• by Colin Kirkland , September 8, 2023

To expand its measurement ecosystem and provide marketers with a more complete view of the customer journey, TikTok has announced a multi-touch attribution partnership with TransUnion’s TruAudience Marketing Attribution solution, a decision the social media platform hopes will help enhance the effectiveness of ad campaigns on its app.

The Byte-Dance-owned company first worked with TransUnion through a deal with Neustar, which TransUnion acquired in 2021.

Now, the two companies are partnering to address the complexity of the consumer journey, which can often span various touchpoints and interactions that they believe “traditional attribution models don’t accurately capture.”

“Last-click attribution models assign all credit for a conversion to the final touchpoint before a purchase,” TikTok pointed out in a blog post. “However, we know that users often take purchase inspiration from TikTok without interrupting their experience to click.”

To make its point, the company said that 35% of purchasers who first heard about a brand from TikTok and viewed an ad had not clicked within 28 days.

According to the company, TransUnion’s TruAudience Marketing Attribution solution “measures advertising impact down to the campaign level, which powers advanced reporting and analytics capabilities,” giving marketers the ability “to allocate budgets across channels, optimize digital and social tactics in real time, and analyze their customers’ path to conversion.”

In other words, the system takes a marketer’s point of sale input, along with additional info from their business database, and helps them understand the specific impact of each campaign initiative. 

Using multi-touch attribution through TruAudience, TikTok says that at a median level, it has seen that 40% or more of the target audiences reached on TikTok were unique and not found elsewhere in the measured media plan.

The partnership with TransUnion marks another step in TikTok's ongoing goal of enhancing its measurement ecosystem to bring more marketers to its platform. Previously, in June, the company expanded its partnership with Integral Ad Science to 23 new markets, ushering in brand safety and suitability measurement for additional marketers placing campaigns on the app.