“What? You mean we’re spending HOW MUCH on advertising?” I asked, dumbfounded at the amount of money we were spending related to the number of units we were selling. I had just built a new metric for my startup, Bigfoot Networks, called “Marketing Spend/Unit”… or what I thought of as ‘customer acquisition cost’.
This scene, and more like it, serve to why Karmaback was founded… where we came from and our main goal. But first, welcome to the Official Karmaback Blog! This Blog is an extension to my Blog on Business and is “feedburned” into Karmaback just for you. Now, on with the story.
“So, we spend $x with Google to get a site visitor, then y% just leave or BOUNCE on the first visit… and so on and so on till we get to what, a conversion?” I asked dumbfounded. This was my first stint as CEO. Prior to this I had been in Engineering, Architecture, or Sales… and now Marketing was my #1 expense!
“Okay, so how do we measure when this 1 special Google ads site visitor actually buys one of our products?” I asked, hoping for the best. I got the worst.
“So, we don’t have any way to know if that customer who we say ‘converted’ because he clicked on a reseller link, actually bought or not… so, we have NO idea to know if all these Dollars we’re spending is worth a dime, right?”
This frustration led me on a 3 year chase at Bigfoot Networks to shore up this hole. I wanted Marketing to justify itself. I wanted to be able to say $X in marketing spend will yield $Y in sales. What I wanted, was unheard of.
Years later, I had an idea. I thought it likely that thousands of companies have this similar problem. I thought it possible to solve with technology, and so Karmaback was founded.
Our main goal, if you didn’t know by now, was to create a system… a fun system… to somehow connect “interest” to “the sale”… in short, to Justify the existence of Marketing. After looking at the landscape, and building our first product (the like-it-flow), we discovered that MANY companies do have this problem… especially with Social Network Marketing.
Now, 1 year after Karmaback’s founding, we are on the threshold of Success. Using Karmaback a company can:
- Grow fans and followers at a low variable cost of $0.25/new relevant fan.
- Measure those fans and followers interactions as they “evangelize” and “follow” the company.
- Convert those fans and followers into REAL and Measurable sales.
Poverty is stranger to industry.........................................
The problem you describe is often referred to as marketing or conversion 'attribution'; how you credit each marketing exposure that sometime later results in a conversion event, rather than attributing all credit to the exposure immediately preceding the conversion. It is a tough problem even with today's plethora of analytic software.
i think what makes it so hard is "why would a user do it?"
In other words, incentive/motivation is a big part of it.
That's why we try to motivate users to help with the attribution.. with reward points!