Today, I am going to tell you a story about Jim O’RecordSales. Jim’s biggest responsibility is to ensure an album’s digital marketing is optimized to earn as many online purchases as possible throughout the entire release cycle (from pre-order, to release day and beyond). He is helping to release an album that is being sold across the major digital music outlets, with the largest and most powerful being iTunes.
Jim’s standard promotional plan includes marketing the album across social channels, YouTube, on the record labels website, in a press release, setting up an AdWords campaign targeted towards English speaking countries in which this artist has passionate followings, and to work with the artist’s managers to push the promotions on the individual artist’s website, social channels and wherever else they can.
From experience Jim knows that the link to iTunes within these promotions with a strong call to action is arguably the most important facet to drive sales. As music fans can be extremely impulsive, ensuring that the link to the music allows every fan to act on their impulse and buy the album in that moment is vital. If set up right, Jim also knows that each link can tell a story from those users, and help him with future marketing campaigns as well.
He knows that iTunes will pay commissions for referring people to their store to buy music, movies, apps and e-books. He has a hunch that by affiliating the links he includes in all of his online marketing, he can earn his record label some additional revenue on top of his normal record sales. He’s also heard that the iTunes Affiliate Program has some interesting reporting that should help him gain additional insight into his campaigns, and as Jim always says, knowledge is power.
Enter GeoRiot’s Relative Conversion Score, developed so that marketing superheroes like Jim can track indiviudal campaigns on iTunes.
With the conversion score activated Jim found that the band’s website was about 50% more effective than the label’s website in promoting the label. Further, he found that Twitter was 3X more effective than Facebook while both significantly outperformed YouTube.
Jim found that the calculations delivered were the most accurate in the industry. Here’s why:
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GeoRiot use three different data sets to calculate a score per click (not per link or per metric). This allows them to analyze every click, link, and sale (instead of in aggregate) to avoid “false positives” that would inflate values. This also allows them to assign the RCS value to each of the different attributes we report on (country, referrer, media type, device, etc.).
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A time based decay algorithm was introduced to reward purchases that were made shortly after the click. For example, if a purchase is made a minute after a click, it’s more likely it’s the item you’re promoting while an item that is purchased 23 hours after a click is less likely.
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Rules were built in to handle multiple purchases of the same media type and price as you can’t buy the same product twice (after you purchase once, it’s yours forever).
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GeoRiot also developed detailed rules to account for pre-orders, apps with in-app purchases, products that had “up sell” opportunities (click a link to a song, but buy the album instead), and items available in multiple formats (Ex. HD, SD or rental) to provided better insight.
In part because of the tracking provided by GeoRiot, as well at their link management platform, Jim achieved superhero status and saved both his artist and his record label from mediocre sales.
Jesse Lakes first realized he had an issue with Geo-Fragmentation in 2009. He’s been working on a cure ever since. This path has taken him from being the first author about the iTunes Affiliate Program, to a job with Apple as the Global Product Manager of the iTunes Affiliate Program, and now as the co-founder and CEO of GeoRiot. Based in Seattle, GeoRiot is working to eradicate Geo-Fragmentation and bridge the Purchasing Gap.