eMarketer Webinar: Navigating the Complexities of Cross-Platform Attribution

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Made possible by

Navigating the Complexities of

Cross-Platform Attribution

Lauren T. Fisher

Senior Analyst

October 6, 2016

© 2016 eMarketer Inc.

Today’s Agenda

Assess the current state of attribution

Discuss common roadblocks to implementation

Identify future areas of development and advancement

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What is attribution?

The practice of

assigning credit to

any advertising- or

marketing-driven

interaction or other

brand-imposed

touchpoint

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The explosion of devices and touchpoints has

made cross-platform attribution a must

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This

complexity,

among other

challenges,

has made

attribution a

significant

area of

concern for

many

marketers

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Those using

attribution are

still in the

minority

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About half of US companies will shift to

multichannel attribution models by 2017

But remember:

This is only the

number of

companies using

it for digital

media

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Cross-screen complexities aren’t the only things

sidelining marketers

Cost, expertise and

organizational silos

also delay

attribution

adoption and usage

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Roadblocks to Overcome:

Setting Up for Attribution

Success

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Interest in

more

advanced

attribution

methods is

high

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But getting sign-off on these tools and platforms

can be difficult

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Winning budgets and justifying long-term value

can prove tricky, but essential

“When it comes to implementing a DMP or an

attribution platform, these are new cost items

that haven’t necessarily been slotted into the budget

mix. How do you fund that? How do you make a case

to management that this six-digit investment

that probably won’t be up and running at any sort of

meaningful scale for six to 13 months is going to

pay for itself on the other end of this?”

—Rob Griffin, Chief Innovation Officer, Almighty

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For most, arriving at a ‘single point of truth’

proves a powerful case for attribution

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But to get

there requires

companies to

make multiple

tools and tech

work together

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Achieving

full-scale

system

integration

is still an

industrywide

pursuit

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Many lack

proper

coordination

and expertise

required for

such

integration

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But more often, organizational and departmental

silos impede proper data share and integrations

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Data

integration

and

accessibility

are key to

making

attribution

work, but so

is data quality

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When it comes to attribution, it’s garbage in,

garbage out

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Common data quality issues marketers must vet

for include:

Fidelity of owned and tracked data

Fraud and viewability

Accuracy of purchased data

Compatibility of device-level data; online-to-offline

(O2O) data

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Cross-device and the lack of a universal

identifier poses even bigger challenges

“Cross-device targeting came ‘to the masses’ in

2015. That resulted in a lot of conversations about

deterministic and probabilistic data. But what we still

see is that cross-device attribution is still very much

in its infancy and there are no standards around

it yet. Between what ID you have on one platform vs.

what kind of ID you have on another, it ends up

becoming very complicated … and the resulting

attribution can look entirely different.”

—Alan Beiagi, Senior Director, Products, DataXu

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To combat this and other data quality issues,

many utilize first-party data for known users

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The Attribution To-Do List:

Audit current digital

measurement strategy

Identify where sales data

is being captured

Take stock of tech

Decide: Is this enough?

If not, choose a vendor

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Looking Ahead: The Future

of Attribution

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A more cohesive blending of top-down

and bottom-up models

1

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In the past, most marketers have used one of

two attribution methods:

Top Down

Branding, traditional media

(print, TV, etc.)

Econometrics, marketing-

mix modeling

Uses GRPs/impressions,

spend, sales data, external

data to model attribution

Budget allocation and media

planning

Bottom Up

Native to digital

Path analysis

Uses cookies and other

web data to analyze

actual activity

Optimization,

performance

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But of late, many seek greater convergence

between the two

Image credit: Shutterstock

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Still, such solutions are works in progress

“We see a lot of people doing this today, but they’re kind

of duct-taping it together and trying to fit a

square peg in a round hole. And so marketers are left

scratching their heads and wanting to try and figure

out how to improve the data discrepancies and how

to make user-level and aggregate-level data

work together.”

—Amy Mitchell, General Manager, Convertro, an AOL company

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A move to more real-time reporting

2

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As capabilities improve, rear-view reporting will

become a thing of the past

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The ultimate aim of attribution is to move from

this:

To this: Company

Level

Is my

advertising/marketing

successful?

Department Level

Was this campaign successful?

Team Level

Was this tactic successful?

Company Level

Is my advertising/marketing

successful?

Department Level

Was this campaign

successful?

Team Level

Was this tactic successful?

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Addressable media is the most malleable at the

moment

But long-term,

traditional

media will

become more

and more

addressable

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But remember: Automation and algorithms are

marketing assets, not marketing absolutes

“Oftentimes marketers immediately want

to jump to optimizing. Shut that off. Turn that

on. Move money from here to here. And they

may be reacting to an anomaly and not a

true pattern. So there’s definitely a balance in

terms of timely data availability and a deep

enough and big enough sample to make sound

decisions.”

—Jon Schulz, CMO, Viant

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Greater online-to-offline sales

attribution

3

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Attributing all

the way down to

the sale has

become ‘mission

critical’

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Tying online to offline (O2O) may be an

imperative, but it’s still a work in progress

“Even with just online, being able to connect the

dots across different devices and publishers is

already hard enough. And to be able to tie

online transactions to offline sales is

even harder, because a lot of the time

advertisers just don’t have the right

technologies and tools in order to do so.”

—Anh Bui, Product Marketing Manager, Facebook

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Data matching capabilities are improving, but

there are still pitfalls

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Location data

can prove a

rich source of

O2O info, but

its fidelity is

increasingly

being called

into question

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Example in action: an entertainment client

looking to activate monthly paid subscriptions

The goal: Develop a cross-channel, integrated model that drives

business results using paid, owned and earned media.

Data in: Primary acquisition KPIs (subscriptions, registrations, monthly

active users), paid media (TV, out-of-home, social, online video, display,

search), owned and earned media (site traffic, organic social and

search, email, PR), competitor media spend, holidays and events,

macroeconomic data, company-/industry-specific business metrics.

Model used: Marketing mix modeling (MMM) with ‘nested’ levels for

optimization (digital).

Benefits: Determine optimal channel spend; understand how to

optimize and execute marketing dollars to maximize subscriptions and

lifetime value.

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Key Takeaways:

Marketers can no longer afford to ignore cross-platform

attribution.

Organizational, technological and data quality issues all

pose significant challenges to making attribution work.

Blended, more real-time models are now a must.

Tying O2O data will be critical to truly gauge company

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Lauren T. Fisher

Navigating the Complexities of

Cross-Platform Attribution

Cracking Cross-Device Attribution in 2016: Data Quality,

Blended Models and Merging Online-Offline Data

Search and Social Platforms: How Facebook and Others Can

Steal Dollars from Search

Making Multichannel Marketing Work: Four Tactics Required

for Omnichannel Success

Ad Fraud in the US: How More Sophisticated Methods Are

Hurting Mobile, Video and Performance Measurement