• by May 8, 2009

The Attribution roundtable had a lot of discussions on this topic and was clearly top of mind with a lot of marketers.

eCommerce/Lead Gen Roundtable: Adam Goldberg, Chief Innovation Officer, ClearSaleing, led this roundtable and gathered the following key takeaways from the group:

1. Attribution management is a hot topic NOW and a must do NOW. It is not something that a company can wait for. Otherwise, we are leaving too much money on the table. 2. Profit is the metric that should be attributed across ads as that gives the most accurate answer as to whether or not an ad is performing. All other metrics are secondary. 3. It is not all or nothing. We do not need perfect models to do attribution today... we just need improvement... and improvement means more profit.

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Brand Advertiser Roundtable: Jeremy Crane, Director of Search and Online Media, Compete, led this roundtable. Key takeaways:

1. More integration of analytics and measurement packages is needed. They don’t integrate well now and the results are often contradictory. 2. Testing is the key. Whether it’s display vs search, brand search vs generic, social vs video vs search, it’s critical to understand how this connects to your specific space, business, niche. In a similar vein there isn’t enough targeted research that takes testing and modeling down to the specific industry level. 3. Offline poses a major challenge. Whether it is for industries with heavy offline conversions or brands with heavy offline media spending, there is currently no good way to integrate and measure the relationship. This is needed. 4. We need to do a better job of understanding the search funnel and specific attribution modeling associated in this space. How do we attach value to the upper funnel terms? More rigorous models and tools are needed

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