• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 24, 2015

AOL will announce later today the integration of media mix modeling (MMM) into its multi-touch attribution (MTA) platform, Convertro.

The combination increases statistical accuracy, giving marketers one view of performance and budgets. The move capitalizes on disjointed data and modeling systems, aiding long-term planning and tactical optimization without losing valuable data.

Amy Mitchell, head of Convertro at AOL Platforms, claims the analysis brings standards into the 21st century. "Marketers take historical data, as much as five years, to identify market place trends to forecast where they should spend their money next year," she says, admitting that optimizing on those broad insights alone make it difficult.

Mitchell says AOL has been working with a number of advertisers to bring the two mediums together. Previously, marketers needed to collect data sales measurement and online search, along with marketing and finance from across the enterprise, media agencies, and third-party data aggregators.

Now, MMM estimates a model that reports the returns of various marketing investments per media channel. Multi-touch attribution matches the channel credit to the marketing mix modeling analysis giving marketers one view of the numbers.

Convertro, part of One by AOL Attribution, the marketing brain of the One platform, now considers incremental and outside influences like competition, economic conditions and weather.

Monthly insights now replace historic reports marketers generate once or twice yearly in the form of a Power Point to help plan budgets for ad campaigns. The data will account for aggregate media like print, out of home, as well as social media, mobile, and search.

Mitchell says Convertro also has been "exploring" integrating mobile geo-data, compliments of Verizon, being careful to protect consumer privacy to track and analyze consumer behavior that marketers will "eventually be able to use for marketing" purposes when consumers opt-in to location based services.

"It will show what's performing in specific geographies with in-app tracking," she says