Attribution Report: The most easily overlooked media planning tool

I recently interviewed Jason Heller, executive vice president of the media training and consulting firm Laredo Group, and discussed with him the topic of the previous column, "Different views on showing arrival tracking". He says it's really helpful to show arrival tracking, but the most overlooked tool in network media planning should be attribution reporting. Why do you say that? See the specific analysis below.

What is attribution?

In simple terms, in the field of network marketing and advertising, attribution refers to the user's every action or conversion is caused by what factors, which factors of higher proportion. Many industry experts have pointed out that too many people will last click as the source of the conversion. However, planners should consider a variety of factors that will affect the final outcome, measure them and share the conversion proportionally to these factors. These factors can be any transaction, such as the number of display ads displayed, email marketing campaigns, value-added services, lists in more competitive shopping search engines, organic searches, or pay-per-click advertising.

For conversions made up of a variety of marketing strategies or multiple organizations, attribution reporting can also avoid duplication of contributions (or double advertising costs). For example, an online shopper inspired by an email marketing campaign clicked on a pay-per-click AD offered by a subsidiary, but before clicking on the coupon code, which factor was the main factor that led to the conversion? How should this successful conversion be assigned to contribution? This problem can be solved well by introducing attribution reports.

Report Provider

The providers of attribution reports mainly include the following three categories:

1, advertising server (such as DoubleClick DFA, Mediaplex, etc.)

2, advanced network analysis software (such as Coremetrics, omniture, etc.)

3. Third party tools/custom software (e.g. clearsaleing, Tagman, etc.)

Each provider will provide different levels of reporting and analysis, so you need to know your biggest needs and how to deal with them beforehand.

The challenge of attribution reporting

Heller believes that one of the challenges of adopting attribution reporting (and media planning based on attribution reports) is that the subject itself is an advanced theme. In fact, Heller points out, even very few media planners know or use well-known advertising campaign management factors. To incorporate media planning based on attribution reporting, planners first need to skip the generic terminology and no longer use the click rate as the key indicator or the last click as the primary source of the conversion.

Although you may find that attribution reports are more likely to be used in areas where direct responses can be generated, brand advertisers can also benefit from this analysis. Moreover, although the Attribution Tracking analysis report has been in existence for more than four or five years, misunderstandings, inconsistencies and imperfections in the concept are still pervasive.

The perplexity of attribution study

After discussing the subject of attribution with many different sources, I can finally understand why Heller thinks this is a challenge. For attribution tracking/reporting, people have different descriptions, such as "participation Diagram", "Conversion path", "Show Number Attribution", "Interactive Attribution", "Attribution model" and so on.

Chris Brinkworth, Tagman's marketing director, also raised other common puzzles:

1. What features does this tool (or none) include and what can be tracked? For example, is it possible to track unpaid traffic sources, such as direct browsing, natural search, internal e-mail mass, social media, and mobility?

2. Are you able to determine that the right strategy will get the right attribution analysis (and that a strategy does not have a good attribution analysis)? ...... Can you do something to ease the situation?

3. Can this solution track and explain the offline policies that generate network transformations?

4. Do you use a variety of strategies? For example, different organizations implement different policies, and these technologies and reports do not provide a comprehensive analysis?

5, whether there is such a risk, that you give customers too much data, so that they are in the data analysis into trouble?

6. Attribution tracking and reporting is not one of the tools you use now, if so, is there any additional cost to pay and where is the limitation?

Attribution Analysis Process

As some experts have pointed out, in the attribution analysis process, the first is to ask some questions, and these problems are the entire attribution model needs to answer. For example:

1. How many times did the advertisement interact with the user before the user responded to the advertisement?

2, which channel/source will affect the user's response?

3, if a strategy can help transform, but not the last click, then we can determine the quantitative value of this decision?

After you have established the attribution model, you need to have all of your ad campaigns run for a period of time and measured before you analyze these comparative data. The following is a report screen provided by Mediaplex to explain specific attribution reports:

The screen shows the highest conversion rate and the number of different events that drive the conversion.

In this example, the display advertisement involves a 81% conversion, but only plays an important role in the conversion of 61%. In the conversion, which is driven mainly by paid search, 52% is also affected by the display ads.

The last thing I want to say is that everyone in the attribution tracking/reporting area I interviewed agrees at least that attribution reporting is an emerging area that, once marketers mean it, will become an important media planning tool.

(Original: October 19, 2010, compiled: Zeng Cui)