BIA/Kelsey Bytes are excerpts from research reports. This is the latest installment from the recently launched report, Call Commerce: A $1 Trillion Economic Engine. It picks up where last week’s post left off.

The report can be downloaded for free here.

Beyond the Last Click: Call Analytics in Display

Because calls are increasingly recognized as an influential step in consumers’ O2O sequence — $1 trillion big as examined earlier — assigning credit for conversions has become vital for call analytics companies. And several methodologies are developing.

Display ads are an example. Calls can be attributed when launched from a display ad, but what about calls that happen weeks later? Because display is more of a branding and awareness medium, it does not drive direct calls to the extent that intent-oriented formats like search do.

But display ads still have an impact, albeit harder to measure. They reinforce brand awareness and drive calls at later stages. In fact, one in 500,000 display impressions drives an immediate call. But expand the window to two weeks and the odds improve to one in 8,000 (see Marchex case study).

Therefore, measuring calls launched directly from a display ad provides an incomplete picture — a stumbling block of “last-click attribution.” To achieve “full-funnel attribution” requires linking impressions to conversions using device ID, phone number or other identifying factors.

This is analogous to the way Facebook uses social identity as a common thread to attribute ad impressions to conversions. Similar attribution methods are developing in the call analytics world, to make sure that calls — wherever they sit in consideration cycle — get their due credit. (See Appendix for a case study on these methods.)

Read the rest.