Together with Econsultancy, our team at Google Analytics has released some research entitled: Marketing Attribution: Valuing the Customer Journey. It’s available for free here.
What exactly is marketing attribution? It’s something all marketers should be interested in: distributing credit for different tactics of your digital marketing program to gauge impact on sales results, and use that data to make more accurate investment decisions.
What struck me most about the research conducted was how new marketing attribution still is and the concurrent benefits. For example, 72% of marketers say attribution helps them better allocate budget across channel (and improve ROI) yet 83% of practitioners have been using it for less than 2 years:
Also interesting is that attribution is already helping measurement-savvy clients and agencies (more) strategically plan spending in digital channels:
One quote from the final page of the paper ties this together:
The last decade has seen a remarkable, even overwhelming proliferation of channels, platforms and technologies. Marketers are challenged to stay on top of emerging opportunities while attempting to perfect the ones they’ve already taken on. The promise of an innovation isn’t often matched by its reality, so marketers are wary of investing too much or too early.
Attribution isn’t just an exception to this pattern; it’s one of the solutions to the problem of too many options and not enough time. Digital marketing has claimed to be accountable since its inception, but in reality our knowledge has been limited to knowing a great deal about some channels, without understanding their relationship to each other. Attribution, when done well and across silos and touchpoints, can finally fill in the gaps for marketers and answer the question of what is working and how it works.
Learning marketing attribution is flirting with the next generation of measurement and a skill for the future. Ready to get started? Our team also created a handy playbook.