Although many marketers rely on simplistic or outdated attribution models, improvements are being made.
We forecast that 58.3% of US companies will use multichannel attribution for their digital marketing efforts in 2019, up from 48.6% in 2017.
Multichannel attribution assigns marketing credit to more than one marketing channel or touchpoint. It also provides more complete data on a customer’s path to purchase than does last-click attribution, which credits a purchase or conversion to the last ad clicked by a customer.
While companies can better prove the value of their marketing efforts with multichannel attribution, they have a long way to go in gaining a deeper understanding of their campaign metrics.
For many, bridging traditional media measurement methods—like marketing mix modeling with multichannel attribution—remains a challenge. Even fewer are capable of combining the two and accounting for critical nonmarketing touchpoints, such as call centers, sales teams and the in-store experience.
While there is no panacea for marketers’ attribution challenges, data scientists may be part of the solution. Marketing firms should view their data science hires as a complement to their traditional marketing analytics, not as a substitute, according to Jim Spaeth, partner at media consultancy Sequent Partners.
“Without data science, traditional marketing analysts can’t cope with big data sets,” Spaeth said. “Without traditional marketing analytics, data science overlooks decades of knowledge about consumer behavior and advertising dynamics, and then mistakes data for answers.”
Many marketers agree. In a Salesforce poll of 4,101 marketing leaders worldwide, 42% of respondents said they are using methods driven by data science to measure their marketing success. A similar percentage said they measure their marketing success with attribution modeling, which included marketing mix modeling and multitouch attribution.