CertainSource Launches Source Efficiency Index to Rate Customer Acquisition Spending

CertainSource, an eWayDirect company, yesterday launched the Source Efficiency Index (SEI), a new metric that measures the efficiency of customer acquisition spending across all digital channels over a given period of time.

The SEI will help B2C marketers track the overall effectiveness of their acquisition marketing spending by grading the overall ecosystem of sources used to generate new leads.

"Today's data-driven marketers need a metric of budget efficiency across all their programs, over time, not just the usual Return on Ad Spend type of per-campaign analytics," said Neil Rosen, CEO of CertainSource, in a statement. "A given campaign may provide a positive contribution, but that doesn't necessarily tell marketers the degree to which their overall acquisition effort is leveraging the highest quality sources." 

The Source Efficiency Index is now available within CertainSource Acquire, the company's recently announced customer acquisition management platform for B2C marketers. The SEI score, ranging from 0 to 15, represents the degree to which a marketer's budget is spent more on high-quality sources versus low-quality ones. High-quality sources are the particular URLs behind media buys, channels and campaigns that generate leads that most resemble high-value customers. Low-quality sources are sources that generate unengaged customer leads.

The SEI algorithmically looks at email engagement, sales, collection errors, and other data to distinguish high-quality leads from lower-quality leads.

"SEI can be used to help track how a marketer's acquisition budget is shaped over time into a more and more efficient spend," Rosen added. "Metrics for different types of acquisition programs with different vendors in different channels are hard to compare. SEI gives a marketer an aggregate, overall, longitudinal metric."

While SEI is a report within CertainSource Acquire, the company plans to use the SEI in the future to generate vertical market reports.