In our latest column from the IAB’s Display Trading Council, Shady Twal, head of programmatic, AOL and Matt White, EMEA managing director, Quantcast collaborate on discussing the benefits of a unified marketing attribution model.

Traditional digital attribution solutions offered by many digital marketing tools leave marketers without a clear view of all factors influencing consumer decisions. As multi-touch attribution blends with traditional marketing mix modelling, marketers can now have a more comprehensive view of marketing effectiveness.

Today's increasingly connected, multi-device world has made once reliable digital marketing performance measurement tools clumsy and outdated. They lack the granularity to show consumer choice at an individual level. For far too long, marketers have battled to understand which elements of their marketing mix deliver the greatest return on investment. Standard digital measurement practices — usually last touch — give credit to ad exposures that actually have little to no influence on a consumer's purchase decision journey.

But multi-channel attribution gives us a much more accurate view of the individuals who respond to our marketing and ultimately buy our products. It helps marketers more accurately understand how and why their prospects converted into customers by establishing the relative importance of individual touchpoints along the consumer decision journey and how they fit together. Seeing which elements of the advertising strategy are truly realising results, thus, allows marketers to focus their efforts more effectively, tweaking campaigns in real time, and applying learnings to future campaigns.

CMOs have used marketing mix modelling since the eighties to determine expected returns based on how they spend their money. It helped enormously with the top down, big picture stuff, like annual budgeting and the optimisation of media channels. It not only factored in sales and promotions, but also the non-marketing influences, such as socio-economic and environmental factors. Digital channel attribution, on the other hand, has provided the bottom up, sub-channel, tactical-level insights that just weren’t achievable with older-style media. It helps track the customer journey across multiple devices, navigating often-unpredictable consumer behaviour.

Ultimately, both these models are trying to do the same thing: determine how marketing impacts consumers' responses. But they both have their shortcomings and, due to such different methodologies, they haven’t traditionally worked well together to help marketers arrive at the source of the truth. Marketers need a cohesive, comprehensive, continuous analytic solution that provides both high-level strategic planning, as well as prescriptive, actionable recommendations at a timely, tactical execution level – a bridge between the tried and true (albeit broad) measurement through marketing mix modelling, and the data-driven, highly accurate (but in the weeds) measurement through multi-touch attribution.

We are now just at the stage where marketing mix and attribution approaches can blend together, using the different statistical methodologies to measure and optimise single interactions. Most vendors in the market are developing solutions to connect the two models, moving from marketing mix modelling + multi-touch attribution, to a unified model with just one set of rules, or one maths equation, if you prefer.

Forrester refers to this as Unified Marketing Impact Analytics (uMIa): “A blend of statistical techniques that assigns business value to each element of the marketing mix at both a strategic and tactical level.”

The approach gets marketers close to the single source of truth. As Forrester defines it: “The ability to measure across all channels, and develop complex analyses, including cross-channel effects, customer paths, and building budget scenarios. The integration of online and offline data, to measure short- and long-term goals, gives marketers both allocation and planning capabilities in one tool.”

uMIa is an important development for the marketing industry. Those who continue to attempt to marry the two approaches by more arbitrary means will ultimately lose out, with suboptimal campaigns, lower conversion rates and less-efficient workflows.

Ultimately, a unified model brings confidence that you can drive more business and better returns with efficient marketing choices. More to the point, this unified approach makes the customer the centre of focus and allows a deeper understanding of how marketing truly influences behaviour.

For further information on the Display Trading Council, and to become involved, please visit the IAB UK.