• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, October 20, 2011

Maybe John Wanamaker’s notion about advertising’s lack of effectiveness still applies. The department store magnate famously asserted, about 100 years ago, that half the money he spent on advertising was wasted --he just didn’t know which half.

A new survey out of the UK indicates that most firms still don't try to figure it out. The survey, from BskyB, found that while most marketers believe they need to know the proportion of sales attributable to individual marketing channels, most firms don't make efforts to track all the channels they use.

That's despite all the headlines about companies being obsessed with return on investment from the marketing dollars they spend.

The survey found that only 25% of those polled said they try to attribute sales to all of the marketing channels they deploy, even though 97% said they believe that doing so is important. Ninety percent said they track at least one channel. The survey, conducted for BskyB by research firm Dynamic Markets, polled managers at 100 major marketers in the UK across a range of sectors, including retail, financial services, utilities, telecommications, transportation and travel.

Most of those surveyed -- 94% -- cited difficulties with the attribution process. And nearly 40% admitted that their companies didn’t know which of their marketing channels customers were exposed to. Not so surprisingly, 88% of those polled indicate that their firms have trouble determining which channel actually prompted a customer to make a purchase. And 50% admitted not knowing which channel was most influential in triggering a transaction.

Many of the respondents said the media vendors shared at least part of the blame for the lack of clarity, with 46% saying that too many channels “make the task of tracking unreliable."

"Due to the complexities of the customer journey today in a cross-channel, multi-brand environment, there is an ever-increasing struggle to determine not only which channel finally incentivized a customer to buy, but also how the customer travelled across them,” the report states.

The survey found that all media present some attribution challenges, but some are tougher than others. Half of the respondents said they believe it is difficult to directly attribute sales to TV advertising. And close to half felt the same way about outdoor (49%), print ads (47%) and PR (47%).

Slightly fewer of the respondents found digital channels to be as daunting on the ROI front, although 42% said that both social and email marketing are difficult to track.

About one-third of the marketers in the survey thought online marketing generally presented significant attribution challenges. The most common obstacle, per the study, is a lack of effective tracking tools. Sixty-four percent cited a lack of technology available to track and measure channels, leaving marketers to essentially make educated guesses based on “less reliable qualitative methods,” the study stated.