EMEA > Attribution

It probably doesn’t need stating, but digital media ad spend has grown quickly. Even in the current economic climate, 2011-2012 year-on-year growth for the UK is estimated at around 10%.

Digital advertising is more measurable and more accurate in determining who saw what and the actions they took as a result, and so more cost-effective.

The problem is this claim doesn’t tend to stand up to scrutiny.

Take click through rate (CTR); still often used as an indicator of response and user interest in many campaigns. Research by the Advertising Research Foundation in July 2012 found that even a blank ad could generate a CTR of 0.08%, and of that around half was due to accidental clicks.

Given the standard display CTR in the UK market is 0.07%, according Google, suddenly the intent behind any given click in most campaigns is unknown.

Similarly, numerous attribution models now exist in the market to determine which of a multitude of exposures in any given user journey are responsible for the end outcome. This is an important move forward from last-click, but still assumes the answer can be measured and understood, and in the case of static attribution models, as a stationary model.

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Among the channels within the media mix, digital marketing is the most measurable and offers the most potential for effective analysis of what is and isn’t working within your marketing. Every dollar can be reported on for ROI and this has enabled search campaigns to be optimised, with strong keywords being identified and exploited. It enables display campaigns to be reported on, to determine if a publisher really does have a suitable audience for your company or product.

Break free from the silos
The problem is that this measurement is only done in silos, and consequently any optimisation that results can only ever be partial and one-dimensional. To date, a lot of measurement is based on the “last click wins” attribution model, meaning the final touch point before a sale receives the credit, largely undermining many other channels’ valuable contributions to a sale. Also, many companies come to rely on audit tools which measure performance that includes that company’s own campaign performance, therefore, gaining truly independent and impartial reporting is the foundation to ensure optimisation is channel-agnostic and reaches the full potential possible.

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Ezra Pierce is co-founder at PubSquared.

Advertising is about one thing: persuasion. You put an ad in front of a person, they see it, a desire is created and an action engendered. What’s odd is that this isn’t what our corner of the advertising industry is focused on these days. The industry is currently obsessed, not with great content and persuasive creatives, but instead with the latest and greatest software. That’s perfectly sensible, but I can’t see that lasting. Here’s the thesis: trading technology is having it a moment, but we’re going to reach a new equilibrium and top-notch tech will be table stakes, not something to brag about.

Advertising technology is at a rolling boil at the moment. Venture capital firms have shown a willingness to invest huge quantities of funding to anyone with half a bright idea and a marginal ability to execute. Simultaneously, the barriers to entry have been progressively lowered by the arrival of RTB ad serving, cloud computing and big data infrastructure as commodities. These factors have converged and accelerated the pace of progress in display advertising. The question is, does the innovation continue forever, or is there a natural end point to this progression?

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Paul Frampton is Managing Director at Havas Media

We are all well aware that the retargeting model is broken. Still, three years into an RTB world, advertisers are frequency spamming the same users over and over again.

Whilst there are some positive innovations in the prospecting space, the reality of first-party data integration is still nascent and will never scale to the same level as the US.

My view is that the next evolution required is a new model for prospecting consumers further up the funnel, namely whilst in the awareness and interest stage. This requires a different approach; an engaging and more contextually-relevant deployment than is present in today’s remnant exchanges.

Exchanges and DSPS’s have efficiently opened up access to both the big boys, but also the long tail, of inventory eyeballs. For me, that’s where the next play will be, but it will be a content play and not a performance one.

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One student says to the other, “I used to think correlation inferred causality. Then I took a stats course and now I don’t.”

“Great, so the course helped,” the other replied.

“Well, maybe.”

Everyone loves a good stats joke, right?

The fact that correlation does not infer causality, as illustrated by the joke above, is a fundamental statistical principle, and it’s pretty important to understand when evaluating online media. It’s ironic then that it’s usually completely ignored.

Standard online media performance measurement assumes that if someone converts in some way on a brand’s website, then the last piece of online advertising served to them must have been what drove the conversion.

Fixed attribution models, while they do look at more than just the last piece of activity served, tell the same lie in a slightly different way by assuming the effect of any channel/placement/keyword to be uniformly based on its position in a customer’s purchase journey.

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Over the last 12 months the attribution debate within digital marketing has slowly moved from whether or not advertisers should be doing attribution beyond the last click, to what kind of attribution they should be doing.

Last week saw the launch of DoubleClick’s Attribution Modelling tool within the beta section of DFA reporting. For those who are unaware, this new tool sits within the Multi-Channel Funnels section of the interface and allows a campaign analyst to quickly and easily apply a variety of fixed attribution models to an advertiser’s digital media data and observe how each one affects the campaign’s outcomes and KPIs.

Sounds great, and it is. Sort of. Advertisers and agencies have long had the ability to look at the effect of these sorts of fixed models for themselves in Excel using their raw campaign data, but the ability to run them simply and easily within the DFA reporting interface certainly makes this process less arduous.

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As reported earlier this week, Google recently launched an update to its DFA reporting suite with the addition of attribution modelling capabilities natively into the DFA interface. Beyond the basic models (namely: linear, first position, last position, time decay, etc.), DFA also offers the ability for users to build their own custom model to manipulate the rules of the model itself.

By offering it as a value-add within an existing ad server, it may force existing attribution software clients (who currently deploy the likes of c3metrics, Clearsaleing) to review their overall investment in attribution modelling.

Many agencies have been investing in developing their own proprietary solutions, often requiring the need of some form of ‘big data’ solution to execute this. Will Google’s recent roll-out be seen as a positive for the industry? Will it help to increase more scaled adoption of attribution modelling as a practice by marketers? Will it devalue the internal tools being developed by agencies? We asked some industry leaders what they thought of this. The general consensus seems to be that, whilst added analysis is agreed to be a good thing, in the hands of non-analysts, the benefits could range from slim to adverse:

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Hot on the heels of our Japanese launch, ExchangeWire is announcing today that it is rolling out a dedicated, localised site for the Brazilian market, www.exchangewire.com.br.

Brazil has one of the fastest growing digital advertising markets globally. The market is undergoing some huge changes in terms of ad technology adoption and the move to automated buying – with many local players either partnering with large ad tech providers or launching their own versions of buy and sell side technology solutions. ExchangeWire Brasil will be a native language site, and will deliver the best analysis and reporting on the Brazilian market.

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