Thoughts on Marketing Attribution
Published: 9/16/2022
Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) – collects individual, user-level data for addressable (trackable) media and conversion events to determine each media event’s impact on a customer’s path to conversion. Because MTA requires tracking and connecting all media at the user level, it does not account for non-addressable media, like print, radio, and traditional (linear) TV, which is not tracked back to individuals.
Media mix modeling – collects aggregated data from marketing and non-marketing sources over a multi-year historical period, also factoring in external influences such as seasonality, economic data, weather, and promotions. The data is then used to develop a demand model which quantifies the historical contribution of each marketing and non-marketing input to a business outcome, like sales or conversions.
Using MTA and MMM for cross-channel attribution has proven to be difficult for reasons including:
- Many platforms like Amazon and Facebook are walled gardens and inaccessible to third-party tracking of impressions.
- Identity resolution across media platforms is relatively low.
- Services like LiveRamp (IDL product), TransUnion, and Neustar provide a solution, while The Trade Desk has offered Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) as an open-source solution.
- Cross-device tracking is complex, and match rates are meager.
- Instrumenting a tracking infrastructure by a third-party measurement provider has proved to be fraught with breakage and data leakage.
- Both are extremely time-consuming to implement and maintain and require experience in data science and analytics.
- Media Mix Modeling (MMM) is typically two quarters behind which misses major sales cycles and introduces bias by giving the most credit to the strongest impression-based channels.
Consumers are becoming increasingly aware of data collection in their day-to-day lives. According to Marketing Evolution, 97% of consumers are concerned about protecting their personal data. This increased focus on privacy negatively impacts a marketer’s ability to collect and derive insights at a rapid pace and makes some of their previous marketing technology investments obsolete.