Predictions for 2012 Part 5 – Analytics Trend 2012: Increasingly Complex Attribution
January 20th, 2012by Mike ZeMans
In the online marketing world, much is made of the ability to pinpoint the exact source of a particular consumer activity – whether the person clicked on a banner ad, an organic search result or a link in social media, for example. This has led many online proponents to tout the traceability of online campaigns, especially in comparison to traditional offline marketing tactics where impact is difficult to determine for a medium like outdoor or print advertising.
However, for all the capabilities of technology online, the actual adoption of complex attribution models to credit various sources for various consumer actions has been quite low due to resource constraints and the lack of a dominant model or tool.Enterprise tools do exist that attempt to crack this paradigm, but as of yet, these methods have yet to trickle down to the masses. Instead, advertisers generally rely on a “last click” attribution model where the last click a user made before completing a particular conversion event gets credit for the entirety of the event, regardless of user actions taken prior to that last click. This marginalizes the power of the events that led to that last click and creates a situation where different marketing tactics are devalued inaccurately.
We believe that 2012 will be a year where complex analytics attribution becomes a major consideration for clients due to a confluence of factors – increasing availability of complex attribution tools, increasing education about attribution itself, and the increasing need for greater visibility into user motivations as online audiences continue to fragment. Advertisers who dedicate resources towards implementing these attribution tactics will be rewarded with greater insight into not only what marketing tactics best drive consumer action, but also what combination of marketing tactics lead to the greatest result.
– Mike ZeMans, Chief Experience Officer
Tags: analytics, Attribution, complex attribution tools, online marketing
