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Attribution matters: how marketers are navigating an ‘uncomfortably complex topic’

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Attributing results to particular channels or campaigns is arguably digital marketing’s most dogged problem, with an array of approaches mutating as platforms change. Here, The Drum Network experts’ quick tips.

Molly Deaville, Growth Director, Dept UK: “Measuring the impact of marketing investment is not a new challenge. There’s no silver bullet solution.

“For far too long, the digital industry has over-relied on attribution as a source of truth. Now data privacy has caught up with technology, and the industry is forced to find better (and more ethical) solutions to help us understand customer and their journeys, better than ever.

“My advice? Run a blended measurement approach, combining attribution with regular incrementality tests across paid and owned channels. Even better if you’re running marketing mix modelling (MMM) and brand studies too; these are often overlooked by digital-first brands. Build your results into a knowledge repository that can be used in planning cycles.

“Don’t just rely on media platforms to mark their homework. When did that become good practice?”

Matt Triggs, Head of Analysis & Modelling, Jaywing: “Attribution modelling has met criticism lately, particularly around its usefulness in measuring incrementality. The claim is that attribution models overestimate on low-funnel channels like PPC and underestimate the influence of upper-funnel or brand-led advertising. They also give little information about the incrementality of channels (as this would require a useful measure of baseline sales), which should be a measure of success.

“In some cases, especially rule-based approaches to attribution, this is undoubtedly correct. Simplified solutions like last-click, position-based or time-delay simply can’t factor in any baseline and are naïve in sharing credit between touchpoints. Modelled approaches using Markov Chains are more sophisticated when it comes to sharing credit, but still struggle with identifying a baseline (and so, incrementality).

“Jaywing’s approach of ‘exploding’ journeys into different combinations and using machine learning and AI to understand key drivers allows identification of a baseline and true, mathematical incrementality. Marketers should look to challenge their attribution providers to ensure that they’re measuring incrementality and providing the best illustration of the power of their marketing.”

Aaron Dicks, Technology Director, Impression: “It wouldn’t be a week in digital without a debate around the next step to take with digital attribution (whether or not we mention GA4). This is under constant review at Impression, and for good reason.

“Stitching together views and sessions for third-party ad platforms naturally falls into the purview of third-party cookies, which have been severely curtailed over recent years, and had their death sentence handed to them for 2024 when Chrome joins Safari and Firefox browsers in their removal.

“Advertisers have relied heavily on performance metrics from platforms that use this data for some time. In some ways, this has let us take our eyes off wider measures of success.

“For us, there are three areas of interest when it comes to attributing results and setting budgets for the modern customer journey – which is multi-platform, multi-moment, and multi-device, and therefore impossible to track from the point-of-view of a third-party.

“Our team is currently appraising: media mix modelling, conversion modelling, and third-party all-in-one attribution platforms. Tools worth checking out include SegmentStream and Triple Whale, depending on your tech and ad stack, and your approach to attribution.”

Kevin Joyner, director of data strategy, Croud: “Our industry has a new-found respect for privacy choices, and a new-found… resignation when it comes to zealous, privacy-protecting browser and OS technologies. These disruptions have thrown conventional digital attribution out of the limelight and into an important, supporting role. The new magic word in measurement is ‘incrementality’. Deservedly so, but as causal inference and machine learning models grab our imagination, there’s a more old-fashioned phrase that mustn’t be forgotten: business impact.

“Machine learning-enabled automated budget optimization will be game-changing, for a business that’s ready to use it. Before commissioning your data science team, ask yourself: are we producing real analysis from the data we already have? Is it resulting in any meaningful action? We must deliver the analytics that will impact your business, even if it’s not yet the new solution our industry’s in love with.”

Harry Daniel, technical marketing strategist, Rawnet: “With the sunset of GA3, we now turn our full undivided attention to GA4 and data-driven attribution modelling as standard in Google Analytics. Data-driven attribution constantly updates how it understands conversion probabilities based on assessing how likely specific user paths are to lead to a conversion or an exit. Data-driven attribution modelling also compares user data to randomized control trials, allowing it to understand and better calculate the conversion probability of different user paths.

“It would be helpful to have visibility of these trials, and the conversion probabilities for different paths. This will improve how agencies report on specific user paths to clients, and give clarity to clients on what user journeys are more likely to drive conversions (and exactly why we use data-driven attribution modelling).”

Nick Elsom, Director, FourForty: “Attribution of what – directly measurable sales? Or maybe something a step removed; propensity, or awareness? And if our work doesn’t have influence over the whole journey, do we even want to ask too many questions? If it was clear-cut, we’d surely all be rushing for the payment-by-results door.

“Customer experience (CX) is about removing obstacles as much as creating demand, so start at the beginning, with a benchmark. The only benchmark that matters in measuring a great experience is: how near or far it is from your customers’ expectations? Without that, CX is just another name for what we do.

“Understanding expectations requires a shift away from total reliance on historic data to extrapolate a view of what customers will do. Demographic, behavioural, and attitudinal data is invaluable. We need to know who they are, what they did and possibly even why they did it. But knowing how your customers see their relationship with you in the future prevents CX being nothing more than a campaign looking for an objective.”

Ryan Green, senior vice-president of marketing and innovation, Coegi: “It’s not just GA4 that will upend your attribution models. The latest iOS17 update will reportedly strip link trackers from being passed through message, mail, and private browsing. It’s yet another action chipping away at the scale and effectiveness of last-click attribution and website analytics.

“We’ve been moving our clients towards incremental measurement for years, even before Facebook and Apple walled off their data. There wasn’t enough impression-level data to build an accurate model then; there certainly isn’t now.

“No single KPI can adequately identify success. Instead, we encourage every brand to develop a custom measurement framework, consisting of media data, business data, and advanced measurement studies – for example: lift in unaided brand awareness (45%) + location visits (20%) + clicks (10%) + sales (25%) = brand health score.

“Let’s start leveraging custom scoring models to evaluate leading indicators of success that are predictive and driving smart optimizations.”

Betsy Ray, director of marketing analytics, Kepler: “With Google’s impending cookie deprecation and the loss of UTM tracking coming with Apple’s iOS 17, it’s long past time for advertisers to move away from cookie-based and last-click attribution. There may be companies offering ‘silver bullet’ software, but most of these are just technical workarounds that may not pass a data privacy sniff-test.

“Rather than investing in short-term ‘hacks’, brands should commit to robust, future-proofed methodologies like marketing mix modelling. MMM software is increasingly more advanced and accessible for brands of any size and any channel mix. Advertisers looking to get started or upgrade their MMM should think about whether they want to build their own model in-house via open-source code, use a lower-cost but customizable self-service partner, or onboard one of the bigger players in the market for more hands-on support. MMM must be validated by a strategy of ongoing experimentation.”

Ebrahim Bakhtar, analytics director, RocketMill: “Touchpoint-based attribution has become an uncomfortably complex topic. Each ad platform and web analytics tool has access to different data and produces its own data-driven attribution models. Which should you trust? Should you build your own proprietary model in-house?

“While there are a slew of adtech solutions to improve tracking and ad attribution, touchpoint-based attribution will never give you the full picture of the performance of your media mix, particularly when it comes to cross-channel interactions or impression-based activity (let’s not talk about cookies).

“It’s become important to augment touchpoint-based attribution models with other techniques, like good old-fashion statistics, leveraging emerging libraries such as Facebook’s GeoLift or Robyn to gain analytics capabilities previously reserved for companies with big data science teams. Connecting these techniques requires a concrete framework where each business decision has a clear, defined method for measurement.

Naomi McAleer, digital marketing manager, Brandnation: “Integrated campaigns require a multi-touch attribution model. If you’re delivering a multi-channel campaign for a client, you need to be able to attribute results to channels. Last- or first-click won’t cut it and will unfairly give all the credit to one touchpoint.

“This gets trickier when you throw PR into the mix. PR, historically an offline channel, is now very much a digital channel in its own right – a positive where attribution is concerned. It’s now fully within a PR’s capability to track what impact their efforts are having on a campaign’s objectives. Enter urchin tracking modules (UTMs), which digital marketers are usually familiar with but are surprisingly not always used by PR and comms. These little snippets of code on the end of URLs create trackable links, picking up the source (the specific release or article). Now we can see this touchpoint in GA4 (and other analytics platforms) and can include this touchpoint in multi-touch attribution models to give PR activity the credit it deserves.”

Feature Image Credit: Edward Howell via Unsplash

By Sam Anderson

Sourced from The Drum

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Sir John Hegarty: Creativity is receding from the world of marketing and the obsession with data is to blame

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Brands have become risk-averse and ads are boring, says advertising guru Sir John Hegarty. If the industry wants to survive it has got to lose its obsession with data and go back to its roots.

I’ve barely sat down in the office of Sir John Hegarty’s latest venture, startup incubator The Garage, before he is bemoaning everything that is wrong in the ad industry today. Across the table, he complains how creativity is “receding from the world of marketing” as it becomes data-driven, how marketing has forgotten to “engage with people’s imagination and soul” and how digital tech “hasn’t created the wealth it promised to”.

This, he argues, is the reason for lacklustre economic growth. Innovation, creativity and imagination have been sidelined in favour of data, cost-cutting and simply doing what the research says. That isn’t to say he doesn’t believe in data, just that it isn’t the “only thing”.

“Data is great at giving you information, giving you knowledge; but it doesn’t give you understanding and that is its great failing,” he explains.

“What we need is greater creativity and what we’re doing today is reducing the power of creativity. Marketing, I believe, is suffering because of that; you’re not getting imaginative ideas that capture people’s imagination.”

Hegarty knows a thing or two about creativity. He was a founding shareholder in Saatchi & Saatchi and co-founded TBWA London in 1973 before going on to start the agency that would bear his name, Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), in 1982.

We presented this work and the main guy at Golden Wonder said ‘that’s the finest work I’ve seen’. JWT ended up winning the business. It’s a fucking lottery.

Sir John Hegarty

His work on Levi’s, Volkswagen and Audi is the stuff of legend, still regularly touted as some of the best and most creative advertising ever made. Yet ask him what he thinks are the best campaigns of recent years and he’s hard pushed. In fact, he says he can’t think of any that “absolutely stand out”, although he holds up Marmite, Netflix and Nike as examples of brands that are still doing “brilliant things”.

“I try not to look at advertising [anymore] because I think by and large it’s quite boring,” he says. “I’ve always thought great advertising elevates the status of [a brand] to such an extent that it becomes part of culture. That way you get greater fame, greater value, greater certainty and greater effectiveness.

“Marmite, it’s just a yeast spread, but do you ‘love it or hate it’? It’s become a part of culture.”

Marmite
Hegarty believes Marmite is one brand still doing “brilliant things” in advertising.

The focus on data, he suggests, is the root cause of the problem, making big brands risk averse and “boring”, too focused on saving money instead of generating growth. He uses the beer industry as an example, claiming companies such as Heineken created the opportunity for craft brewers because they lost their audience.

“I’ve watched very exciting companies become very boring because in the end they’ve got size and now they’re obsessed with their size and so they don’t think imaginatively,” he explains. “They put systems into the organisation that take creativity out because they don’t trust their own people, so instead they control them. By controlling them they reduce the power of creativity and consequently markets begin to suffer. Then they have to go out and buy companies that still think creatively, suck them in, and make them boring too.

Agencies must go ‘back to the future’

Despite Hegarty’s clear disdain for a data-driven philosophy, it seems unlikely the industry is about to shift focus. So what does Hegarty think agencies should do? His suggestion is quite radical: stop working with large organisations and only deal with those that want to think creatively.

“What we need is the great agencies to say, ‘we are only going to deal with people who want to think creatively’. To say, ‘we are driven by creativity because we think that’s the incredible tool for creating effectiveness’.

“[If I were starting an agency now] I would go back to the future. I would make it strategic and creative and I would insert media alongside it.”

Despite conducting hundreds of pitches throughout his career, he claims the process has “never worked” calling it “completely unscientific”.

Data is great at giving you information, giving you knowledge; but it doesn’t give you understanding and that is its great failing.

Sir John Hegarty

“You try to make it as scientific as you possibly can by having various criteria, but in the end, it’s faith. Do I believe these people, do I think they are people who can deliver success for me, do I think they’re committed to my business? The pitch process has always been a haphazard business, a bit of a nonsense,” he says.

To illustrate this he recalls pitching for the Golden Wonder account at TBWA. “The strategy was freshness and so we said the way you measure that with a crisp is the noise it makes, so noise is what we’re selling and we created a 48-sheet poster that had an empty packet of Golden Wonder and it said ‘Silence is Golden’. We presented this work and the main guy at Golden Wonder said ‘that’s the finest work I’ve seen’. JWT ended up winning the business. It’s a fucking lottery.”

The risk of digital landfill

With digital advertising eating up more and more of advertisers’ budgets, what does Hegarty make of its rise? While he welcomes digital as just “another opportunity to communicate” he has concerns about the business models and practices of the some of the digital players.

“[The big digital players] are unregulated, irresponsible, and we are just waking up that,” he says. “I view them as someone with unprecedented power that has managed to get away with using that power in an unregulated form. That’s going to have to stop, and it is now. We are beginning to see that with GDPR.”

But is it partly the ad industry’s fault digital media companies have been allowed to run riot? Hegarty has a theory.

“When you get these great tech advances and innovations, creative people stand back and say, ‘what the hell do I do with this?’. The tech becomes king and everyone bows down in the face of technology. But eventually technology runs out of innovation and then creative people come in,” he explains.

“Look at the Lumière brothers, who invented the moving camera; they gave up on it, they didn’t realise they had invented Hollywood.”

lightbulb innovation
Hegarty believes technology eventually runs out of innovation, which is when creative people take over.

He also questions the need for brands to be “always on”, describing it as an idea peddled by digital media firms to eat up marketers’ time and budgets.

“Who says [brands] have to be on all the time? It’s the digital companies telling you that. Wouldn’t it be better to be on three or four times a year and do something great each time. [Brands should] drive forward an overall idea that says ‘this is what we’re about’ but find different ways of articulating that throughout the year. Isn’t that the future, rather than a constant stream of digital landfill?”

What makes a great marketer

Hegarty has worked with a number of great marketers in his time, but asked to name one and the first person who comes to mind is Volkswagen’s John Meszaros. What made him great, explains Hegarty, is that he “went with his gut”.

“Whenever you showed him a piece of work he said to himself, ‘do I like it, do I think it’s great?’. He bought things on that basis and therefore he was the man responsible for that great campaign, ‘If only everything in life was as reliable as a Volkswagen’. He did Vorsprung Durch Technik [for Audi with BBH] even though the research said don’t do it. He felt you had to be daring, you had to be different.”

Returning to his theme of data, Hegarty proclaims it is this feeling that marketing risks losing. Every creative, he believes, should love their work and not worry so much about what the research says.

“We lack today people who love what it is that they do. They are very professional, they’re well trained, they read data, but they don’t love it.

“Today the reliance on data is destroying love and therefore [advertising] is losing its audience. And if we lose it we won’t have the economic growth we want. Why is it we’ve not got economic growth? We can’t just blame the financial world.”

Getting that creativity back is the key to ensuring the future of the ad industry, and that it is seen as a driver of company profits and economic growth, not just a nice to have.

“Creativity is the future. When we got a troubled brand we would go back to its roots – what made it, why was this brand so successful – and we tried to capture that again. It’s the same with advertising, when it was great what was it doing? We have to go back to that.”

Feature Image Credit: Illustration by Peter Strain

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How blockchain is disrupting loyalty

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The loyalty market is ripe for disruption, according to a number of brands who believe blockchain is the answer to building trust and improving customer experience in the long term.

There has been much discussion about the rise of cryptocurrency and the potential of blockchain when it comes to increasing transparency in the digital advertising ecosystem given its open ledger format. But perhaps less talked about is the way these new technologies could impact the future of loyalty and CRM.

Startup Trippki is collaborating with nine hotel groups across South America, Europe, Africa and Asia on a blockchain-powered loyalty system that rewards guests in cryptocurrency.

During their stay, guests will be able to collect Trip Token rewards, which are sent to their personal cryptocurrency wallet app on their phone. Alternatively, users can cash out on a secondary exchange and trade Trip Tokens for cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum or Bitcoin.

Trippki founder and CEO Edward Cunningham believes blockchain technology will transform the smart rewards market. “With this system each hotel would set their own business rules, so for example they could say you get X amount of Trip Tokens on your first night’s stay or if you stay three nights or more, or write a review and share it on social media.”

The smart contract means that guests will be eligible to write a review only if they have stayed at the hotel because the ledger registers your visit, guaranteeing reviews come from a source with experience on the ground.

Trippki plans to hold its ICO in June and is already promoting the sale on Telegram messaging app. Whereas in 2016 there were only a few ICOs taking place, by early 2018 that number has rocketed to hundreds a month, says Cunningham. He has seen the cost to advertise on cryptocurrency exchanges like Coin Market Cap rocket from hundreds to thousands of pounds.

“Two years ago, there were virtually no conferences on [cryptocurrency and blockchain], now it seems like there’s one every day. It’s a bit like the Gold Rush days; you have people rushing to get the gold and you have people filling shovels,” he adds.

Tokenising social

Canadian messaging app Kik integrated its own cryptocurrency into its platform in 2017. Known as Kin, tokens are available to use by the app’s reported 300 million users on the Ethereum blockchain.

The idea behind Kin is to give users the chance to earn and spend within the Kik platform. This means brands can reward users with small amounts of Kin for completing simple tasks such as answering questions in a survey or creating themed content such as stickers or GIFs.

Alec Booker, Kik B2B communications manager, explains that as a consumer-tech company, the received wisdom says you have to monetise your user base through adverts, but this does not work for everyone.

“This ‘centralised’ business model put advertisers directly in conflict with users on our platform – advertisers want you to view ads to make money; users don’t want to see ads,” explains Booker.

This was the reason the messaging platform first started experimenting with digital currency in 2014, launching the Kik Points pilot programme to test user appetite to earn and spend using a crypto-coin. The resulting points programme generated a daily transaction volume three times the size of the then global volume of Bitcoin, suggesting the community was ready to adopt a crypto-coin.

Kik went live with its ICO last September, raising nearly $100m (£72m) from more than 10,000 people across 117 countries.

Prioritising transparency

Another brand that believes strongly in the growth of cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies to create better customer experiences is American betting company FansUnite.

The startup aims to create a more fairly-priced betting model that offers increased transparency and security for customers by storing all their betting information on a blockchain, removing the risk of bets being reneged upon post-match.

All payouts are made using FansUnite’s Ethereum-based token Fan, which will be launched widely with an ICO expected to take place imminently.

Blockchain

Co-founder Darius Eghdami is convinced of the power blockchain tech has to build trust and improve customer experiences.

“There has been a knee-jerk reaction in the court of public opinion to dismiss the influx of capital being poured into cryptocurrency as naive and unfounded; however, the blockchain technology underpinning crypto possesses an incredible amount of potential,” he states.

“Blockchain streamlines transactions between parties by facilitating trust, increasing transparency and removing unnecessary intermediaries.”

Eghdami hopes to inspire other brands to focus on incorporating blockchain technology, with the customer in mind every step of the way. He argues brands should embrace blockchain not only because it offers cost savings to businesses, but because it has the potential to make a positive social impact.

“We’ve already seen ambitious projects attempting to democratise inefficient, archaic and non-inclusive areas like banking, insurance and lending,” he adds.

“In spite of recent unrest surrounding regulations and predatory ICO practices, I have no doubt that over the course of the next decade people from all walks of life will benefit from the creative applications of blockchain being thought up today.”

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