• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, August 11, 2016

The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Advanced Attribution Working Group, part of the IAB Performance Committee, on Thursday announced an overhaul of its Attribution Primer. The Committee and Working Group are responsible for examining best practices on campaign development, digital insights, measurement, and attribution — beyond the last click.

In a blog post announcing changes in the Attribution Primer, Benjamin Dick, director, industry initiatives, IAB, wrote: “The IAB’s Performance Committee has specifically focused on attribution guidance in 2016. The first step in our attribution agenda was to completely rebuild our attribution primer to account for the many developments in cross-screen measurement, data collection and usage, and ultimately provide a common language when discussing attribution tools, technologies, and methodologies.”

To that end, Dick told Real-Time Daily via email: “The primer will help brands, agencies and vendors get on the same page as far as terminology and methodologies around attribution.” Further, the primer “reflects the complex landscape of attribution in today’s multi-device, multi-screen world, and addresses the need to account for online to offline attribution options, specifically store visits, purchases and phone calls.”

Dick noted that the release of the primer represents an update to guidance that was originally published in 2012. “The new edition was substantially rewritten to account for mobile and other technology developments since the release of the first version,” he said.

In addition, Dick said: “Media and marketing technologies have evolved rapidly over the past few years, but too many ad buyers continue to rely on last-touch attribution approaches, which runs in the face of both common sense and market research.”

The IAB hopes the primer will serve as an educational resource to show the limitations of and alternatives to last-touch methodologies. It examines campaign measurement approaches beyond first/last touch methodologies, the complexity around the implementation of fractional attribution tools and counting methodologies, and the lack of clarity around how best to apply advanced attribution data within the reporting and optimization process.

The IAB cites several trends driving the need to solve the attribution problem, such as the rise in copious amount of real-time data via automated tools.