Attribution- The Biggest Challenge for the Modern Marketer

To say that marketing has completely changed in the last decade will be the biggest understatement ever. To say that marketers haven’t been completely able to keep pace with the evolving technology and the evolving consumer will not be completely false.

There are new ways to

a)      reach consumers (multiple new platforms and devices)

b)     track consumers (digital footprints please!!)

c)      measure performance with 100% accuracy

Point a is followed by everyone. Point b would be explored by any digital marketer/agency worth their salt. But point c, I highly doubt. At least not by 99% of companies. Not yet.

Yes, I am talking about multi touch attribution. For every conversion/sale that happened, we should be able to give partial credit to every marketing channel along the consumer journey that helped in the conversion.

A possible example I am sharing from our line of business- I may see a native ad blogpost which tells about the benefits of BLDC fans. Intrigued by that, I search for bldc fans, click on the 1st organic result( achieved through SEO) and land up on Atomberg’s site. I check the product and I exit. I see remarketing ads on Google Display and Youtube and interact with them. Finally I see a Facebook ad with an offer and click on it, land on the website and make a purchase. Will it be right if I assign 100% credit for the sale to Facebook? Of course, not. But last click attribution is still the most popular way to measure conversion success.

And not just high level marketing channels ( Facebook, Google Search, Youtube, Display etc) but each and every dimension( campaign, placement, creative, offer etc) should be tracked and worked upon.

But if it is easy, everyone would have done it right? The truth is that despite individual, user-level data being available to track touchpoints in the consumer journey, it is incredibly difficult to achieve it in reality. The primary reason for this that the channels exist in silos. Amazon, Google and Facebook are the 3 biggest channels when it comes to addressable media today. And each one of them is separate ( specially Amazon). There is so much data and everything is scattered. And that makes it incredibly difficult to follow customers in their customer journey across devices and channels, and as a result as a marketer I still don’t know which marketing and advertising is working the best.

And there can never be a single product/tool to clear this mess. Because success of a campaign for every industry is different( yes, end of day it is sales, but campaign goals are different). A successful campaign for an auto giant would mean increased dealership visits. For someone like us, it would mean increase in online sales and offline walk-ins to our outlets. For someone like Zomato, it would mean increased app installs/first order. And so, on and so forth

Also more importantly, today the media can be classified into addressable media( where individual user level data is available)- online ads, video, social, email etc and traditional media( where individual data is not available)- TV, radio, OOH, newspapers etc. Almost every company has a mix of traditional and addressable media in its marketing mix.

The challenges are manifold. From the usage of accurate metrics to understanding how the online and offline channels interact to understanding how a combination of addressable and traditional media can be used and measured. Most traditional organizations(not operating in online space but where online channels are influencing sales like never before) are not even aware of this challenge. And for people who are aware of this, the solution isn’t available readymade anywhere.

At the end of a day, as a marketer all I need is a holistic picture of all my marketing and advertising (both traditional and addressable), reaching all consumers, across device and channels. I want to create a coordinated, relevant and a personalized experience for my customer throughout his purchase journey. And when the CEO asks me this question, “If I increase the marketing budget by 30%, how are you going to deploy it across channels and how much will it increase sales”, I should be able to plug this in my system(with all my past data making the system intelligent enough) and the system should give me an output based on all historical data.

Till the time this happens, the quote will still hold true, “Half of my money spent on marketing and advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”