In today's evolving partnership ecosystem, brands need partnership automation providers that offer advanced incentive structures, attribution, and measurement solutions.

Our analyst Andrew Lipsman is joined by Sara Livingston, head of customer solutions at Rockerbox, to discuss where direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands' Facebook ad budgets are flowing since iOS tracking changes disrupted ad targeting and measurement last year. Find out why Google, TikTok, and connected TV are capturing more spend and how D2C budgets are likely to migrate in the coming years.

Attribution innovations have brought the focus away from video completion rates and toward return on ad spend (ROAS) and cost-per-action (CPA) metrics

Attribution and Measurement. Attribution is a key obstacle for advertisers on TikTok. Both the platform’s move to allow advertisers to add first-party cookies to its pixel and its integration with Foursquare to track in-store visits are undoubtedly major steps forward. Even so, challenges remain:. Before first-party cookies, attribution was based on single user sessions.

StoreKit Ad Network, or SKAdNetwork, is Apple’s privacy-friendly attribution framework. Like the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), it uses a deterministic attribution model to provide conversion data for app installs. Unlike the IDFA, it aggregates that data before sharing it with advertisers, ensuring that no user- or device-level identifiers are passed along.

metrics/KPIs, No. 2 on audience targeting and off-site targeting, and No. 3 on closed-loop sales attribution.

Attributing revenues to marketing touchpoints is one of marketers’ most challenging yet vital tasks. Read on to learn how marketers are approaching the journey to holistic attribution.

Advertisers we spoke with were more inclined to believe that Facebook’s measurement and attribution challenges have been the bigger cause of performance declines.

Along with automated ad buying tools, attribution is also essential for TikTok to scale its ad business, particularly in performance advertising. To that end, TikTok has introduced new features that allow advertisers to better track the effectiveness of their campaigns.

The researcher also cited Apple’s SKAdNetwork, which Apple has positioned more as an attribution solution than an identity platform. None of these initiatives, on their own, will directly replace the customer data lost to cookie and mobile ID deprecation.

Marketers seek to overcome these gaps with brute force and modeling to estimate the performance of each media channel—via marketing mix modeling—although these don’t always align with their channel and functional attribution scores.

In mobile, cross-app signal loss on iOS is a major problem for attribution. This is especially true for performance marketers, and Apple’s privacy-friendly attribution solution, SKAdNetwork, doesn’t offer the reporting granularity that advertisers are used to. Some apps are resorting to device fingerprinting to prove the effectiveness of ad campaigns.

First-party data has become more important than ever, and companies with access to customer data will focus on activities such as audience segmentation, targeting, measurement, and attribution.

Andreas Cohen, founder and chairman of I-COM Global, a forum for digital leaders, joins eMarketer co-founder and Insider Intelligence chief evangelist Geoff Ramsey to discuss community building in a post-pandemic world, how attribution is evolving and AI's role in digital marketing.

Marketers can now use Foursquare Attribution to track in-store visits prompted by TikTok ads. The integration with Foursquare Attribution should allow TikTok marketers to answer more questions: How many new customers is TikTok bringing to a location? Which audiences are most likely to convert to an in-store visit? What’s the maximum a business owner should pay per lead?

Walmart’s deal with The Trade Desk will accelerate the importance of offline attribution data. There’s a large—and largely untapped—opportunity in offline sales attribution. Walmart Connect, by partnering with programmatic heavyweight The Trade Desk, will tap its massive repository of in-store sales to begin linking digital ad exposure to in-store sales, giving brand budgets a reason to shift.

One of the unique qualities of retail media advertising is the ability to use closed-loop attribution, tying ad engagements to sales. This is possible because the same company is running the ad and selling the product advertised. Brands often look to Amazon and Walmart.com because those sites facilitate closed-loop attribution—and with the ongoing disruptions to digital identity, this tool will likely provide even greater advantages to those who use it.

What they need is a retail media network that can effectively tie together offline and online sales data to deliver more precise targeting and attribution, as well as a holistic view of a customer’s entire shopping journey—but no network on the market currently fulfills all those criteria.