How Lenovo Is Moving Beyond Last-Click Attribution

The argument, particularly within the affiliate space, is always that the affiliate guy swoops in at the last minute and steals the order from paid search or some other program.

There are real companies that focus purely on attribution. We plan on looking at one of those, and kind of doing a side-by-side analysis [against our current last-touch vendors] and really seeing where the attribution lands for us.

Affiliate coupon shoppers, emails, we do some business-to-business [B2B] stuff with other large organizations that don’t conflict with our brand, there’s influencers on YouTube—it really runs the gamut.

I don’t want to throw them out just because, all of a sudden, we’re going to change the attribution. We need to be smart about how we run our business.

Absolutely—that’s something we’re going through right now. That’s why we’re [testing a multitouch vendor]. Some people would say it’s overkill. But this way we can make the business case to our partners that we have no doubt about [the attribution], based on all the different data we are pulling in.

In some ways it could be revealing that maybe the affiliate program isn’t as big because it’s been eating off of the fact that we’ve been a last-click business. But I’m very confident that our program has multiple layers to it, and there’s more to it than just this last-click, bottom-feeder approach that some tend to think about when they think of the affiliate space.

We have an internal business intelligence team that goes through the data.

We’re giving it a year. We’re just in the first couple of months now.

Some people are afraid to get this deep into the data because they're afraid of what they might find. They're afraid that they might not be as big as they thought they were.