How Do You Allocate Sales Credit Among Marketing Tactics?

Your marketing mix consists of TV ads and organic search. How can you tell which tactics drive which sales?

  • It doesn’t matter. If it’s working, then just keep doing what you are doing.
  • You can’t allocate any sales directly to TV unless you do infomercials, so just chalk it all up to search.
  • Credit brand name keyword searches to TV, generic keyword searches to organic search, and everything else to TV.
  • Credit sales that started with search to your search campaign and everything else to TV.

Allocation of credit among competing tactics is a big deal. It drives your investment in those tactics in the future. What makes the most sense is to cede to TV all those brand searches if those TV ads are constantly improving your brand awareness. On the other hand, all those other searches are not driven by brand advertising, so you should credit them to your search marketing.