As with any service, technology, or combination of both, the expectations of the marketplace grow more sophisticated as the industry matures. Such has been the case in the marketing
attribution space over the last 12 months, as brands, agencies, executives, media buyers and marketing analysts have all undergone an education from vendors, analyst firms and other thought leaders in
the space.
The “Old Days”
Just 12-18 months ago, marketers expected marketing attribution solutions to provide them with directional insights –
mostly in the form of reports –on which channels, campaigns and tactics were contributing most to their success metrics in a multichannel environment. They were glad to have specific tactics
identified as their top “introducers,” “advancers” and “closers” within their “attribution funnel,” as such insights ensured they would not blindly
reduce their spend on tactics that were, for example, very productive introducers just because they weren’t effective as closers when judged by last-click methodologies.
Attribution
expectations circa 2011-2012 were also heavily focused on “path-to-purchase” analysis – with marketers uncovering the top five or ten combinations of marketing touches that
contributed to their desired conversions
More, More, More
Fast-forward to today. Brands and their agency partners are now asking for more: more translation of
insights into actual media-spend recommendations. More facilitation of marketers’ daily tasks. And more detailed attribution for specific audience segments.
Media
Spend Recommendations
Sometimes driven by a lack of in-house analytical support, and often driven by a desire for speed and simplification, marketers are increasingly demanding that
attribution solutions go a step beyond displaying findings and delivering reports reflecting past performance. Instead, they require that these insights be translated into forward-looking media
spend recommendations using sophisticated predictive analytics, so they need do nothing more than push a button to have optimized media plans across multiple channels produced – which, when put
into market will take advantage of cross tactic impact. And to get there, they want to be able to safely explore an unlimited number of media spending combinations in “pre-launch”
mode, using their goals for overall cost, CPA or conversions as variables in “what-if?” scenario exploration exercises.
Facilitate Media Buying &
Optimization
In addition to the demand for actual media buying recommendations referenced above, marketers are requiring that attribution solutions accommodate the real-world
optimization constraints they face. Be those limits in available display/search inventory, pre-contracted media buys that can’t be changed, or internal resource limitations to how many
changes can be executed, attribution isn’t valuable if it simply points to theoretical optimization tactics – it has to present executable recommendations.
And once those
truly actionable recommendations have been identified, marketers are no longer satisfied by the ability to hand media buying recommendations to their media buyers, or to translate them into whatever
campaign management platform they’re using. They now want to be able to deploy those recommendations into market by a push of a button that will send a feed to their demand side platform
(DSP), real time bidding (RTB) or other buying platform that will automatically execute their optimized buys without the delay and exposure to human error that comes with manual execution.
Tailored Optimization By Segment
Finally, it’s no longer acceptable to deliver a shared set of attribution findings across the entire universe of prospects to which
brands and their agencies target their efforts. Increasingly, marketing attribution must be performed at the audience segment level to be deemed accurate. Identifying the combination of
channels, campaigns and tactics that are most effective at producing conversions for each segment, optimizing to maximize the number of conversions produced by brands’ most profitable segments,
and targeting limited budgets to the audience segments with the highest propensity to convert are all strategies that attribution is now expected to enable.
The demands of the marketplace will
continue to drive innovation within the marketing attribution space. Today’s requirements are just stepping-stones to a more efficient media buying future, and will soon give way to even
more cutting-edge functionality that further empowers marketers’ multichannel efforts.