Online marketing attribution – even this requires common sense

The idea is that we can at last step away from last-click attribution in which everything an advertiser does is pretty much disregarded by focusing on the digital channels that were the last in the chain before a customer arrives at a website to buy. We’ve discussed before how paid search gets a disproportionate amount of marketers’ budgets because of this very thing.

The sense of it is clear. Consider the idiocy of playing a football team consisting entirely of strikers. Or, if you’re in the US, a football team comprised entirely of running backs and receivers. No-one to defend, no-one to pass – just a bunch of points-scorers hanging around the goalposts/endzone waiting for something to convert. This is a world where advertisers only run paid search campaigns – because that’s what converts!

But, unfortunately, the truth in purely data-driven planned media – as online has fast become – is that common sense can be left behind. It is common sense that stops everyone from entirely dumping things like PR, display advertising, brand awareness and perception activity. We know that these things drive ‘footfall’ and ‘sales’ but, because we struggle to measure them, we over-weight spend to the channels that the data tells us ‘deliver’.

So, the hunt has been on for a way to recognise accurately the impact of such things in contributing to a sale and thus – as finance directors, MDs and investors go on an understandable hunt for proven revenue-drivers - marketers can justify the budget they know they need to spend on things other than paid search marketing.

Attribution is online’s answer. It involves – at a basic level – compiling complete user journeys and attributing credit and commission not just to the deliverer of the final click, but sharing it proportionately between all the channels that featured in the journey.

Online marketing attribution is the business end of what container tags enable. The first step to identifying complete user journeys is to track all channels through one system and in one place. That – crucial - bit has now been solved. The next step is for such container tag systems to enable automated reporting of entire user journeys and the ability to weight credit/commissions to the different channels. That bit too has been solved. The last step is the tricky one since it takes the application of common sense to complex technology. The last step is to:

a) decide – based on a collated understanding of typical user journeys – the role we believe different channels are playing in delivering revenue

b) divine the percentage of credit or commission we believe those channels should get for playing that role

Plugging those decisions in to build an attribution model is now possible. But, there’s no getting around the essential application of imagination – however data-driven the information is – to arrive at a rational approach.

Much as marketers are pushed to justify their actions, we have to be able to rely on what we know to be true, whether or not we have solid, data-driven evidence to prove it. And we have to hope that our paymasters can rely on that too.