The number of marketers who plan to use multi-touch attribution (MTA) in their evaluation of consumers’ path to purchase could double within a year, according to a survey by the Mobile Marketing Association.

As reported by Advertising Age, the trade body has found that under a third of marketers currently use MTA in their campaigns, but it is expected another 35% will try the process out.

If that happens, it is reported that online video and branded content will benefit from the shift to MTA at the expense of paid search – a development that Advertising Age says “could reshape marketing spending for years to come”.

According to Sanjay Gupta, chief customer officer at TIAA, who has been working with the Mobile Marketing Association on its Marketing Attribution Think Tank initiative to improve analytics across media, that’s because last-touch attribution places too much emphasis on paid search.

“Most people are not using multi-touch attribution, which means that they are not leveraging the full might of their budgets, and worse, they are optimising based on the wrong metric,” he said.

“You can get lulled into this false confidence that you’re doing things at a very sophisticated level when you’re actually not,” he added.

However, Gupta went on to caution that implementing MTA is not straightforward because it includes tagging every marketing element and having to develop ways to capture and process all the accompanying data.

That is why the Mobile Marketing Association has stepped in to help those marketers who want to develop their own MTA analytical capabilities.

The organisation has created a five-stage “Journey Map” to guide marketers through the process from project initialisation to final deployment. And each of the five stages contain five common components – analytics & data, milestones, partners, skills & knowledge, organisation & people – with guidance and checklists attached.

Separately, a recent WARC Best Practice paper also provides a wealth of advice and insights for marketers seeking to navigate their way through multi-touch attribution and assorted marketing-mix models.

Sourced from Advertising Age, Mobile Marketing Association; additional content by WARC staff