LONDON: More brands and agencies are turning to attribution strategies as a means of assessing the effectiveness of campaigns, an industry figure has claimed.
Amit Kotecha, EMEA head of marketing at Quantcast, the digital ad measurement business, told The Drum that while marketers had talked about attribution – assessing the influence each advertising impression has on a consumer's decision to make a purchase – for many years and then done nothing about it, that situation was changing.
"In the last six months we have seen a massive shift in the industry where more of our clients are asking about it and we are doing a lot more deep dives into attribution as a company," he said.
And he added that major brands were inquiring "because they have started to realise that their spend is not being utilised to its maximum". He argued that attribution could increase conversions without increasing spend "which is what everyone wants to do".
Kotecha acknowledged that attribution was "a hard subject to get your head around" and explained that was the reason for Quantcast issuing a white paper outlining the different attribution models available in "small, easy to understand steps that a marketer will read and hopefully understand".
The important thing, he suggested, was that marketers stop using clicks and last touch/click as the main metric for measuring display advertising. "If you can move away from that it's one huge step," he declared.
A separate study by IgnitionOne, a digital marketing solution business, found that 58% of marketers continued to use last-click as their attribution model and that only 18% of organisations employed a sophisticated cross-channel attribution model. Some 24% did not have any attribution strategy and did not measure how one type of online media affected another.
This was surprising, it suggested, given the clear benefits associated with advanced attribution models. "Marketers lack urgency in implementing truly integrated digital marketing, as well as cross-channel attribution, which is affecting their budgeting decisions", said the report.
Amit Kotecha, EMEA head of marketing at Quantcast, the digital ad measurement business, told The Drum that while marketers had talked about attribution – assessing the influence each advertising impression has on a consumer's decision to make a purchase – for many years and then done nothing about it, that situation was changing.
"In the last six months we have seen a massive shift in the industry where more of our clients are asking about it and we are doing a lot more deep dives into attribution as a company," he said.
And he added that major brands were inquiring "because they have started to realise that their spend is not being utilised to its maximum". He argued that attribution could increase conversions without increasing spend "which is what everyone wants to do".
Kotecha acknowledged that attribution was "a hard subject to get your head around" and explained that was the reason for Quantcast issuing a white paper outlining the different attribution models available in "small, easy to understand steps that a marketer will read and hopefully understand".
The important thing, he suggested, was that marketers stop using clicks and last touch/click as the main metric for measuring display advertising. "If you can move away from that it's one huge step," he declared.
A separate study by IgnitionOne, a digital marketing solution business, found that 58% of marketers continued to use last-click as their attribution model and that only 18% of organisations employed a sophisticated cross-channel attribution model. Some 24% did not have any attribution strategy and did not measure how one type of online media affected another.
This was surprising, it suggested, given the clear benefits associated with advanced attribution models. "Marketers lack urgency in implementing truly integrated digital marketing, as well as cross-channel attribution, which is affecting their budgeting decisions", said the report.
Data sourced from The Drum, IgnitionOne; additional content by Warc staff
