Executive Summary

Attributing revenues to marketing touchpoints is one of marketers’ biggest challenges. Holistic approaches to attribution help marketers plan media budgets, optimize within channels, and drive incremental outcomes for their business in the most cost-effective way. But putting such approaches into place can be unwieldy—and it’s getting harder.

How will the “identity crisis” affect ad measurement and advertisers’ ability to attribute revenues to marketing touchpoints?

Major changes are coming to how advertisers and others in the ecosystem can identify users across channels and devices. The loss of third-party cookies and changes to Apple’s Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) will affect ad addressability, but also measurement and attribution. Advertisers are taking steps in response, including more emphasis on first-party data, data collaborations, and modeling-based approaches.

What other problems still exist in cross-platform measurement, and how are advertisers confronting these challenges?

A host of long-standing problems in measurement and attribution still plague marketers, including a lack of standards, issues with basic data accuracy and infrastructure, a lack of organizational alignment, and the difficulty of understanding and validating attribution models.

What should marketers be doing in 2021 to prepare for post-cookie attribution methods?

Past best practices will continue to serve marketers well as they deal with identity-related disruptions. This starts with a serious audit of the data advertisers currently rely on, as well as understanding what data will be lost to them in the future. Implementing a data strategy is a must, along with getting the organization aligned with business outcomes that matter and having channel-level key performance indicators (KPIs) that roll up to those outcomes.

WHAT’S IN THIS REPORT? This report investigates how marketers and their partners are approaching ad measurement and revenue attribution, and explores best practices for addressing both lingering and new problems facing attribution strategies.

KEY STAT: We estimate that 84.2% of US companies with at least 100 employees will use digital attribution models of some kind in 2021, with 65.3% using multichannel attribution models.