Closing the Loop on Art with Science

Omniture and Salesforce.com recently announced a partnership to provide a Closed Loop Marketing service, available to joint clients, through Salesforce’s AppExchange. The solution was designed to measure Marketing’s overall contribution to the sales process by analyzing the impact of multiple campaigns through an attribution methodology. This helps to solve the age-old marketing problem, where the last touch historically received all the credit, by indicating which campaigns collectively contributed to the ultimate sale.

Although it’s too early to tell if the service will be highly effective, I like the concept because it incorporates measurement practices into shared responsibilities that were generally gauged on gut-feel in the past. With the proliferation of technologies such as analytics and multivariate testing, results are driving change. Much to the chagrin of the senior-most executive in the room, operational decisions facing web site managers are increasingly made based on the science of technology rather than the art of intuition.