Editorial Articles

Attribution used to be about understanding the value of every digital touch point that leads to an event, for example a sale – it was about gaining a better understanding of ROI. Attribution still is about this, but it is also about much more.

Imagine for a moment that all media touch points, eCRM, Display advertising and Search etc., are football players, each having a role in getting the ball from one end of the pitch to it’s end target – the goal. If Football Managers used ‘last kick wins’ to make decisions about who is contributing most to the ‘journey’, most players would be out of their highly paid jobs… nothing left but strikers. So, at a simple level Attribution is about understanding exactly what each ‘player’ contributes to the success of the team. For many advertisers this alone is a major step toward better decisions and performance gains.

But we can go further. If you are looking for a realistic description of the contribution of each media touch-point, then the Attribution model at the core of delivering the description (and the ROI based metrics sitting underneath it) will inevitably be a sophisticated algorithm that describes the data, automatically adjusting to changes in the data – ascribing partial value to every touch point, whether impression or click, converting or non-converting. It is not just about clicks and it’s not just about conversion – it’s knowing ‘why’ and ‘why not’.

By employing all data, a sophisticated, true measure of influence can be delivered. Attribution evolves to become a genuine Insight tool, used to assess the value of creative, customer behaviour and inform future value, in addition to being a tool for measuring and optimising the media mix. It has the potential to become the glue that enables across-the-board performance gains, through understanding not simply what is happening, but why.

Back to our simple analogy… we know that winning is not a simple binary case of kick ball, score goal. It’s often a complex set of moves, some moving the ball forward, some back and sideways - always some competition along the way… No two goals are scored the same way despite the same result. Digital media is the same – simple binary ways of measuring and deriving Insight just don’t cut it.

Typically, marketers have measured what they have found easy to measure - last click rather than what would be truly useful to measure, that is, everything that really contributes to an event.

Today, we are in the position whereby that easy, simplistic and wrong method of ascribing value has been superseded by a multi-model approach that much better reflects reality. It’s this approach that not only delivers deep Insight; it ensures that attribution has value where there is no direct conversion, in Branding activity or with FMCG etc.

It is sometimes hard for marketers that have grown up only knowing digital to see beyond the last click, because that is what they are used to, and comfortable with. The whole point of advertising is persuasion – not measured clicks. We need to measure the real effect of advertising on an audience for digital to fulfill its potential.

Is it not time to stop ignoring the data that already exists and move towards attribution based measurement and optimization? You might have the best players but we know what happens when they don’t play as a team!

Matthew Mills
CEO & Founder, Shomei
blog.shomei.com