Sponsored: I presented AdRoll’s State of the Industry ANZ report at The Programmatic Summit week before last. There was a slight slant towards attribution - particularly since we’re in the process of doing an in-depth whitepaper on what Australian marketers are doing with attribution in association with AdNews.
In my commentary, I was pretty tough on last click attribution. According to the marketers we spoke to, last click attribution remains the predominant attribution method with just over half reporting they use last click attribution. This is worrying when an Econsultancy report in association with Google as far back as 2012 identified last click attribution as the least efficient attribution method.
After the presentation a few people asked me why I had been so hard on last click attribution - particularly since I work for a company that has its roots in retargeting. Isn’t retargeting advantaged by last click? Shouldn’t we be praising last click from the rooftops?
My answer to that question is two-fold. First and foremost, I’m a B2B marketer and my primary purpose is to drive revenue for the business. Although it can be trickier to prove, the reality is that offline events and non-direct performance channels like social do wonders for our brand. They create brand recognition and brand connection and even though they are harder to attribute to a revenue dollar, I know that without them my PPC and retargeting dollars definitely wouldn’t be as successful.
Secondly, when was the last time you (yes, you reader, this is interactive now) clicked on an ad? I work in digital advertising and to be honest, I don’t know when the last time I clicked on a digital ad was. ComScore research shows 85% of the clicks on the internet come from just 8% of the internet population but 10.9 million (nearly 50%) made a purchase online in 2014 according to the ACMA. Therefore, the logic follows that last click is not a reliable indicator who is buying from your brand.
This is why the first thing you see when you log into the AdRoll dashboard is the ROI of your campaign and we recommend that you allocate some portion of your attribution model to view throughs because a click isn’t a purchase.
Attribution is hard, primarily because there is no right answer at this point in time. The customer journey looks more like a toddler running across the room than the linear path of consumers past. Marketers are also putting more shiny toys in the toddler’s path as we use ever more varied marketing mix.
At the end of day, finding the right attribution model for your brand is a mix of custom factors and a little bit of faith. That’s why AdRoll and AdNews are asking marketers - great and small - to tell us more about you handle the attribution challenge.
Now it's your turn to contribute to the discussion, by taking a couple of minutes to answer this simple survey.
Your responses will be crucial to informing an attribution white paper to be published by AdNews and AdRoll in April. Click here to view the AdRoll Roundtable discussion on Attribution.
Cat Prestipino is AdRoll head of marketing, JAPAC.