type.

Reporting on custom goals

You can view how your campaigns impacted your custom goals on the Campaign Dashboard, or via Insights reports and dashboards.

Note: You may observe differences in the counts of goal events when comparing holdout reports to campaign detail/ summary reports or Insights reports. For more information, see Holdout Analysis vs Campaign attribution.

Include custom goals on the Campaign Dashboard

To set up campaign reporting, click the gear icon on the Campaign Dashboard and select the required custom goal metrics. Campaign reporting can also show compound metrics based on custom goals.

In the following example, the custom goal “Wishlisted” is selected as a metric to be displayed on the Campaign Dashboard. The Campaign Dashboard shows the number of items "Wishlisted" as a result of a message from the campaign.

 

Include custom goals in Insights reports and dashboard

When you create an Insights report or a dashboard, you can select a custom goal as the metric for the report or dashboard widget. Click Metric, go to the Custom Goals tab and select the required custom goal.