Ribble Cycles: Going beyond traditional attribution with SegmentStream AI

About Ribble Cycles:

Ribble Cycles (https://www.ribblecycles.co.uk/) is an innovative UK-based bike manufacturer that has been producing fully-customisable bicycles since 1897. Ribble designs, tests and hand-assembles each bike in England, to a customer’s personal specification. Its award-winning bikes and bike kit is expertly curated on Ribble’s digital store. The Ribble BikeBuilder delivers unmatched personalisation, with each individually specified bike assembled by one mechanic, start to finish, direct to the customer. 

Innovation is at the core of everything at Ribble, including their marketing activities. That’s why Ribble’s team decided to partner with SegmentStream to promote their bikes more efficiently by applying the power of the latest big data and AI technologies to their digital channels. 

The challenge:

Ribble Cycles sells professional road bikes with an average price of £2,000 — £5,000. When the price for a product is that high, people rarely buy from the first click. Sales cycles are quite long — it might take up to 30 days for a person to make a decision.

Because of this, it was extremely difficult to understand the ROI of top-of-funnel campaigns, such as Paid Social, Display, and Video.

Previously, Ribble’s digital team used Last Non-Direct Click as their main attribution model which always showed that upper-funnel awareness campaigns (such as social or display) do not bring almost any sales. The First-Click attribution model also didn’t attribute proper value to these campaigns, as the user might simply browse on one device, and complete a purchase two weeks later from another device, so the first interaction with the website also didn’t receive almost any credit. 

However, every time Ribble’s team decided to decrease the budget on upper-funnel campaigns — the amount of total sales dropped dramatically. It was clear that social or display channels are very important and effective but at the same time, it wasn’t clear how to understand their impact in pure numbers.  Thus, traditional single-touch attribution models don’t really help much when it comes to the evaluation of marketing channels and campaign performance.

To solve this measurement challenge, Ribble’s team decided to partner with SegmentStream.

Solution overview:

SegmentStream is a next-generation, AI-powered marketing analytics and media mix optimization platform.

The unique solution combines the power of proprietary machine learning models and first-party data to understand the true contribution of each marketing activity to total sales and revenue. This, in turn, helps to understand how to optimize the marketing mix and ensure that the digital advertising budget is allocated in the most optimal way.

One of the key advantages over traditional attribution models is the fact that SegmentStream doesn’t rely on cookies to track customer journeys in order to evaluate campaign performance. When traditional multi-touch attribution tools fail to observe the real, complete customer journey due to modern-day tracking restrictions and privacy regulations, SegmentStream AI is able to accurately measure the impact of any marketing activity on overall conversions and revenue.

Customer testimonial:

Most of the customers do not buy advanced bicycles like ours during their first interaction with the website. People want to take their time and make proper research, read reviews, and consult with our bike specialists before finally making a purchase decision. Moreover, the already complex customer journey is becoming even more difficult to track because of people using multiple browsers and devices.

With all of this, we thought that it will be almost impossible to understand the true value of our digital marketing campaigns, especially upper-funnel awareness campaigns that tend to receive almost no credit when using traditional marketing attribution models such as Last Non-Direct Click.

Luckily, we found SegmentStream and its AI-driven technology that actually helped us to see the real picture of our cross-channel marketing performance, and what’s more important, to truly activate machine learning insights and improve the performance of our key digital advertising channels. 

We are happy with our collaboration, and looking forward to working together to drive outstanding digital marketing results!

— Matthew Lawson, Chief Digital Officer, Ribble Cycles