U.S. Cellular’s problem was one that is fairly common for modern businesses. While a majority of their sales goals, mobile phone plan activations, happened off-line and in-store, their marketing efforts were split across three primary channels: in-store displays, telesales, and online marketing.
They realized that many offline sales were likely misattributed as they had no accurate way to track the sales impact of digital marketing. To solve this problem and gain better insights into their sales channels to increase their marketing efficiency and sales forecasting ability, U.S. Cellular and its analytics firm, Cardinal Path, turned to Google Analytics Premium and BigQuery.
BigQuery is a Google Cloud based analytics platform that allows for the processing and analysis of large and diverse data sets. Using BigQuery and terabytes of data from Google Analytics Premium as well as their own internal data warehouses and other sources, U.S. Cellular was able to map consumer behavior across all channels. They were then able to attribute consumer touchpoints each buyer had made across channels.
In the end, U.S. Cellular re-attributed 50 percent of all offline activations to their online marketing channels.
“We’re now in the enviable position of having an accurate view at each stage of our customer journey,” says Katie Birmingham, a digital and e-commerce analyst at U.S. Cellular.
While this has already lead to actionable insights that will help U.S. Cellular optimize their marketing approach and priorities, they plan to scale their new solution to an even more integrated view, tracking all customers interactions across all digital channels including search, social, display ads and their website.
You can read U.S. Cellular’s White Paper here.
