Multichannel orders muddy the waters; matchbacks are your chlorine

By Mark Swedlund

Incoming orders or retail transactions are then matched back to mailing files, e-mail records, telemarketing logs and others. Each order from a household is matched to all the media you know you’ve targeted to that household over a period of time, thereby identifying the costs of those media.

Then, typically, these methodologies use a series of business rules to allocate the sales from the order to the media that might have generated it. Here’s a very simple example of a business rule: If the household was mailed four times in the past four months, assign all of the sales from the order to the most recent mailing.